Our entire civilization has always rested on a tacit "it's nice to have civilization, so we play by the rules" by everybody involved. Voluntary restraint is what keeps us from being animals, not nature or laws.

As Hobbes wrote so eloquently, we keep that compact because the alternative is "continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"

We're currently exploring how many of those rules are really necessary, and, as a society, have decided to mostly shrug off that exploration.

That is the part that's changed. A willingness to ignore the rules by some, and a collective shrug by most.

I think it's partly the way the US state is set up. When the president picks the Supreme Court judges and they have lifetime appointments you don't truly have separation of powers. Then the whole thing is meaningless. When you have "liberal" and "conservative" courts based on the make up of the judges you need to start again.