[1] see also a novel "The Klansman", the Word of that narrative made flesh and into "Birth of a Nation" , i which the modern movie was born.
Sacrificing individual agency to mythic protections has a name. It's collectivism. And it takes quite the storyteller to kill that sort of story.
The housing crisis? "Housing never goes down." Vietnam? "The domino theory." Manifest Destiny? "Go West, young man."
The problem is that we're adapted to narrative as our principle means of information exchange. So we try to construct counter-narratives. Those work just about as well.
The antidote to narrative is rhetoric.
It's actually spelled hypocrisy, but that's a fun misspelling for those who know Greek roots.
Otherwise, I think a huge reason for our moral progress in the US, slow and unsteady though it may be, is having a document like the condition to point to when advocating for better conditions.
The constitution enshrined the diminishment of blacks' humanity, had to be ammended to extend the franchise to women, and still says that slavery is fine under the right circumstances. It's as much a reflection of our failings as it is our ambitions, and has been wielded violently to uphold or change the status quo. It has no inherent trajectory towards progress other than the one we actively embody.
There is no reading of American history where the press or the judiciary function as some conduit for the immortal "brilliance" or protection of the framers. One needs to only look at recent history, the condition of minorities in modern carceral state, being lied into war in Iraq, to recognize this. Further back, the judiciary was used to justify segregation, eugenics, and mass disenfranchisement. And the history of the press speaks quite bleakly for itself.
This kind of mentality, where individual agency is sacrificed in favor of "mythic" protections, is a big part of the reason things have become so precarious.