The US was founded on puritan ideals driven out of Europe which have endured through time and the 60s era of USSR rivalry and Mccarthism.
We must understand this. And learn what motivates rather than dismissing fears and differences of values as 'backward' or 'bigotted'. They are just 'different' more often than not and not out of outward malice nor desire to oppress. That does exist of course but it needs to be separated out.
That's a very shrewd observation, RTB. Visiting France and Germany as a teen/young woman, I was always struck by how fundamentally similar in a lot of respects (language aside) they were to Britain. The first time I went to the US I was similarly struck by how very, very different it was, despite the shared language.
The more I read about American history the more I'm struck by the deep roots of these differences. For instance, it's important to remember the genuine political and religious oppression the puritans faced in Britain (and not just puritans, a generation earlier, the first political liberals like John Locke, whose writings exerted an immense influence on the Founding Fathers, and who had to flee England for Holland for political reasons), and the huge role this played in shaping the American constitution.
The way this history plays into things that Europeans find so difficult to understand, such as the 2nd Ammendment. Is it the right to bear arms because they're all redneck cowboys who just like huntin' and shootin' (the European stereotype). Or (endless arguments over that comma) is it that ultimately the people have the right to bear arms in case the government gets too big for its boots - the ever-present fear of the founding fathers who'd escaped European tyranny and thrown off the yoke of colonial government?
And the immense and poisonous legacy of slavery. We were equally culpable, but because we were the merchants (for the main part) rather than the owners, the bulk of the poison has landed up on American shores, and we've got off pretty much Scot free (a phrase which itself has roots in the legacy of American slavery). The way that led to the civil war. The war by other name phony peace which followed culminating in the liberal north screwing over blacks in the south, and the Jim Crow laws.
The curious tension that the white Americans saw themselves as having thrown off the colonial yoke while simultaneously being the colonisers who'd done a massive land-grab from the Indigenous people.
And so on and so on - exceptionalism, reluctant engagement in world wars, the cold war (and terror of communism)...
It's massively shaped by a history which is very different from that of Europe - we split apart nearly 2 and a half centuries ago now, and I think (two nations divided by a common language) we often forget just how very, very culturally different the US is from pretty much any western European nation.