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I think the partisanship and the entrenched powers points in the other direction— hypernormalization. The hyper-normalizing simply means that most people have simply accepted that this is how it is and ever will be because the people in charge simply have no solutions to the issues at hand. This goes for democrats and republicans, and I think it explains the Cult around MAGA and Trump. Trump is popular because he’s giving hope of a world actually better than what we have now, and doing so in a way that’s very concrete. Not “slow the growth of inflation by X% over the next Y months” but “I want you to be able to afford groceries and gasoline again.” Not “we’re going to deal with the root causes of X,” but “we’re going to actually fix this.” Not “well, we should give illegals a court date,” but “we’re throwing them out.” It’s a similar appeal to other populist candidates— they’re addressing the real needs of real people with a promise that they can actually fix it, and of course they get very popular with ordinary people who want things to be more like the past where one income would feed and house a family (in an actual house even if it was small), where social deviance was not taught as normal to elementary school kids, where walking down the streets in major cities was not an open invitation to be assaulted and robbed, and where you didn’t see drug dealers selling openly on the streets.
I don’t think any party can actually deliver on getting us back to the turn of the last century where such things were possible. It’s the slow decline of the western world into moral decadence, sloth, corruption and decay. Such has been the way of every other civilization to exist. We’re in the late empire stages of decline. And unless we right the ship, she’s going to sink into darkness until some other civilization pulls up from the ashes of the Rules Based International Order to create something brand new.
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