I would disagree. Those are obvious and existential enemies. I received a masters degree in history and initially intended an academic avocation- pay was the primary reason I no longer work in that field but politics were a close second. Academic institutions, the educational industry, those are clear enemies- people titularly on “our side” such as you Slava Ukraine propagandists, the same as most of the institutional GOP, are the near enemy- the real enemy, suborning good intentions and real efforts for reform. You lot are the cancer within.
The tide of corruption flows down from your universities, directly into the schools, and from there into everything. That is the reason all your institutions are corrupted, because their personnel have been corrupted.
Your upper class has developed a hatred for the American people and their historical heritage. And the hatred is returned, vigorously. This is culture, the worldview, not interests or politics.
That is why you have split into two peoples, ready to war with each other. Thats why your institutions are universally distrusted. That is why even obvious and necessary policies like supporting Ukraine, which would have been obvious and “conservative” in better times, have become political footballs, without regard to the actual issues, interests and principals (like the Ukrainians) in the conflict.
Politics, and policy, are downstream of culture.
The place to fix it is where it starts.
I still do my small bit, what Ive done for decades, financing Catholic parochial schools in the San Francisco archdiocese.
Ponder this fascinating article:
An existential function of ‘enemyship’: evidence that people attribute influence to personal and political enemies to compensate for threats to control”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20175623/
“Perceiving oneself as having powerful enemies, although superficially disagreeable, may serve an important psychological function. On the basis of E. Becker’s (1969) existential theorizing, the authors argue that people attribute exaggerated influence to enemies as a means of compensating for perceptions of reduced control over their environment.
In Study 1, individuals dispositionally low in perceived control responded to a reminder of external hazards by attributing more influence to a personal enemy.
In Study 2, a situational threat to control over external hazard strengthened participants’ belief in the conspiratorial power of a political enemy. Examining moderators and outcomes of this process,
Study 3 showed that participants were especially likely to attribute influence over life events to an enemy when the broader social system appeared disordered, and
Study 4 showed that perceiving an ambiguously powerful enemy under conditions of control threat decreased perceptions of external risk and bolstered feelings of personal control.”