I think journalists are just good at finding crackpots that make for good OpEd anecdotes. I'm not denying that Yanks are by are large extremely stupid, but as much as we gone on about people having incoherent politics, it's been my experience that most people do have a somewhat consistent worldview informing their political decisions, they just either have weird values, horrid analysis, or both.

Like surveying the people I work with, who are on a spectrum of MAGA Chud to Bernie Bro, most can articulate some vague set of values that are mostly consistent, but they suck at actually assessing anything materially and just assume things are happening either randomly or because of malicious actors in high place. I don't wear my politics on my sleeve at work, but what's weird is when I actually offer them some kind of economic or geopolitical analysis on why something is happening, they all seem to think I'm the smarter boy on planet earth cuz they "didn't think that may". But if I ever said "Marx" much less "Lenin" they'd tar and feather me so I guess occasionally dumbfounding them is the best I got