It's almost like you need a strong constitution with heavy restrictions on what the government can do in order for democracy to not devolve into autocracy.
People are unwilling to oppose government control, and when they are they get crushed by outside forces. People in American continue to work for the government, it's even considered prestigious.
We can't even prosecute torture. People who believe in the government are dangerous idiots.
That might be true, but that's still my point-- it is to some extent democratic. If more people were genuinely and strongly opposed to torture, we'd be getting somewhere prosecuting it. I'd say a majority are weakly opposed and a minority are strongly opposed. If a majority or super-majority were strongly opposed something would be happening.
(Being weakly opposed is basically meaningless.)
In some ways all societies are democracies. A totalitarian society is where the majority either supports the totalitarian regime or at least doesn't dislike it enough to invest the energy and risk required to rebel against it. There's a minimum threshold of support that any regime must have in order to maintain control. At the very least you must have sufficient support among a society's wealthy and powerful (money), those who wield weapons (military and police), and those who control key infrastructure (operations). If those sectors of support fail, kings get deposed.
This is a really salient point and one that comes off as heresy to the standard conspiracy-esque narrative. The reality is that to some extent our slide into authoritarianism is democratic.
Look at the "Arab Spring" -- they got a little democracy and mostly elected totalitarian theocrats. In that case many people want totalitarian enforcement of social norms.
Another place you can see a strong preference for authoritarianism is at a local community level. Many people prefer communities with strong zoning regulations, regulations on the appearance of buildings, and (often indirect) mechanisms for excluding 'undesirable' residents. Without those things you get sprawling, ugly, and sometimes crime-ridden places that just don't feel safe and are not aesthetically appealing.
Yet another is the clear preference many people have for authoritarian computing platforms like iOS. It's the most restricted platform in the history of computing, yet it offers superior user experience and a lack of malware precisely for that reason. The fact is that there's classes of problems that can be easily and simply solved by authoritarianism that are not easily addressed in a freer society.