Stephan:   I agree with this report but would add something important that this piece misses, something not generally recognized nor understood. At about the time of the Reagan administration, some amongst the uber-rich, men like the Koch brothers, who funded research and understood science, began funding researchers and think tanks to test paths to power. That wasn't what it was called, of course. The correlation between education and voting, being one example. (the more education, the more likely a person was to vote Democratic. Out of that came the useful fiction that the Republican Party was working class. That research taught the oligarchs that the United States was becoming a majority-minority nation, and that this would produce a vortex of resistance, just as it has. Using the science data, they understood that the way to take control of the government was to stimulate that cohort with misinformation and conspiracies within the population. What has become generally recognized as MAGA world. They also learned -- you can go to Google scholar and find the papers that led them to their decision -- that coalescing the fearful, the ignorant, and the less educated into one politically powerful cohort would, over time, let you turn the U.S. into an anocracy, with the oligarchs in control.