[piva00]

I don't think we are disagreeing, expanding my point: the forever pursuit of more material wealth narrowed whatever was the USA's vision as a nation.

More material wealth showed other good indicators for society being correlated to it, culminating in the misguided ideology with Reagan that only caring about advancing material wealth is enough to advance society.

Since then the whole point of the USA is to further material wealth, and the belief that societal benefits will inevitably trickle down from this advancement. My firm belief after 40-50 years of empirical data about this experiment is that it was completely misguided and missed the forest for the trees.

Within this ideology all the issues you brought up branched from: corporations and moneyed interests got even more power; to keep power those moneyed interests need to corrupt democratic processes.

Rage-based content providers is just another facet of power maintenance mechanisms, if you have capital and want to push your agenda you need the media for it, and since your main purpose is to have an audience to push this agenda you will, inevitably, rely on content that is easy to churn out while keeping this audience, hence the rage-based content landscape that is very prevalent in the USA.