I've spent a lot of time researching and asking that same question, and I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of the answer: Corporate propaganda created in direct response to the civil rights movement which portrayed corporations as the victims of democracy, in order to frame their future attacks on democracy as defensive and justified actions.

SCOTUS deciding faceless and unaccountable corporations were people via Citizens United then helped turbo charge that shit into the dystopia we see before us today.

•Since 1975, nearly $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

•Perhaps the most important influence on the Koch brothers and their political activities has been a confidential memorandum submitted to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by Lewis F. Powell Jr. in 1971, before he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. Titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the memo presents the argument that a minority of college and university liberal faculty members and students, among others in society, were undermining the system of free enterprise. Supporters of free enterprise, Powell argued, must organize themselves to counter the influence of left-wing and liberal faculty members and students.

•The Heritage Foundation is a right-of-center policy think tank founded in 1973 that researches and recommends policies such as free markets, limited government, a strong national defense, and courts that adhere to the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution. The idea conceived in 1971 was presented to Coors Brewing Company president and right-of-center donor Joseph Coors in 1972, and Coors wrote out a $250,000 donation as the seed money for what became the Heritage Foundation (nearly $1.6 million in 2021 dollars). Feulner later said, “There wouldn’t be a Heritage Foundation without Joe Coors.”

While Feulner was focused on economic conservativism, the co-creator of Heritage, (Paul Weyrich, architect of the new right who coined the term "Moral Majority"), was obsessed with social conservativism, and used a similar strategy to create the social movement that convinces poor people to keep voting against their own interests and handing control to corporations and elite pedophiles by promising the eventual return of American society to a utopia that never actually existed:

•The radical aims of the New Christian Right have been obscured by the way they cultivated a shared identity of victimhood and manipulated the discourse about backlash to create a nostalgic idea of the past that they then leveraged to justify their right-wing policy goals. The Catholic-Protestant alliance constructed an imagined past that they projected into the future as their ideal vision of society. Ebin calls this strategy “prefigurative traditionalism”—a paradoxical prefiguring of a manufactured past. Using this tactic, the New Christian Right coalition disguised the radicality of its politics by framing their aims as reactionary and defensive rather than proactive and offensive.

Even before the civil rights movement it's important to remember that democracy in America has always been under constant attack by Oligarchs since the very beginning.

•America's Unending Struggle Between Oligarchy and Democracy: This is the argument presented in Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, How the South Won the Civil War. Throughout American history, she contends, the forces of oligarchy and democracy have been involved in a mortal struggle for the nation’s future, and she wants to show how the visions of oligarchy have often won out—how, in other words, we got from the era of emancipation and Confederate defeat to the presidency of Donald Trump.

Those who have always relied on propaganda to distract from their own injustices by placing the blame for the problems they have created, on people attempting to disturb what they view as a "natural order" that places them at the top of a heirarchy, resting on the shoulders of the remainder of society (mudsill theory).

•Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon. The term derives from a mudsill, the lowest threshold that supports the foundation for a building. Mudsill theory and similar rhetoric has been dubbed "the Marxism of the Master-Class" which fought for the rights of the propertied elite against what were perceived as threats from the abolitionists, lower classes and non-whites to gain higher standards of living.

When conservatives argue that the Constitution should be interpreted by its "original meaning," they are referring to an interpretation that favors this "natural heirarchy."

•Peter Thiel has been equally explicit. In a now-infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, he declared that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” But he’d made the point in far greater detail in an earlier essay on Strauss, in which he argued that elites must use “esoteric” doublespeak to hide their true intentions from the masses who wouldn’t and shouldn’t understand the plans their natural-born leaders were making for them.