I find the limited political knowledge a far bigger concern. The US has taken perfectly acceptable words and butchered them: liberal, libertarian, conservative, left, fascist, socialist etc mean different things inside the US to what they mean everywhere else. I reckon US political language hasn’t butchered itself - there’s a plan in there somewhere.
Agreed but I want to push you to go further: it's not just politics that has been so influenced.
Even Google searches - once world-renowned for their recall and precision and overall helpfulness, now are shit. Reddit as well. Twitter... well, apparently was always a hellhole? :-P YouTube was not though - until it was bought by Google.
Enshittification destroys all that it touches. Even/especially governments. Though the same happened to Rome, so many thousands of years ago. And to Russia too, more recently, despite it ostensibly calling itself "communist"/leftist.
I do think that there was a plan to help move it along, but I also think that it might have been an inevitable consequence of (more or less) entirely unfettered capitalism, and that those two worked together to destroy a nation that once was struggling far less than it seems to be doing lately?