The quality of the government reflects the quality of the majority.

The lowering of the quality barrier of entry to power for the politicians enabled by the glorification of stupidity via the megaphone of social media and the resultant divided electorate has given rise to the assholes nakedly profiting from it.

No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.

It is basically downhill from here.

It’s not directly causal, there is a feedback loop. The government has been failing to address the people’s needs for decades because the people failed to hold them to account. But the economy was decent enough for people to ignore this, except for occasional hiccups like 2008, which was papered over with QE and some crumbs for the masses (rebranded Romneycare under Obama).

Meanwhile educational standards have continued to decline, and this will inevitably affect both the electorate and their decisions. Education has been on a downhill trajectory ever since Roger Freeman convinced Reagan that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat.” This was the genesis of the privatization that created diploma mills, insane tuition costs, and the student loan crisis. Public schools gradually moved away from the humanities toward a narrow STEM focus, despite these fields not being a good fit for everyone. Coincidentally, a narrow STEM focus doesn’t give future voters a comprehensive and historically grounded understanding of government. (This has not been helped by left activists trying to overcorrect by rewriting history.)

Pressure has been building, and it found an outlet under Trump. Some steam has been released, Trump has 2 years left (maybe) and only die-hard supporters still believe in him. There will be a small window to either start fixing problems or set up a comprehensive police state to rule without public consent.

While I agree that the quality of the government is correlated with the quality of that government's people, you do also have other factors, namely the way the government is set up, which matter.

Take for example the USA. The entire electoral system is "winner takes all". Duverger's law [0] tells us that this will lead to a two-party system, as opposed to proportional representation, which tends to create truly multi-party governments.

I believe many of the current problems in US politics are in fact side-effects of the winner takes all electoral system. Each election, the only two choices are "candidate chosen by Republican Party" or "candidate chosen by Democratic Party". As such, elected officials are basically forced to first convince the members of each party to support them, which often leads to Trump-like strategies of "alienate half the country in order to please the other half", because that's a good strategy to get the party nomination, which is, in a two-party system, is basically a necessary condition to get elected.

On top that, news media and social networks have figured out that tapping into the human tribal instinct and framing politics as an 'Us vs Them' conflict sells more ads then being neutral, so the media ecosystem will tend to aggravate this two-party system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

That's not true. Trump no longer has a majority (see the coming elections) yet continues to be of inferior quality at all times. MAGA no longer supports Trump as they did two years ago, he lost million supporters already, and continues to lose more. He is now a sinking ship.

> No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.

That's also not true either. Toxicity leads to backlash. You can see this with Trump, but also with DHH claiming "everyone loves me", after his "let's kill wolves" blog entry: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a