Propaganda was a problem in this election, and many of the points you make touch on this. For instance, if you're concerned about the price of eggs, you would

Propaganda was a problem in this election, and many of the points you make touch on this. For instance, if you're concerned about the price of eggs, you would not elect a president who campaigned heavily on tariffs and clearing out illegal immigrants, both policies which will tend to make things more expensive. But that was not the propaganda. If you are concerned about Palestine, you would not elect the president whose inner circle was floating around ethnic cleansing fantasies about Gaza well before Trump made the current remarks yesterday. But that was not the propaganda. Many issues (like immigration, firearms, and transgender topics) are difficult to talk about these days in America because propaganda (in any direction you choose) has turned them into absolutist binary views. Binary views that happen to be tied to identity. It is difficult to try to reason with identity-tied views. Social media has only made such worse. Everyone huddles in their silos, cheers when their identity issues go one way, and rages when their identity issues go another. Contrarian viewpoints to the silo get downvoted en masse. It is pretty clear that there are nefarious sorts out there that know this and try to manipulate the crowd. And this isn't even an American only problem these days. America's just one of the places where the democratic backsliding is the most visible, due to our former position. My main worry in fact goes beyond mere politics, and more to the anti-intellectualism, anti-expertise wave that is also part of the above. How can progress move forward when the propaganda turns vaccines into a boogeyman, when the propaganda politicizes climate change and also ties such to identity, and when (at its worst) the propaganda attacks science itself? To me, such is far stronger concerns to worry about compared to who wins the next American election.