I'm firmly in line with Obama, Hillary, and the best of our leaders that our democratic government principles and institutions must be protected. As always, we are the protectors. Unlike our opponents on our right and left, we don't have the freedom of action, the ability to just abandon the very principles we're fighting for in order to win.
People are not uneducated with regards to their rights. Democracy's eternal problem is that the better part of any people doesn't really believe all those rights are good for society. This is basic stuff, pol sci 101: not all people are suited by nature for democracy. Conservatives have a darker view of human nature. They tend to believe that people will behave badly whenever they're not compelled to behave well, and thus that some degree of authoritarianism in government is desirable. They look around and see proof of this everywhere.
And what they see these days makes them behave even more conservatively. Most of us don't do change all that well, and we're in an era of runaway change and enormous uncertainty about the future and they're absolutely terrible at it. We need to face these changes bravely and competently, but they can't. The more conservative, the more fearful, the less generous and caring, and the more aggressively hostile toward others (including Democrats). And the more their perceived need for a "strong man" to lead them to safety.
Fascism is a bad word in the minds of millions, but (here's where that ignorance comes in) not necessarily fascism itself. They don't want a bad government, of course, but this is hardly the first time in history people defiantly chose a disastrously bad, authoritarian leader to defeat the other party. Today's Republican leadership is nothing but unprincipled, win at any costs "spine."
The huge flaw to any representative republic that our founding fathers understood perfectly well: the choices a free electorate will make.
"Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
The response is attributed to Benjamin Franklin—at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation—in the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention.
We're the keepers. We're not weak or stupid, but we are living in an era when democracy in many nations is losing ground to the forces of fear and authoritarianism and especially to the greed and power of unimaginable new wealth concentrated in a few hands.
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