It is as Aristotle said, the average person is a natural born slave (to their emotions, and thus to the rhetoriticians most skilled in changing them). That is why democracy always fails in the end. Americans just had such good geographic and historic luck to delay this reckoning by a century or two.

If you see politics through this lens then the 'democratic backsliding' that has been universal across the world for the past two decades is entirely unsurprising.

Vae Victus.