[A_D_E_P_T]

It's not even "places" -- not any more. It's driven by the extremely online. Twitter, in particular, is a bazaar of echo-chambers, and most of them push their own political and social agendas. (Left and right, the mechanism is the same.)

People get caught up in it, and then think that those opinions are normal. There is no "normative" frame of reference.

This has, of course, infected politics itself over the past 10 years.