This may have just been in the communities I visit but in the after-math there was a lot of people who expressed regret at their extreme reaction, which makes me think that the "spiral of silence"¹ may have also played its part.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence

Great reference, I hadn't heard of this before. Thanks for the link!

Yes, the government's implementors were rabidly anti-democracy. Which is is what we'd expect from some rich slaveowning elites, who looked down aristocratically on their fellow countrypeople as "the mob". John Adams wrote:

"if we take into the account the women and children, or even if we leave them out of the question, a great majority of every nation is wholly destitute of property, except a small quantity of clothes, and a few trifles of other movables. [...] if all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have? [...] the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted."

This is the "tyranny of democracy" they feared, an Orwellian notion. I recommend Graeber's "The Democracy Project". He was one of the many Occupy founders, and is every bit as "American" as any of these government guys.