You also have to add in the fact that the USA's system of 'checks and balances' via different branches of government constantly blocking eachother from doing an

You also have to add in the fact that the USA's system of 'checks and balances' via different branches of government constantly blocking eachother from doing anything, and the Electoral College system of assigning votes and enforcing a 2-party system also contribute hugely to anti-democratic sentiment. Americans feel (somewhat rightly) that their democracy isn't responsive enough, and even if it was more responsive, they feel it doesn't represent them. Many of them seem to think the only way to fix this is to have a king. _____ To connect this back to HackerNews relevant discussion, I feel there's a bit of an "innovators dilemma" at play with democracies. The democracies which developed the earliest have some design flaws baked very deeply into their mechanics that later democracies recognized as problems and were able to avoid. But in older democracies, there's too many entrenched interests against fixing these problems so they keep ancient design flaws even when everyone knows they're counterproductive (and in the present case, perhaps even fatal)