What sort of liberal democracy are we talking about here? I would argue the core of a healthy liberal democracy is the opposite: a politically engaged and invested populace with a decent understanding of politics, who understand perfectly well that their political agency extends beyond popping into a voting booth every few years.
I think that would be the core of any healthy democracy.
The problem with liberal democracy (and in particular the kind of neoliberal democracy in the US) is that there's a giant elephant in the room which noone is supposed to notice or talk about, and that elephant is capitalism. Capitalism creates material inequality, but it also needs people not to ask too many questions about why there is material inequality. So what you end up with is a class system, and I mean that in the (extremely British) sense of
cultural classes rather than classes that are merely material.
The kind of people who end up suckered in by people like Trump aren't just politically uneducated, they don't want to be politically educated. They have (correctly) absorbed the idea that political education is not for people like them, and they've learned to take pride in being that kind of person because what else do they have? These are the kind of people who get irrationally angry about people doing "useless" degrees, because the ideology of (neoliberal) capitalism is that you should become more and more technically specialized. It is your job to accommodate yourself to the economic system you live in by becoming a better worker, and any difficulty you face in life is entirely due to your failure to do that. These are people who spent their lives trying to do that, and are proud of it.
That is why I don't think those people are capable of understanding what is screwing them over or why. They've staked their lives and their identities on their ability to accommodate themselves to capitalism, and now need to make the leap to understanding that it was all a lie and they were never going to be rewarded for that. Meanwhile, you've got Trump, who is basically a poor person's fantasy idea of what a rich person is like, telling them that he understands them and is on their side and wants to help them and he's totally going to fight all the bad people (the
elites, those weird overeducated people who have achieved ascendency and/or comfort within the system despite not perfectly accommodating themselves to capitalism) for them. I don't think it's weird that people fall for that.
I think what's going on here is that a properly functioning liberal democracy probably wouldn't have got to this point. It's not convenient for lots of powerful groups in a democracy to let the people really have their say, and I would argue that what we are looking at is the very deliberate attempt to suppress political thought and political activism in the populace, because they do not want the business of government properly scrutinised by the citizenry.
So, weird rabbit holes aside, I agree but I also don't think there's a clear line between what is deliberate in this case and what is just a feature of the way the social and political system is laid out. Part of that social system is that everyone does learn to identify themselves within interest groups based on how well they are doing within the current system. When you have people who are doing very well under the current system, and when the system is inherently competitive, it makes sense that those people are going to want to pull up the ladders up behind them, not just economically but also culturally.
