but it never spilled over into politics quite to this degree.

Sure. But, look at the media environment. From the founding of the US to the invention of radio, there were newspapers. Sure, there was a strong element of yellow journalism, but to print a newspaper you still needed a printing press so it wasn’t a free-for-all. Then with radio, and then TV in the 50s there were only a handful of sources of information for everybody to follow. It’s only really since the 2010s that the media environment has been a free-for-all with anybody able to put up their own podcast, or put up videos on YouTube, or have their own blog, or post on Twitter, or whatever.

Politicians used to be able to do backroom deals. Those used to get a bad name, but to a certain extent it was a good thing, because at least they were dealing, instead of causing things to come to a deadlock. Now, if anybody dares to talk to someone on “the other team”, they get raked over the coals.

Russia was found to be sponsoring the NRA

Sure, they spent some money, and had some success. But, they hardly needed to push. The NRA’s goals were already aligned with Russia’s. The NRA has over 5 million members, and they were hardly upset with the direction Russia was pushing.

the rise of evangelicals as a voting group seems to be a co-ordinated world-wide phenomenon.

Not to me. There doesn’t seem to be much coordination there. There are just grifters seeing an opportunity.

I’d argue that those same elites thrived more under stable economic growth than an unstable one

It’s hardly the first time that an elite and powerful group tried to use a movement or a politician to further their interests and then found out that they couldn’t control what they’d unleashed.