Social media is an effective tool which can be used as a weapon, but the problem isn't that Americans have effective weapons; it's that they're incentivised to use them against each other. The solution to me seems pretty obviously a return to federalism. It's the fact that there is only one throne that makes everyone fight for it with whatever is at hand rather than build things up locally.
The pessimist (or realist) in me tends to agree, that a fundamental shift occurred after the second world war. What exactly is the nature of this change is hard to say - something about the dominant ideology of the ruling class, the relationship of wealth, business, politics and governance - maybe.
At the same time, this period has been one of the greatest maturing and flowering of our collective global civilization. Not to go all Pinker ¹, but the optimist side of me wants to believe that the cultural and technological advances we've made have enough momentum to overcome the negative tendencies that are possibly bringing us to the brink of collapse.
¹ https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/international-poverty-line-ip...
With global climate disasters and large chunks of the population prone to tribal superstition looming, nearly everyone being spoonfed technology they don’t begin to understand much less have any ability to replicate, and the government of the global hegemon inches away from collapse into autocracy, people are afraid of dark ages, but most of them can’t quite articulate it.
Rome fell and a big part of europe and the mediterranean lost the ability to maintain cities many of which dumped 90% of their populations to the countryside. Specialization gone, most people were just doing subsistence agriculture. Literacy plummeted to almost no one outside a very very few people in monasteries.
This whole religious adherence to party aligned mythology about everyday things (say, vaccines) is pervasive in the western world, and it is not some surface defect, it’s a rot that goes through to the core.
But things have been pretty nice as long as almost everybody has been alive so the belief that everything will continue to be fine is about all that holds things together.
People don’t appreciate how precarious civilization is.