I'm on HN, so I tend to want to blame the ad industry. It's pretty nebulous to think that "made in America" directly snowballed into this; so many things did. The freakier nativism in advertising really could use a break right about now though.
"Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman is 100% predictive and descriptive of how we got where we are.
I do also need to read Postman, though.
One of the underlying contradictory elements in the national philosophy of America since its founding has been white supremacy. Yes, that conflicts with "believe all men are created equal". No, this hasn't been properly resolved despite periods of extreme violence. I believe it's the anniversary of Gettysburg about now?
Hence the $45bn for putting people in camps. It's right there in the budget. Of course, that drip-fed in bipartisan fashion: there have been (smaller!) internments of immigrants for a long time.
Since then it's been gradual attacks on press freedom (WL exposed fraud/propaganda in the Iraq/Afghan wars) and massive profits by the defense industry, resulting in dramatically more lobbying money. Not to mention the US automotive industry and major banks getting bailed out and preventing many small economic corrections that should have occurred.
Then 20 years after 9/11 when the US has spent 10s of TRILLIONS on wars and virtually nothing on infrastructure, industrial policy, etc., everyone wonders why China appears to be close to leapfrogging. The anti-brown propaganda and "USA USA" jingoism back in the early 2000s is still fresh, benefitting candidates with xenophobic and jingoistic messages. Many feel real economic pain but don't understand that you don't spend $20T without consequences -- plus scapegoating the weakest members of society is apparently more emotionally satisfying.
By the time we got the pandemic both parties realized that they had more to gain from fiscal irresponsibility, and the tribalism of the government's anti-brown propaganda combined with the "multicultural solidarity" focus over class warfare by Dems, led to increasing tribalism and tribe-focused media. Now a large percentage of the population lives in a complete information bubble and is close to worshiping its political favorites as though they are religious icons.
Thus now regardless of which party is in power, there will be a shift to censor and suppress information that is viewed as harmful to society. I honestly blame both parties for their share of this, but the ultimate culprit is feed algorithms that are optimized for emotionally potent content that creates engagement (and ad dollars) and nothing more.
What is actually fascinating about the orignal TikTok is that the algorithm was so much more useful at showing interesting/appealing content that it pretty much overtook Insta, YouTube, and Netflix and required government intervention to stop its growth. This shows us clearly how the major social media platforms were not just wrong about how to maximize profits but wrong on how to entertain and engage people, mistakes that are only possible when there is really not much competition, which is how we now do capitalism in the US -- and by the way if you win you get nationalized.