It’s an incredible cognitive disconnect

The very foundation of the western liberals ideology is that their countries are democratic. The more a country is different from them the less democratic they think it is. There's no disconnect because they never asked themselves what are the signs that "the people have power", and whether or not those signs can be seen elsewhere.

Basically they use the opposite of the scientific method. They think they know something in the first place so they twist the facts in order to confirm this a priori knowledge, instead of making hypothesis and observing to learn how their hypothesis confronts to observation.