The dirty secret about American politics is that people care about any of that stuff only to the extent that it supports their actual ideological goals. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, state's rights, all of it. They want it for them, and don't care if anybody else has it _at best_, and actively want to take it away from others at worst.
Documents like the Declaration and Constitution only get written after centuries of bloodshed that we are far removed from, and people forget why anybody cared about such abstract principles to begin with.
Um, what "ideological goals"? "My friends and I get to do anything we want and fuck everybody else" isn't much of an ideology. Ideology means "abstract principles".
It was power-lust dressed as ideology, the latter largely to make it attractive to a larger, and highly gullible, it turns out, cohort.