why literally none of these people should be trusted
I don’t advocate for trusting them, I advocate for understanding what their interests and motivations are. Trump is a narcissist, who cares more about flattery and image and power than anything else. It’s why he is much more dangerous than others who are just in love with money, and don’t want to risk their positions actually trying to seize power.
I also believe many Democrats would end democracy if given the chance, whether out of a belief that it’s too dangerous to allow voters to potentially elect people like Trump, or even just to make sure voters can’t replace them with progressives. The important thing is that neither of those groups has the opportunity, normally (we’ll leave aside SuperPACs, unbalanced primary qualification rules, etc).
Trump will (as he did) create the opportunity. He put himself under a great deal of risk in the process, because in his narcissistic mind he is always correct, and should always get what he wants, and that overrules the danger. It’s the reason that despite many of our politicians wanting to be totalitarian rulers, only one of them truly attempted it.
so the ones who are most open and unelectable should be elevated
This is a very dangerous misunderstanding of how populism works. Populist leaders are the ones who seem most relatable to the average person. As where ‘career’ politicians are circumspect, populists are very much open and ‘honest’, which makes them feel very relatable. They can afford to be unattractive and crass, because that feels very relatable. They can afford to be ‘unpresidential’.
Elevating a populist just makes them more popular.
Not one person on Earth would raid the capital building for Jeb Bush.
Not one person in a million years, not even if you paid them. But Trump? 3,000 dumbasses will do it and post it on their Tinder profiles.
treating them as banal when by your analysis they aren’t
They (antidemocratic politicians) are banal. No government that allows people to choose to run for positions of power will ever not be primarily populated by people who, ipso facto, desire that power (and no one who desires power is actually totally okay with losing it at the whim of voters). True “public servants” are few and far between, and often get corrupted by the system after taking office.
In regards to political violence against the government, it only took 85 years for the US to have a Civil War, and another 155 for a coup. In between, we had four successful presidential assassinations (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy). That means that in just 248 years, we’ve had 6 attempts to violently remove the President. That’s averaging one every 41.3 years. And that’s not even counting failed assassination attempts; that would drop it closer to1-in-20 years. That’s not to excuse that violence, it is to say that it’s not abnormal for our system.
We’re not living under a stable (or least, peaceful) system of government.