How much of that, at least among elites, is due to looking at China's dizzying development, bound straight for the singularity, while the old appeals to liberty and rights seem to have only got the USA bogged down in gridlock and squabbling?

Revolutions happen, inter alia, to break gridlock, whether consciously or unconsciously. The rise of the surveillance state might be seen as the coup by elites that is one of the known forms of revolution.