Political Memes

Broadly maybe, but we're talking about a specific demographic of people who have been studied to be more reactionary, more emotional, less educated and less informed broadly. These are people who run off narratives supplied to them to explain their feelings, and there is only one group who are supplying these narratives directly to them about why they're unhappy.

The left and liberals have both been hung up on civility and honesty to a fault, almost as if setting up every engagement to fail, because we've known for decades and decades that you're not going to change Cletus's attitude towards immigrants with statistics and facts, he already feels awful, scared, overworked and insecure, if you try to explain to him that he's also wrong about his feelings, you're going to hit a wall and make him double-down. If you try to make him feel empathy for others especially people who are very different from Cletus, you will only make yourself a living personification of the picture of the "enemy" which they've been given.

Meanwhile, if instead of arguing you redirect their dissatisfaction towards the right targets, you won't have to change their feelings towards minorities or women or whatever, if you point them at the billionaire class who are actually stripping away their benefits and raising their taxes, they will stop caring about race and gender and identity politics. You can channel that rage at specific targets instead of trying to constantly tell a huge segment of the population that they're wrong and dumb. (Despite them being factually wrong and dumb. Again, just telling dumb people they're dumb won't change them, it will only make them worse.)

This outcome, of the left pushing the dumb towards corporations and billionaires is exactly what the actual ruling class fears so much and why they depend so, so much on creating as much division as possible, and why we now have bots arguing on social media and adopting the most radical positions of both sides of every issue.