Wealthy societies are like wealthy people: money makes people intellectually indolent and self-absorbed. Wealth infantilizes people. Sure, there are poor people in the USA and its total dysfunction leaves a significant percentage in danger, but most of the street people don't vote. Those who do vote are fabulously rich compared to how people lived 150 years ago, and compared to how people live in places like the Congo, Liberia, Venezuela, etc. And so, as baby-people, everyone wants free ice-cream forever and most definitely does not want to expend any effort, mental or physical. As lies are far easier to grasp than even the most basic aspects of complex reality, people vote for whoever proffers the most appealing lies. The most appealing lie of all is "it's not your fault, everything is the fault of other people, vote for me and you get all the free ice-cream you can eat, forever." As a compulsive liar who knows nothing and understands nothing, and as a person who thinks "strength" is bluster and treason, Trump is the ideal candidate. As Plato noted 2,400 years ago, democracy (and Athenian democracy was far better engineered than US democracy) always leads to tyranny because ordinary people will always in the end fall for a demagogue who promises easy answers to difficult questions. Our Western civilization was unique in all of human history and now we're returning to populist-induced tyranny, it's extremely unlikely that any similar rules-based quasi-egalitarian society will ever come into existence again. Now that we've returned to the 1930s but with far more dangerous weapons, the clock is ticking for our species.