[ripe]

No, pjc50 is right. Republican politicians are scared of their leader because their primary elections are completely at his mercy. The reason for Congress's dysfunction today is 100% a partisan issue. No need to blame "elite power centers".

[pjc50]

Eh, there's something in "complicity has been between the economic, political, and informational power centers in US": in that all of them backed an increasingly dysfunctional Republican party, as a means of avoiding problems they didn't want to have solved (post industrial areas, police violence, fake news, money politics and so on)

The reverse applies to Democrats, who are sufficiently unafraid of their leadership that they occasionally engage openly in collaboration with the enemy.