> I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause. There's an opinion piece to

> I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause. There's an opinion piece today in the NYT which argues that the present state of politics, with the rightward and even reactionary shift in certain areas of Republicanism, has been 40 years in the making: Republicans have been fueling the conditions that enabled Mr. Trump’s rise since the 1980s. A growing Southern and Western evangelical base pushed the party to replace its big-tent, bipartisan and moderate Republicanism of the mid-20th century with a more conservative version. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the party had made peace with New Deal social provisioning and backed large-scale federal spending on infrastructure and education. Even as late as the 1970s, President Richard Nixon passed legislation expanding federal regulatory agencies. Yet when Ronald Reagan moved into the White house in 1981, the Republicans sharply slashed government regulations. They cut taxes for the wealthy and oversaw a hollowing out of the American welfare state. At the same time, the party shored up its heavily evangelical base with tough-on-crime policies, anti-abortion rhetoric and coded racist attacks on “welfare queens.” The full piece is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/opinion/gop-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/opinion/gop-trump.html