You write real well, Benjamin, I have to keep saying it. Even where you do not declare things well, you write it down real well. Let me try to show where we agree.

We agree that culture is always part of the mix; we start out for any nation with their own given information, environment, and people.

Then, we also agree on much of what you describe in this reply. Yet it is what is not being said we disagree on.

You mention the folks not represented, and then you move away from this truth and don't take it in with the big picture. An entire layer of society is 'enslaved' because they are not represented and cannot be represented; the system prevents them from being represented. And you write this down with a simple acknowledgment like "Yes, that happens, let's move on."

This cannot be brushed to the side. This is a fundamental aspect in our society. We divide-and-conquer, and next the rulers declare what our history is. As a culture, that is a major aspect of disrespect. A culture is not just its elite; this culture is an elitist approach affecting all people.

Then, when reading your historical brush strokes, I recognize the English view on history, and not the global view on history for our United States.

Wall Street is not found in Boston or Philadelphia, but in the place where New Amsterdam is found. The financial innovations of Europe did not go from Italy to the UK; they went from Italy to the Low Countries to the UK, and the British hated the Dutch so they cut them out in their historical view as important players. They copied the innovations in as much as they liked, and then they ignored it in their history books until 30 years ago.

The Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula in 1492 ended up going to the Low Countries because at that time the Low Countries were part of the Spanish empire, so they stayed within the Spanish empire but not in the part where they were no longer welcome. With them, they brought financial instruments (and other knowledge), and together with the folks in the Low Countries the very important stock market innovation occurred there.

The Hanseatic League needs a quick mentioning here as well since it established a rich business culture of cooperation in Northern Europe from medieval days on.

Belgium ended up being that staging grounds for the Spanish troops to fight the Dutch Republicans. They spent much of their silver in the Low Countries with this war and the subsequent war (also of 80 years) with France, fought from Belgium.

The Enlightenment is also occurring at that time of Independence of Spain, with Spinoza perhaps the father of the Enlightenment, who declared that Church and State needed to be separated (and that God is real as long as we view God in the abstract). He got excommunicated from both church and Jewish community.

The Dutch Republic was studied by the Founding Fathers real closely because they liked what they saw, particularly in light of religious freedom but also as a nation ruled (in the original days after independence from Spain) as a true Republic. It did help as well of course that five out of six ships on the waves were Dutch (before the British pushed them aside), and that lots of money ended up banking there.

It appears you have learned the Red and Blue of American history, but not the White. (The Dutch red, white, and blue is the oldest tricolor in the world and has been copied by many nations in the world to reflect self-based rule, and then also as desired model with these financial innovations). The Dutch Republic followed the Enlightenment in that ultimate power was not in the heavens, but here on Earth with its people.

So, I would say that your partial amnesia is indeed part of the culture you live in because you pick and chose what you like, and you ignore what you do not want to talk about.

What happened in the USA is that the Framers used the Dutch (and Swiss) model of (con) federations, but they had to innovate them since these models lead to countries the size of the Netherlands and Switzerland and they needed to create a model for a much larger nation.

Their innovation was to start at the top and have three layers of power as well like the Swiss and the Dutch (who had, bottom-up: 1/ cities/land, 2/ cantons/provinces, 3/ (con)federate agreement among cantons/provinces), but the Framers inverted it and replaced the cities/land with We The People.

The US Constitution is particularly about the Federal setup in which the States have their roles to play, yet the People are unmistakably the third layer of power, because otherwise they would have created a religious power model and not an Enlightened power model.

So, they tied everything to the People at the basis, on the ground (but did not talk too much about it otherwise; the constitution describes more for Fed and States).

That is the setup. If you then subsequently ignore the bottom layer of We the People, then you are involved in a religious view of our culture and not in an Enlightened grounded view of our culture.

I know you want a grounded view, so I hope you will get to work and achieve that.