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It depends on who's in office, and who the media and political groups want to rile up.

You're describing symptoms as the disease. People elect officials, sustain media outlets that support their viewership's confirmation biases, and organize by tribal beliefs. People are the messy, complicated root cause. New symptoms will always emerge, regardless of how much focus/treatment they get. Symptoms can sometimes look like a cabal. But they aren't. The root is normal people.

That’s leaving out a key problem: this is not happening in a vacuum, with perfectly spherical cows randomly distributed. Because those ejections have a broad variety of consequences, there is a ton of money to be made shaping public opinion and billions of dollars is spent doing so.

Much of the conservative agenda consists of positions which poll in the 30-40% range but the groups of people backing those positions are extremely motivated, so you get entire media operations (not just Fox News) devoted to pushing the most popular points trying to get people to vote for the entire ticket. Crime is really popular there because it gets people scared, and scared people don’t think long-term: maybe you don’t really hate gay people, think abortion should be up to doctors, feel that we should do something about climate change, think rich people should pay taxes at the same rate you do, etc. – those are all positions a majority of Americans take – but none of those are really affecting you personally right now, whereas you keep hearing about these carjackings and other violent crimes which could, so you vote for the guy who will definitely go against all of those other long-term things because he’s promising to do something about the immediate scary thing.

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