It's also wildly inconsistent. The same political factions (vs individuals) that complain about Real ID also complain endlessly about fake ID. They complain about illegal voting, but also support the drive to withdraw their states from ERIC, which has done a good job in detecting illegal voting. Basically they're sometimes against solutions because their complaints infrastructure generates a reliable stream of political and financial capital from the credulous.

[Lightly] amusing is thinking there is a singular attitude in the US towards national IDs. And we already have several forms of national ID anyway.

Comically, the primary national ID we use is one specifically designed not to be a national ID.

The secondary "national" IDs most of us use are simply state IDs or driver's licenses. They're not in a federal database, but I don't understand how that's meaningfully different. It's still a big government tracking system.

It was, but curiously, they've removed the related verbiage from new issuances.

They used to carry a disclaimer: FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PURPOSES • NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION

Well yeah, generalisation is awful, but it has it gist here :-)