You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.
Is it really that the president is all that decides about the future of democracy itself? Is 53 out of 100 senate seats really enough to make country fall into authoritarian regime? Is the army really not constitutionally obliged to step in and save the day?
I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile.
How do you build a system that doesn’t depend on voters not being morons? Everything I can think of, up to and including full-on authoritarianism, has human shittiness as a glaring weak point. The founding fathers assumed that people would, for the most part, act in good faith, and it kept us going for a couple hundred years, but all that is starting to fall apart.
I am not arguing in favor of authoritarianism or against democracy, to be clear. Just saying there is an inherent risk that if you give the common people power, the common people might do something dumb with it. I’m not aware of a system that removes that risk without other considerable downsides. There are other democratic governments that have fewer structural issues than the US, but none of them prevent the whole “sometimes, voters are very dumb” thing.