I know I've seen some articles on this but I can't seem to find them again. There were studies done where they asked self identified right wing people to agree or disagree with political statements.
People were very likely to disagree with a statement like "I support universal healthcare", but very likely to agree with statements like "I support laws which would ensure no taxpayer would enter into medical debt for obtaining necessary medical care". Essentially, if you just described socialist ideology, without using the common words for it, a large amount of right wing people completely agreed with it.
This has been my anecdotal experience as well. Most of the time when I ask my Republican friends their opinions on specific policies I find that their views are very populist leaning toward socialist. They just happen to also be motivated by fear and easily swayed by propaganda and will readily vote against their own interests in exchange for a false sense of security.
They are then confused and frustrated when the scumbags they voted for do exactly what they said they would do and it turns out badly.
I've noticed the same in conversations. When I talk about socialist theory, people agree 100%, but as soon as you say a buzz word it's, "Now I don't want full socialism!"
Yes. The difference is that its corporations doing the the majority of the propagandizing rather than the government directly. But propaganda is propaganda.
That's authoritarianism. You don't see the CCP edging closer to a civil war based on propagated polarising. AFAIK, that's never been achieved in human history. I'm sure it's unlikely to happen, but between all the international targeting from Russia, China, etc. and then the US's own media and governments, the US is soaked in propaganda more than anywhere else. Absolutely surrounded by it.
But this is the interesting part. The more someone is propagated, the less likely they are to realise it.
America doesn't even need to do that. It just convinces people to not trust anything that doesn't come from pre-approved sources and that works well enough.