The Anglo-Protestant WASP, Eastern Seaboard elite lead the way downward. Sometime after WW2 they decided to pursue the path of material pleasures and moral degeneracy over other considerations. This set a bad example which others emulated.
It's not all their fault but much can laid at their doorstep. Just look how long they've been unthinkingly & lazily been endowing the best universities without insisting on fair and balanced curriculum and faculties. Harvard Yale etc. on down the line. The WASP elite abdicated.
Actually I would set the date back for that to the inter-war period with the locus being in the 1920s. It is interesting to note however that Teddy Roosevelt remarked on this growing tendency at the turn of the century.
It is the typical case of commanding power without seeking responsibility for it. Paradoxically, democracy requires a elite - it just requires one that also a moral elites. Ironically, the hectoring, self-righteous, PC mobs are just imitating to old 19th Century WASP elite but without and real moral understanding underpinning there posturings.