A lot of the talk about protecting democracy was coming from the Democrats and the mainstream media, the ones who paved the way for Trump to win twice. Most Americans don't know what democracy is.

And a lot of them want fascism tbh

This goes back to C Wright Mills' "Power elite." We've grown up thinking we had choices on who we picked to lead us, but really it was all the same people in different costumes with different names. Now being in a non-representative democracy is biting us.