It's a product of the two party system and FPTP.

Then you have actors like Russia who correctly identify it as a weak spot, and therefore dump as much fuel on the fire as they can.

And profiteers like the church, who keep their cash-cows enraged and engaged by building big blue strawmen.

It's not any kind of coordinated effort, just the end result of lots of different flavors of bullshit thrown in the same pile... but there are definitely people who benefit from it.

And it feels disingenuous to even mention that it can go both ways, but look at things like presidential elections and how many vote not for a candidate based on their merits, but against the other bastard based on how horrible they are.

Christians have been a major driving force for this, namely evangelicals.

A lot of people will say it’s the nature of a 2 party system or some shit, but it’s really the natural conclusion to a society that’s driven by religion.

As far as I know, the modern ideology really started in the 70’s with the Jesus freaks movement, but the general attitude has been around forever (look at the Pentecostals and other big tent denominations as far back as the 1800’s and their constant war on secularism). But this batch of Christians have been systematically working toward taking over positions of power and even trying to out-produce everyone else in order to raise little versions of themselves (look up ‘The Joshua Generation’) with the ultimate purpose of simply outnumbering everyone else. There’s been an intentional and calculated plan that I’ve known of my whole life because we were literally and directly talking about it regularly in church.

Then evangelicalism went mainstream and became the loudest group of religious zealots in the country and everyone just sat back and said next to nothing while they started the satanic panic and the likes of Limbaugh latched on for powers sake and fomented the fear and anger on the right in a way that the left just never even tried to do. And for the last 40 years this cohort has grown and grown until we have what we have now.

The 2 party system isn’t the reason, it’s the tool.