This might in fact be the only innovation that Russia can claim since the fall of the USSR: complete mastery of the technology of propaganda for controlling populations.
Conservatives have been threatening to drown the federal government in the bathtub since the 1980s. There’s no new beliefs. It’s just a reshuffling between the parties of the same folks that existed in 1990: paleocons and social conservatives, capitalists, neocons, nationalists, economic populists, etc. The anti-vaxxers were there, they were just democrats because that was the low-institutional-trust party back then.
The people you’re calling “Russian agents” were also there in the 1990s, as were the neocons calling them that. They just took over the GOP because it turned out that the Democrats (back then) were correct and american military intervention in places Iowans can’t find in a map is actually bad for the GOP base.
I’m old enough to remember conservative republicans from 2008 ish era and while there was some dumb stuff, anything 2016 and beyond is unparalleled and its revisionist to say otherwise.
The American public got slowly acclimated to turning into a ridiculous version of idiocracy. A mix of corrupt / easily bought politicians, a voter base addicted to consumerism and social media, and a country with a problematic voting system, all contributed to todays situation.
I used to wonder, like many kids, “why didn’t anyone stop hitler, he was so obviously bad”. It was never that obvious to me that so many other indoctrinated people could have been just as awful and far gone.
I pray those smart enough to see where all of this is inevitably leading to, leave the US before it’s too late for them to. Do not become an unwilling contributor to what the US does next.
"Idiocracy" came out in 2006, and Carl Sagan was writing about American anti-intellectualism long before that. I'd also note that 2008 brought us Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket. I agree things were better, but the rot was clear to some already.