So the two main parties in America, the republicans and democrats. Is it true there was a time when both parties weren't so different?

There's a lot of mythology about every era in US history, formed by every generation continuing the tradition of saying that everything was so much better in year x, when things in the US have pretty much always been a dumpster fire, even before the US was formally created (just ask the natives)

Shortly after the war of independence from the UK, guess what? Nobody wanted to pay for the war. Imagine that.

We literally fought another war because one side could not agree with the other on enslaving other humans. Talk about your common ground of yore. Hell, the new country was created so as to allow one side to do it, and the other side not to do it, during the interwar period, preferring the stoner unicorn idea of "states' rights" over, well, you know, individual (human) rights so that the two-systems-system could continue and the unpleasant can could be kicked down the road until that other war.

What positive things could we do with the effort we just waste on mythologizing history?