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It DID fail during the civil war, that's what a civil war is. There's a saying, "there's a great deal of ruin in a nation," and I think that goes 10x for America for various reasons: the USA realistically has a continent to itself and no serious rivals, it is gifted with oil + fertile farmland + good rivers + other natural resources beyond the dreams of any other country in the world except maybe Russia, and in a much more convenient form.
I don't actually mean to be too anti-American, I respect it more than comes across on this site because the site is pro-America enough that I end up providing the alternate view, but I think that America has a vast cushion for failure that other countries don't. More than that, though, @JeSuisCharlie posted the old-but-good Adam's quote that American society is suited only to a moral and religious people, and in practice I think he was expressing the same kind of sentiment. Think of it this way through the ages:
What I am getting at is that, in my reading, various factors conspired to keep the views of Americans reasonably homogenous on the level at which government was primarily operating, and that the one time this failed America had a civil war. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say,
This is getting to be a long comment and I'm nervous about losing it, so to answer the rest of your points very briefly:
I am not very keen on my state at the moment, and I certainly don't consider it just. I am a Reform voter, which is the closest the UK has to a 'blow it all up' party. Likewise I voted for Brexit, my feelings on trans and immigration are not in line with the state, and I spend perhaps 1 hour a day arguing politics on this website. I could justify it by saying that I am by hereditary class and education part of the group of people who absolutely are expected to have an opinion on matters like this, and that in that way it is in my 'pay grade'. But it would be more accurate to say that I am a hypocrite who intellectually believes that what I have said is true but can't hold to it. As the Operative of Serenity says, "there's no place there for me". It's one of the reasons I left Japan despite liking it so much.
Americans in many ways have a deeper trust in authority than almost any other country - apart from the Borderers they entirely lack the corrosive distrust you tend to see in Old World countries like Europe and Russia. What they distrust IMO is foreign authority, whether that be London or Washington.
(Epistemic confidence: low. I'm not sure I believe what I'm saying and I can think of lots of counterexamples.)
This is sort of what I'm getting it, in a 'fish have no word for water' way. When individual parents and doctors are making decisions like this (except to the extent that individual children to some extent have different needs), when legislators are deciding to coerce behaviour and we are debating whether parents have the right to resist that coercion, your country is already well on the way to breaking down. The mechanisms for achieving consensus have failed, and legislators/doctors/parents are engaged in inter-nicene brawl which is time-consuming and damaging to the medical profession plus every individual involved. Note that even Britain, which is dysfunctional in many ways, has been able to move relatively seamlessly and easily from 'transing the children is good' to 'transing the children is bad'.
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