All us WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) countries seem to spend a really embarrassing amount of time talking about the pointless minutiae surrounding our candidates for office and their personal lives.
We are also prone to backing very crap candidates based on personality, rhetoric, appearance ie: things that have nothing to do with being a good executive or legislator.
I think we should ban names from the election process and just have each party submit their ideas in writing and let people vote based on those submissions.
It’s both. It’s always both. People are afraid and angry and hungry, and that brings fascism like flies to shit. I really don’t want to believe that people were always this hateful, and that it’s mostly because times are tough for everyone. Doesn’t help that you have Fox News and their cronies whipping everyone into a frenzy about every little thing.
Oh well. Now we’ll see them put their plan into action and hope that they somehow self-implode before they do too much damage.