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They clearly don’t believe in democracy, in fact they’re frightened by it.
I don't believe that.
I believe that the followers of Trump started off being a bit frustrated that they see their ideas being implemented less and less in the national stage. They felt like their voices aren't being heard. And while I think that is wrong - their voices ARE heard and they are just a minority of the voices on a national basis - it can certainly FEEL like their voices aren't heard.
That frustration met up with a serial liar in Trump, who was willing to play off their frustrations and tell them some lies to fashion himself as the "champion of the little guy". The problem came when Trump started committing crimes (or perhaps continued committing them, just on a larger stage). As a well-known, but still small time real estate developer, he was able to use his inherited fortune to get away with most of his crimes. Once he became President, those crimes become fair game for his political opponents and started getting closer scrutiny - scrutiny that a President cannot avoid. But by the time those opponents could properly develop their cases, Trump had quite literally become a cult icon. He told so many lies, and got those lies to be echoed around both a corner of the traditional media as well as on social media, that those lies became Truth to his followers. We all know the story from there.
The big problem with the lies is that they basically painted a story that their base frustrations came not from being a minority, but because democracy itself was broken. He fabricated lies about voting processes to cast doubt on the basics of democracy and secure his place as a leader. To cement his power, he convinced his followers that their problems were due to faults in the democratic process. That also lets them rationalize their embrace of autocracy - they became the majority in their own eyes, and the autocrats are doing nothing more than fixing the errors that democracy was making. After all, if you are a majority, you should be winning elections and seeing your policies enacted on a national level.
So deep down, I think that the rank and file conservatives/right wing/Republican/MAGA folks really DO believe in democracy. They've just accepted two basic lies that sound good to anyone in a minority - that you're not really a minority and that we (as in the leaders tickling their ears) can fix this injustice by dispensing with a few democratic process that are "broken".
--Peter
