People have a limited capacity for thinking rationally, because by its very nature thinking rationally is slow, deliberate, and exhausting. It's a large reason why we need to have faith in our public institutions, because then we can offload that cognitive demand on agencies or experts that actually do know better, because even the most free-thinking individual isn't going to personally investigate every belief or position that they encounter. But between societies getting blase about their liberal democracies, the degradation in the quality of journalism, and the internet, etc, we're presented with a sort of wilderness of views that is only going to get more people experiencing failure in their rational capacities. These patterns are widespread so we can't expect the effect to be limited to the US.