Culture, movements, propaganda, all odd and complex things. Seeing how things have changed in the last 30+ years in the US (since that’s what I know) and especially the last 10, and how that all came about, gives me a very different perspective about the directions various countries take and how the populous is led there gradually.

I’ve been to Moscow briefly. I know the people there are just people like anywhere. But their reality, like mine, is shaped by information available, the culture, the history.

Rise of right wing craziness to mainstream in USA via right wing media has been a targeted project for the last 40+ years following Watergate. Only now do we see those plans come to fruition in the form of judicial takeover and extreme divisiveness among the populace. As educational institutions continue to be eroded, underfunded, demonized, and subverted there will come a time when the majority of the population gladly accepts its strong man and relinquishes the rest of its freedoms with a smile.

They have returned to nature and now run in wild packs on the Kazakh steppes.

There’s some amount of nuance to both I think. For America, Trump actually had less popular support for both elections he ran in. For Biden v Trump, he not only lost the electoral college but also got something like 10 million fewer votes, which is a blowout result for an election in a 2-party nation. For Hillary v Trump, he lost by a few million but was more strategic with the states he appealed to, winning several Rust Belt states by fairly thin margins. For Russia, polling works a bit differently in a dictatorship vs. a democracy. In a democracy, even if everyone hates the current leader the idea that people can vote them out often brings contentment, so a democracy can chug along with low approval. In a dictatorship, the dictator can’t be voted out and will often use fear to gain support, so they tend to poll highly because the people doing well love them and the people doing poorly are too afraid to say their feelings on the matter on government record. However, this means that if polling falls low that there are either fairly few people doing well or they no longer attribute their well-being to the state and that the people doing poorly are either bold or desperate enough to push through fear. This is extremely bad news for a dictator and may signal an impending change in leadership. With all that in mind, stable dictators like Kim Jun Un and President Xi Jinping poll very highly even during times of hardship, and Putin’s poll numbers falling to levels that would seem fine in a democratic nation could be dire news for his state.

As you imply, it’s possible for someone to come into power by winning elections, and then become a dictator by breaking the democratic process, ending free & fair elections, criminalizing opposition parties, destroying independent judiciary so that dictatorial actions cannot be reviewed in court, etc.

There are plenty of examples of this in today’s international fascist movement.