Not everyone in the crowd had the same motivations, obviously, as with any crowd. I suspect a significant percentage were decent people who for for various reasons (likely rooted in the suffering your parent mentions) had come to inhabit Trump's alternative facts universe, and truly believed they were doing what was necessary to uphold democracy. I also suspect a significant percentage were various white supremacists, authoritarians and anarchists. Most of them were/are deluded too, but that's orthogonal to the human decency dimension.