correlation vs causation fallacies and public opinion

We are living in a period which represents the culmination of a generation of increasingly extreme wealth inequality, combined with the concentration of political power in favor of the center-right, right, and lately the far right, to an unprecedented extent. Today, a whole generation has grown up in which this state of affairs is the norm. Which leads me to a theory that I hope some sociologists have thought to test, or will some time soon:

If you are in the habit of frequenting the online forums of mass media publications nowadays, you could be easily forgiven, if you were inclined towards a conspiratorial mindset, of suspecting that some combination of Koch bros and Russian bots have unleashed armies of deliriously far right reactionary trolls in all directions. Perhaps.

But another theory I wish to offer is that, for many people, there is no contradiction in attributing to what the US rightwing calls "liberal politics" any new (or apparently new) problems they become aware of, despite the increasingly monolithic ascendancy of the rightwing worldwide. Consider that, for example, many problems only become evident to most people after slowly festering for a very long time (the climate crisis is a notable example, but another is the housing and homelessness crisis that has culminated following forty years of increasingly catastrophic disinvestment in public housing at the federal level, mandatory rent "decontrol" ala California's Ellis Act, etc).

Many problems build up over a long period and only become very obvious to a stereotypical homeowner when they breach some tipping point ("why are all these destitute people camping out and defecating in or near my lawn? why is the air filled with smoke every summer nowadays?"). The seemingly "invisible" causes of these long festering but suddenly erupting crises are far more difficult to reason about for most people, whereas it is not paradoxical in the least that they might attribute the eruption of something apparently new to something unfamiliar, unusual, and also new.

If AOC is suddenly talking about wealth redistribution, and you suddenly notice a lot more scabrous beggars hitting you up for money on the streets, do you conclude that it's on account of the slowly building monopoly on money and power achieved by 1% of the population -- which is not a "new problem" to you, but merely the "natural order of things" by now? Or do you attribute it to AOC herself -- another scary, unfamiliar, and apparently anomalous new phenomenon, that of a young working class woman of Puerto Rican ancestry getting elected to Congress?!

More generally, the idea that any kind of left-leaning ideas which are wholly alien, anomalous, and unfamiliar (despite exercising almost zero real power in the larger economy and society) might be to blame for newly observable problem X, Y, or Z does not seem particularly paradoxical at all, but more like the normal way that human beings process new information. Correlation does not equal causation, but such an assumption is often good enough for most everyday human purposes. Consider it a perverse corollary to the power of "disaster capitalism", ie, the idea that the creators of catastrophic problems are often in the best position to profit from them, and those offering unfamiliar "new" solutions in the worst position to advance them.