I don't think that's true (well, your second sentence; your first is absolutely correct).

This kind of thing has been happening before the advent of mass and social media: this is just basic human tribalism at play. The only difference is scale.

People want to feel like they belong, and the political Left has done a really bad job at talking to the anxieties of the poor, especially young, male poor. The populist Right, meanwhile, has had a plan and has welcomed these people with open arms.

The Left abandoned the poor because it's political leaders fell in love with neoliberalism. And I don't think I can blame them, because triangulation worked very well and made a lot of people very rich while also cutting the traditional right-wing parties off at the knees. The problem is that it left the Left vulnerable to being flanked by right-wing populists who were ready to give comfort and validation to disadvantaged people; answers that were simple, easy and appealing, and make them feel like they were being listened to.

I can see how the leadership of, eg, the US Democratic party, or the Liberals in Canada, might be shocked by this, but for anyone involved on the ground this has been brewing since at least 2000. The real warning signs should have been when people of colour and LGBTQ folk started getting nervous about how progressive governments were big on empty gestures but very quiet when money was on the line, but the loss of young, working-class men happened a couple decades before that.

It's like we have an entire political class that slept through how the 1930s and 1940s happened. Which is of course, facetious, but it seems true, and the reason is because they didn't, and still don't, want to see it because they have been making too much money off of the problem.