We have eyes and can see and brains that can read. Anyone with eyes and a brain can see the internal coup happening by the executive btw ch against the other branches with elon at the head of it all.
It is an interesting question with an interesting, long and complicated answer that can't really be done justice in a HN post. It'd probably be worth looking up some psychology papers if you're really interested in the topic.
But for a basic theory sketch: Humans are social creatures designed to form herds around a leader/small number of leaders (see, for example, cults as an example of this dynamic). The typical human is expecting to do what they are told by a leader and constantly playing status games to figure out who that leader is right now and whether they, the human figuring, qualify as one.
This means that the average punter is totally unequipped to evaluate not just capitalism but any ideology! The only skills they have are maybe how to play status games and maybe a few economically valuable technical abilities. This results in bizarre situations where you have roving hordes of people who swear by ideologies but have no idea about them (find me a Marxist who has read Marx - they exist but there aren't as many of them as the name suggests). There aren't enough people who can break out of that dynamic to set up forums that exclude it though.
The natural social response to all this is you have people floating around who challenge every ideology and the masses generally expect them to be heard because that is one of the rules for status games. But at the end of the day it is normal for the challengers to then be ignored because capitalism offers huge rewards to the people at the top of the food chain so it is a pretty stable system. Not perfect, but what is.
Because it’s grounded in actual US history? Read up on The Gilded Age for context on what happened the last time the US hit peak robber baron. Our country specializes in creating grifters and this isn’t our first rodeo.
