Agreed but I want to push you to go further: it’s not just politics that has been so influenced.

Even Google searches - once world-renowned for their recall and precision and overall helpfulness, now are shit. Reddit as well. Twitter… well, apparently was always a hellhole? :-P YouTube was not though - until it was bought by Google.

Enshittification destroys all that it touches. Even/especially governments. Though the same happened to Rome, so many thousands of years ago. And to Russia too, more recently, despite it ostensibly calling itself “communist”/leftist.

I do think that there was a plan to help move it along, but I also think that it might have been an inevitable consequence of (more or less) entirely unfettered capitalism, and that those two worked together to destroy a nation that once was struggling far less than it seems to be doing lately?