I feel like I’ve read plenty about the historical materialist understanding about how the US constitution was formed and its class characteristics, but a lot less about the actual act of declaring independence. I do know how a bunch of the founding fathers made fortunes from land speculation via genocide and stealing indigenous land; and how the Brits wouldn’t let the yanks do that because they didn’t want to start another incredibly expensive war with the native peoples. I’ve also read of Gerald Horne’s thesis about how the founding fathers were worried that GB would totally outlaw slavery. I have a lot respect for Horne, he’s great but frankly I think that theory has little to no concrete evidence supporting it. But those two are the only materialist analyses of independence that I’ve seen so far.
reading veblen has made me depressed
feels like everyone just ends up ditching material conditions and mostly discount it as a secondary effect in favor of status signaling once socioeconomic conditions improve past a certain point with the end result being
someone needs to invent the field of ideological engineering
Arguably, the Department of Defense and especially
already has. 
Material conditions do come first as a primary mover and driver of societal events, but completely discounting propaganda and ideological movements is a Fukuyama-tier mistake with similar "identity-based motivations don't real" reductionism attached.
People don't always check their bank statements before deciding what they believe and what they're going to do, and even if they did, the outcomes still vary in ways that don't always have a straight line association with availability/presence.
i think confucianism tried to mitigate this by putting merchants at the bottom of the class ladder but that is like a bandaid on gunshot wound tier of fix
just feeling doomerpilled about unseating the primacy of status relations at a societal level once you get past basic subsistence conditions
I hear you.
That said, while Confucianism is materially wrong about a lot of things (like the presumption that older people are automatically worthy of more authority than younger people in an otherwise matching position) its influence, including in contemporary China to this day, still has an ongoing consequential effect that goes beyond strictly material analysis.