The counterculture of the 1960s-70s was a major incubator for magical thinking and pseudoscience in the United States, yet the national angst over civil rights and Vietnam could not be compared to the general social/governmental implosion that took place during late 19th century China and lead to the Boxers. (Also compare other apocalyptic cult uprisings such as the somewhat similar but earlier Ghost Dance movement among Native American Indians and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom before that.) So where were all the foreign gunboats on the Mississippi in 1970? When did Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap invade US soil? Massive Mormon (Islamic for the Qing) and People's Temple (Taiping for Qing) uprisings killing millions of Americans and devastating the US industrial heartland?

Furthermore, both Trump and Oprah rose to fame during the 1980s-1990s, which were les socially divided and more economically prosperous for regular people than nowadays. If your distress thesis was correct there would have been an American Falungong during the Great Depression or Civil War, both of which were far more destructive to the United States than the current situation. Granted, the examples you cited were violent large-scale uprisings and the author's focus was more on general cultural aspects in American society, but America was still better in the 1980s than now.