That's the American experience.
That may be your American experience, but it's not everyone's. We are a huge country, and while there's of course truth behind the stereotypes, the glib "'Murica dumb" sentiment doesn't exactly capture everyone's experience.
My city (San Francisco) has been continuously improving bike infrastructure and is actively closing streets off to cars, we have a diverse food culture, we don't allow gun stores in the city, and our de facto recreational drug is weed, not coke (though yes, the city does have a fentanyl problem). And I use metric units in lab for my California-based employer.
To address OP's question, I'll add a +1 to all the Ken Burns recommendations. Not an exhaustive history, but it's a great start!
While neat, this is not self-sustaining
it's taking more energy to power it than you're getting out of it. (You can build a fusion device on your garage if you're so inclined, though obviously this is much neater than that!)
One viewpoint is that we'll never get clean energy from these devices, not because they won't work, but because you get a lot of neutrons out of these devices. And what do we do with neutrons? We either bash them into lead and heat stuff up (boring and not a lot of energy), or we use them to breed fissile material, which is a lot more energetically favorable. So basically, the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor. Which is still way better than fossil fuels IMHO, so that's something.