Someone wrote that there are a lot of miserable people out there and many of them want other people to be miserable too.
But I also gotta believe that somehow people have been radicalized. I keep going back to Cambridge Analytic and how they manipulated Brexit and the US 2016 election. I feel like maybe the AI and meta data algorithm have radicalized a certain percentage of the population? People never used to be this stupid.
You should watch "The Brainwashing of My Dad" on Netflix.
It might help answer your questions.
It is about the radicalization of the right, which started with Nixon, who was running for election when almost every state was blue, and literally had no chance to win. This was at a time when the Republicans were rightly seen as the party that catered solely to the wealthy. The GOP was the country club, and everyone else just worked there.
His team came up with this gem "Americans are stupid, they want their thinking done for them". Taking cues from the (racist) John Birch Society, they realized they needed to gain the support of middle class white men by appealing to their emotions (System 1), and they did that by pushing the finger that was pointed at them for causing everyone's economic and financial problems, and directing the finger pointing at a scapegoat - black and brown people, immigrants, gays (the boogeymen are interchangeable and change with current trends).
This was a huge shift in the public. Before Nixon, the wealthy were greedy and selfish, after Nixon the wealthy were just "hard workers", and a lottery ticket was sold that if you work real hard, you can be like them. Ignoring the statistics that demonstrate that people like Donald Trump are only wealthy due to inheritance/connections/etc, and others usually only become extremely wealthy through sheer luck - they were in the right place at the right time. Still, wealth is overwhelmingly a generational phenomenon.
From there, Rush Limbaugh picked up the ball with AM talk radio, then Fox News, ad nauseam.
They all operate from the same playbook because it works.
There are millions of people who furiously support the GOP, while they are literally stealing money out of everyone else's pockets but the wealthy, continually increasing the divide between the wealthy and everyone else.
I have never had a single member on these forums be able to actually show me one policy as put forth by the GOP that had a beneficial economic impact on middle and lower class Americans. Not one.
Check out the documentary if you can. It really puts in to perspective how and why a literal buffoon and sex pest like DJT could actually be elected, on something as absurd as "he's going to look out for regular Americans" (despite having a lifetime of screwing middle class Americans), or "he's going to drain the swamp" (the 1st presidency) when he actually filled his cabinet with more corporate lobbyists than any other president in history, yet they elected him again. Even supposed thinkers like Deorum fell for it. Can't vote Democrat because brown people bad, and I live in AZ where there are a lot of brown people and it was a crisis I tell you. I live in FN San Diego bud, which is actually the busiest border in the entire country. There was no FN crisis. It was totally and completely manufactured outrage.