My primary argument against this line of thinking is that credulity and fascism are nothing new.

Sightings of UFOs went up right as sightings of angels and ghosts went down. Stuff we don't understand is always going to be magic, and the "skeptics" that adhere to a strictly scientific viewpoint have simply substituted one religious following for another. We'd like to believe that rationality is self-derived but for the most part it's just another kind of dogma. Can that dogma be derived from first principles? Sure. Do more than a tenth of the people ascribing to that dogma understand what first principles are, let alone have the capacity to derive their beliefs themselves?

The principle problem is that the two political parties of the United States were formerly aligned over all but economics and are now divided largely by wedge issues. The resolution of this problem is that the parties differed over economics due to economics being the thing citizens care about the most - the two things that got Trump elected were (1) Immigrants are gonna take my job (see: NAFTA) (2) inflation has destroyed me purchasing power. All the Jan6 nazi-ism is a sideshow but it's a sideshow that allows a bunch of unprincipled ideologues to break democracy. Kinda like how they did during the Red Scare.