Public education is universal, as well as television, and it may be that the mass culture drives one to select a brand of social products to go along with. If public education for primary and secondary schools is over-mature, the remedy might be to move about 60% of public school financing to contracts for private schools that anyone could choose to send their progeny to. maybe more diversity would let people develop a better sense of individual and personal interest rather than being indoctrinated with political correctness.
National splintering it isn't a new phenomenon... https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674064362
It could be that Alvin Toffler’s 1972 book ‘Future Shock’ about the pace of change and data overwhelming ordinary people actualized with a sense of the masses being intellectual drowned an at a loss or need to be responsible for the governance of their society, or perhaps relinquishing rule to the 1% and the corporate people at the top.
The United States has gone through a zillion social changes forced from the elites and Wall Street the past 30 years, or since the Reagan administration even, and their may be some cynicism. People have taken to a little trendy neo-nihilism and have tuned out from a degree of belief in the decency of society. People have become emulators of the trends sold by Wall Street, and they know Wall Street has been bailed out by the Federal Reserve. Political economic theory and all else is almost dead as people sig the money fuhrer of the time. None besides Bernie Sanders want to be regarded as socialist or disloyal to Wall Street since corporatism has taken over, the rich have bought the broadcast media and corporate censors control free speech giving the Orwellian epithet ‘hate speech’, hate crimes and stopping just short of ‘thought crimes’.
In the Clinton administration I thought it was disgusting that a fellow showed up for work with pink hair highlight, mascara and a hangover. Eventually the neo-conservative Chief Justice of SCOTUS decided to make homosexual marriage the law of the land. That was a lasting split of sentiments. Instead of busting the old wine skin the homosexual crowd should have established a new institution for themselves that left the old intact.
Abortion did not help traditional moral norms, neither has the Democrat Party preference for illegal aliens (now called non-citizens) that flooded the nation with tens of millions of cheap workers. Republicans developed a cadre of neo-troglodytes that hate science, global warming and mass extinction of the Anthropocene era having decided that they are leftist hoaxes.
Democrats prefer legal dope and tend toward being antipathetic to Christian values unless the church has secularly conformed and semi-non-faith doctrinal winkyness.
Some Americans seem to be immersed in a brave new world order and just want an interesting, comfortable and prosperous lifestyle, or ample power and prestige, and don’t really care about suffering of others or social change unless it is trendy to do so. In a way the nation is no longer grounded in meaningful standards and has become Darwinist free floating dollars for themselves without sufficient philosophical education.
Possible more and better philosophers writing for public consumption can be the pipers leading the people to unity (joking).