How indeed did we get here?

Vivian Gornick writes in the NY Review of Books:

The morning after Donald Trump’s election, everyone who had not voted for him probably woke up thinking, “How did we get here?” Nearly four years later, even when we ask it rhetorically, we are still marveling over the question, for which no satisfying answer has ever been found. How indeed did we get here?

She blames Phyllis Schlafly and her followers.

Pretty soon many of us began to realize that the gulf between the women’s movement and Schlafly’s followers not only wasn’t going to narrow, it was going to grow steadily wider; ...

Still, it was not until Donald Trump became president that I could even imagine American democracy self-destructing. Now it seems a distinct possibility.

She says that she is depressed about the influence of conservatives.