The first person I know to move into all out right-wing radicalization was the father of a college friend of mine, in a medium-sized town in the Pacific Northwest. He lost his small business in the aftermath of 2008 and simultaneously developed a chronic pain problem that led to dependence on substances.
So this all contributed to his descent into the far-right internet, but the real tell was that he began to viscerally hate feminists while my friend's (non-white, came to the US barely speaking English) mother was rising pretty rapidly through the ranks of her civil service job, completely reversing their power dynamic. This was circa 2012-2014. The story ended pretty sadly - the dad ended up assaulting the mom, there was a divorce, ex-wife and kids went no-contact, and the dad joined the ranks of late middle aged white people outside of cities who are dying in much greater numbers than previous cohorts. My friend swears there were no signs of the person his dad eventually became while he was growing up.
I think my main take is that the GFC created a vast amount of grief and despair that fueled radicalization but how you radicalize depends on many other factors. If your previously unquestioned identity as the white male provider is destroyed, you swerve right. If you graduated from an elite college in 2009 and didn't get the place on the professional ladder you expected, you swerve left. I'm probably not the first person to make this point, but one of the things that really served Trump well is he harnessed this energy of being Angry All The Time by literally being angry all the time as a matter of lifestyle.
Also, I wonder how the decline of mainline religious communities tracks radicalization. Regardless of a lot of other factors religion can be really, really good for people who don't otherwise have a lot to orient their future around, or lack other means to find social connection, or get to adulthood without having learned how to behave pro-socially, and I think this benefit basically doubles for men.
2: And specifically how prosperity gospel churches interecat with the newly non-prosperous.
Evangelical religious communities haven't helped (loosely averaging all effects) I think. Don't know that the rapidly growing mormon church has either. I read about decent evangelicals, and I have worked with quiet faithful people who worship there who seemed fine, not making a blanket condemnation.
My kid has a mormon friend, nice guy. Their church requires missionary work right after HS. That basically a) makes non-mormon college much more difficult and b) means formative years spent in a hostile environment where your only community that doesn't laugh at you are your coreligionists. They're not allowed to talk to foreigners one-to-one just in case they start forming allegiances. Lubavitchers in the US also seem like they're not tuned into an especially positive frequency.
So sure, a positive neighborhood church or temple with reasonable leadership would be great, but maybe never that easy to find. The Trumpists I personally know on FB both profess religion, one genuinely (wealthy) and I don't know about the other (not poor, no recent disaster), whether it's performance or real. They didn't attack the Capitol though, which is the population Jensen's talking about in the OP.
I remember the Farm Aid years and how many of those guys who went broke radicalized. But there was no way they could easily connect to a national movement.
I follow the theory that loneliness feeds straight into radicalization.
My dad became a Fox News geezer at least partly out of resentment that we were right and he was wrong about what, in the 70s, he'd considered articles of faith about who could responsibly wield power and who wouldn't/couldn't. And about tax cuts, the Russians, the environment, immigration, racism, etc. My older brother the Trumper simply denies the existence of any contrary information, although my woke sister-in-law reminds him about reality daily. My Trumper sister pretty much insists that reality is limited to what she sees on cable TV, and her husband is more of a troll-Trumper. Lots of paths into the cult.
I'm so glad there isn't a single Republican in my close family.
I think Limbaugh and Murdoch contributed in a very real way to the declining life expectancy we're seeing among red state whites. Even if you're a normal person (e.g. not a narcissist and not especially committed to a certain worldview) it's impossible to mainline all the bigotry, cruelty, paranoia, and pure joylessness that came from this media for decades and not eventually turn it against your family and community and eventually yourself. See "the strong survive, the weak perish" messaging from the mayor of Colorado City to his own constituents. People are obviously going to turn to substances and cults like Qanon. It was pushed just as much as the Sacklers pushed oxycontin.
My gut reaction is that Jansen is overly optimistic in the quote after "more of an anomaly". I guess it depends on whether you view Trump and the modern GOP as unique, or a natural continuation of preexisting right-wing movements. The Republican Party and our country's political environment have sucked since Gingrich and Limbaugh, if not since Nixon, but is it a meaningfully different kind of suckiness pre- and post-2015? If I want to go back to before I was born and single out Nixon as the beginning of the end, or whatever, I'd have to admit that back then the Democrats still had a lot of Dixiecrats or his Southern Strategy wouldn't have made any sense, so both parties really were pretty bad.
Radicalization has been happening for a long time. Apropos the other thread Limbaugh was a major proponent of it. Republicans have been getting more radical for longer than I've been alive, and I'm not a young man anymore. Whats happening now is sorting. People saw the insurrection Jan 6, and sure more people are going to recoil than be attracted to that, but the ones who are attracted are going to be much more of a threat than all but a few people who were in the mob that day.