How did we end up here?

 What could be more non-partisan than wearing face masks in public during a pandemic caused by an airborne virus?

Yet, in the US of A, this has become a marker of partisanship, with none less than the POTUS mocking the use of face masks.

Then see the clip here on the Ari Melber show on MSNBC, of Michael Moore (extremely left) and Michael Moore (former chairman of the Republican National Committee).  At around 2:30 in the video they go through a catalog of issues on which they agree - equal pay for women, climate change, a living minimum wage,...  Incidentally, public opinion poll after poll suggests that more than a two-thirds majority of Americans want action on all of these issues.

So my thought is that just like with the face masks, these issues have been made partisan, precisely to block them.  Murdoch and Koch blow the partisan trumpets a bit, Trump and the easy-to-purchase-in-small-states Senators pick it up -- it used to be the Tea Party in Congress too -- and suddenly what is a non-partisan issue becomes solely a "progressive" or Democratic one.  And now the forty percent who are out to "own the libs" will oppose it with every last MAGA and poster they've got.