2/ the fall of the soviet union - theories abound:
- it was bankrupted by Star Wars
- it became too corrupt & incompetent to go on
- the people woke up and threw off the yoke of tyranny
bollocks.
it was the elites.
3/ early on in the soviet revolution they killed off nearly all of the elites - art, academia, military, science, management.
excepted were only the high-IQ, middle class "elites" at the extreme top of the bolshevik faction.
other than that, the USSR was bereft of the elites.
2/ the political alignments aren't shifting, because the current ones did *exactly* what the established wanted: they kept the establishment in power; Reps as "spicy opposition"; DSA as "far left bogeyman"; Dems as "moderates in between".
3/ the economics point is a bit subtler:
- there is no need to *publicly* punish or shame anybody, because no group has been *officially* blamed for the economic meltdown
- no major economic players enter or leave the political scene (only the small & medium businesses)