Most elites and journalists who trot out this line are fully aware it is false. Their motives vary: will to power, protecting their status or their demographic group, etc. I don't believe the average lib is lying when they express their fear of Trump, though. To truly lie they would have to understand the system enough to know the part or the whole of their claim is false, and most of them do not.

I believe the mind of a lib is relatively comfortable with their place in the status quo - on a level akin to subsistence. They like to bitch about the problems in their life, especially if they can tie them to the right wing, but overall they can effectively satiate their day-to-day needs with drugs, social media, hookups, porn, consumerism, food, or whatever. This is true all the way from living in a safe middle-class neighborhood to living tranny life on the street. Maybe they're Antifa living out of a van, but at least they got their drugs and their furry porn. Maybe their kid's necromorph phase isn't working out and he's suicidal, but the family gets a lot of love on social media. Maybe inflation is blowing up the food bill - but there's always Netflix and credit card debt. They're vaguely conscious things aren't heading in a good direction, but they're always able to get to their crutches.

The lib, on some level, is OK living with hardship, self-injury, and filth, as long as he has his vices. Harvey Milk was fine with STDs as long as he could help himself to twinks. MLK Jr. could live with threats to his life as long as he had his orgy and rape parties. The average Dem voter recapitulates this pathology on a less dramatic level.

This is bread and circuses, but not textbook. Most Americans and Westerners are hurting, but some people are more or less fine with their current level of pain.

These people never needed or wanted to learn about our system. They never investigated whether Trump is Hitler, not because they lack the intelligence but because it's simply not important to them. They have gone along to get along and found their own personal lines of dopamine supply within the cultural forces imposed on us. If the tides rise in that direction, then so much the better. What is that going to change? The real problem is the reversal of the tides, which would leave them stranded. If the media says that someone is threatening to upset the status quo, then that person is rejected. It's the instinctive choice - it's mentally easy.

Right wing people are affected in the same way by the same forces, but they have something that libs don't: the sense or the impression or the memory of something in the past greater than what we have now, whether that goes back to the 1990s or ultimately to the Garden of Eden. This urge compels a person to stand against the tide, or at least ask where it is going. If libs look ahead, they look sightlessly to a utopia that never existed, while right wingers look to monuments far taller than themselves.