Because of how polarized things have gotten, that it's become easier to see what is actually going on if you pay attention. I think that has to due with polarization becoming so powerful that the restraint we're looking at to hem things in is basically the foundational document of the United States. Those are the limits - the rules we play by.
When we push on those limits, people start to pay more attention. America has been sort of a sleeping giant of politics in the sense that the majority of it's people don't vote. Stuff happens, life goes on, no one really pays much attention. But that number has been going up in recent years, especially where we are now in 2020. And once someone starts to familiarize themselves with things and if they can look at things dispassionately can start to see obvious trends emerging.
As I write this (since things happen so quickly), I'm seeing Biden wanting to do more lockdown (4 - 6 weeks, and we know how that works out), I'm seeing his campaign announced they want to get back into Syria (yay, promising more war...), setting up "task forces" for things like online harassment (boy, will social media people love that one!), it's not hard to understand one side wants power, and wants it very badly. People called it the swamp before Trump came along, long before.
Meanwhile, Trump is fighting legally in the courts, and removed several high ranking officials recently who weren't trust worthy, a left-wing government official is trying to block him from declassifying documents on the grounds that it would be potentially damaging to the country. The power struggle is going on at every level of government, because both sides know how to read the Constitution and one side doesn't care too much about it while the other one wants to defend it to the teeth.
Every step right now from either side is basically a power move, each one more blatant than before if it's not censored or ignored by the media, or made so light of that no one cares. The media's corruption levels are so off the charts high that we actually have no clue what's going on besides this polarized battle we're locked into. Did all bad things outside politics also stop happening? The purposeful self-blinding of the media, their complicity in destroying their own profession has made the very things they want to hide glaringly obvious to anyone not suffering TDS.
It will take some time before people even understand that politics isn't just this thing that happens in offices, deals are made and honored or not, and it's all sort of for a better purpose. Not when the politicians are using all the power they can exert to try and grab on to more power. Things that happen in other countries, they can't happen in the United States? Or have happened? Like Eric Weinstein says, we're waking up from a very long nap as a society and turns out there's a reason for politics and it's not nearly as nice as the propaganda would have us believe.
I don't think we've been asleep that long in absolute terms. Remember the days of rage were inside 50 years ago. What you're running into is the twin meeting impacts of all brakes being taken off of inflating fiat currency in 1971, and the 'hard drinking party time' from the cold war ending finally wearing off. For just a little while there you could actually fool yourself into thinking money grew on trees and every enemy had been beaten forever, so the average person stopped caring. Fast forward about four decades of bad inflationary fiscal policy and globalism bleeding the rest of the wealth, and the average working stiff is making too little to really plan for the future, and no longer has any enemy to really celebrate decisively beating to distract them. Barring another 9/11 style super event, Middle East and South American dictatorships getting steamrolled do little to provide that same buzz for the average low info working stiff, and indeed is starting to generate the opposite. That dissatisfaction as pretty much everyone younger than actual Boomers is finding it hard to save up anything has boiled into political extremism growing for both sides. If you can't have a family and legacy under normal circumstances, the obvious next step is to go after the system preventing it.
Unfortunately the polarized ends are so busy arguing about what the resulting landscape should look like, nobody's worried about the massive in control enemy that's in our face: Media, Market Monopolies, and Finance. There's a bad tendency on this sub (forum? We're not really on reddit anymore.) to imagine the power that be want communism when it'll look a lot more like feudal serfdom without any particular care for what morality the underclasses have once they establish power further and reduce the population. I almost hope they make the mistake of letting the left-radicals get further unhinged trying to take more states and the legislature back to speed things along. That barking dog slipping the leash would be terrible for us and most average people, but the would-be puppeteer elite will get caught in the bloody upheaval much as they did in places like Russia trying the same trick of letting communism go 'just far enough' to swoop in behind.
I will agree the single best thing that has come of this recent disruption by Trump and the populists is attention on how corrupt and in-on-the-take the media is directly. The more they scream about being the truth, fact checking, disputing, etc. the better. If you have to say something so much even the slow kids take notice eventually. Fake news becoming a watchword is good news for average people. It's an organ of the uni-party and shouldn't be trusted even if it seems upset with any given neocon for a while, look how they treat Bush Jr. now compared to Trump.
The real sea change will be if radicals on either edge of the spectrum can start pointing the finger at banks and the federal reserve again, instead of leaving it as a libertarian joke of an idea. Occupy came so damn close and was popular with 'both sides' and that's why it got destroyed through the purposeful injection of IdPol that's infested the left radicals ever since. The right wing can't help charging like a bull right back at the cultural and moral aspects when they don't realize they're losing corps and the government because central ownership and dictatorial rule make more money for the people who already have most of it.
Just wanted to say that's a pretty good and unique political analysis there. I don't know that you're perfectly correct, but that's several views I haven't seen before that look accurate and valid. Refreshing perspective :)