America has become a very strange place. At the same time our military was "bringing freedom to the Iraqi peoples", our legislature and executive conspired to remove or automate much judicial review of spying. In effect American citizens lost another type of liberty.
We seem to be better at protecting our access to riffles. Most of the liberties created by America's founding fathers (women were not allowed to vote) were designed to thwart the power of a monarchy and the power of the Roman-Catholic church. Many of these founding fathers were members of a fraternity called the Free Masons and read authors like John Locke. My point is they were a fairly homogeneous group of Englishmen.
Since then America has expanded civil rights explicit in the Constitution to include people of all races and genders. But the Industrial age has been a constant force of erosion of our liberties. Our elections are not publicly funded. This means there is a huge advantage to material wealth and the wealthy have steered Congress to benefit themselves.
The bright shinning star of hope for The Land of The Free is our government is not systemically corrupt, at least not in the traditional meaning of corrupt.
I think this is a good discussion by Prof Lessig, "Republic Lost":