I am going to coin a term here. GPS, or General Populace Syndrome; Here is my take on this, most people are interested in maintaining a personal/familial/inner circle quality of life and therefore are not interested in the bigger picture. These folks are great people, but politics and critical thinking over an extended range of subjects are not skills they developed due to either less of a desire to learn or an ability to use secondary thoughts in life's pursuits rather they choose learning to facilitate a desired lifestyle and so now the ultimate payload cache of this lack of critical thinking development is showing because things have gotten bad quickly, so, we have people who know a situation sucks and they need for more advanced thinkers to offer solutions because the intellectuals of note have failed, leaving a dissatisfied populace without immediate and direct discourse.
As well, higher education isn't what it used to be. If colleges and universities would facilitate the kind of on the move critical thinking required of bad situations we would have a public of millions of free thinking, unfettered problem solvers.
We have a lot of work to do.