[lsc]

It is possible that what we are seeing is just what you suggest, that people are fighting back and trying to fix (as they see it) society. Perhaps this is what participatory democracy looks like when the publishing tools are all very accessible; this is just what it looks like when you make the presses cheap enough.

It's possible that passion is now the main resource needed to get your political message out, and radicals tend to be more passionate than the rest of us.

Of course, to moderates, this looks terrible. I consider myself a moderate (or at least I did before the last election; the overton window, it would seem, has moved) and so I personally think this looks terrible, and it's not the most likely possibility, in my opinion. But you could construct a self-consistent narrative in which this was simply democracy in action; it matches much of the available evidence.

The big hole in this explanation is the evidence of foreign powers buying advertising to prop up our radicals. My understanding is that the investigation in that direction is still ongoing... but even then, the idea that a (much poorer) nation could buy our election would be in line with what I suggested about the presses (or at least the opinion-shaping part of the presses) being much cheaper than expected.