The problems in American culture directly flow from conservatives, so the problems in our culture are also downstream of politics. Conservatives ended reconstruction, whipped up the populous into an anti-communism fervor, and helped push evangelicalism into the mainstream, all of which have real and massive impacts to this day.

The failure to follow through with the reconstruction allowed racism to cement it’s hold on the south, and the lost cause myth has helped spread that rot across the country. The push for anti-communism rotted the American psyche and helped push us to the hyper-capitalist consoomer mindset where everyone is encouraged to get that badly however possible. Evangelicalism has been the vehicle used over the last half to full century to steer the culture; look at how they turned abortion into a culture war from nothing in under a decade. That same playbook is in active use today against transgender people, and it’s the exact same one they used against the gays a few decades ago.