Edit: this became a distracted rant somewhere along the line, so please feel free to disregard.

The GOP loves playing games, this is them playing games and you're falling for it.

The whole thing is a spectacle. One side plays the comical baddy which some people turn to in ineffectual anger, allowing this anger to be dissipated against the usual scapegoats of the state (in short, minorities of any kind), and so not allowing it to congeal into any kind of threat to power.

Meanwhile the other side plays to fear around the comical baddy (who does do real harm, using exactly the same tools that they themselves dutifully maintain, and not infrequently use); to the point of effectively platforming some of the worst of them; as they flounder around realising they can't offer anything but austerity and token gestures (most often repealing offenses against the population carried out in legal form, see slavery, segregation, gender rights, the list goes on) without stepping on the toes of power.

Realistically, the past both sides of this are yearning for is one that worked in a period of prodigious exploitation of new avenues and expansion of old ones as they related to the new (or growth, if you prefer).

This is no longer the case as the appearance of anything that has the momentum to keep the whole mass of debt moving becomes a rarer and rarer event, LLMs are/were the next big thing that was being banked on to keep it all going for the next decade or two, but even if that pays off the same crisis is looming down the road.

Neither 'side' has a satisfactory solution to this problem as their power all acts through the same levers, hence the recurring patterns absolutely everywhere. Insofar as I can see, the answer has to come from us seizing back power to dissipate its concentrations throughout us as a whole, or these things are going to keep happening.