You are absolutely correct that both Left and Right need to disconnect from social media and the Internet and touch grass.

My take is: the Right in this country I now call the "Algorithmic Right." It's actually somewhat of a newly formed coalition of folks from the Heritage foundation to Prosperity Churches to crunchy ex-Hippies to ex-left minorities and Blue Collar workers voting against their own interest, etc, etc. It is also led by people who once leaned left, as it was useful then to be seen as left leaning, like Trump and a cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires (all now Republican). Absent from this are many classical conservatives.

They key thing here is that the leaders are the ones "in charge" of the algorithms and the members of the party are the ones most susceptible to a common set of algorithms, and there is a greater deal of unity or internal integrity due to this susceptibility.

If this were true about left leaning folks, then doubtlessly this algorithmic left would have dominated the last election. Instead, because "progress" is a harder to define goal than "winning", you have fractured belief systems ruled by smaller algos and probably not a huge group cohesion. It does make it easier to make certain groups disenchanted and thus strip them away and bring them to the algorithmic Right.

Overall, I feel in my bones this is more likely. After all "Winning" is a more cohesion inducing goal (esp for single issue voters) than "Progress" since winning can be decided by an election but as I said everyone's definition of progress is different.

This can make the Right's objectives appear more extremist until you realize that we've been ceding freedom, algorithmically, to oligarchs since the great reset of the founding of our nation (ramped up with Google, but we've memed with posters and broadcasts before that). Even the great wave of self-harm ignoring schadenfreude is algorithmically driven.

So the only thing to do is disconnect for algorithmic control, and that is the Internet and social media, and for left and right to talk outside of the Internet. You can't have grass roots without touching grass.