True. What's funny is that if you ask people how their individual circumstances are, they overwhelmingly answer "good and improving". But then you ask them about the state of the world and they answer "horrible and getting worse".

And of course politicians have also been at it for some time. See Adam Curtis's excellent The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.

https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares