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Dig in just a bit deeper here: These are people who live in New York, a state notorious for being unfailingly Democrat and also unfailingly conservative in its governance. The fact that some people have become disillusioned with elections that, their whole lives, have probably demonstrated very little change, is understandable and not a symptom of the average person somehow being simply inadequate for very basic tasks.
Mao was a radical democrat (lowercase d) and both the successes and failures of the Cultural Revolution are connected to that. Though there was direction from the top, ultimately the events that I assume you are referring to, like the Four Olds Campaign, were carried out on a grassroots basis by young activists, sometimes constructively and sometimes not. It was in many respects a battle of the progressive elements of society against the reactionary elements, one that the reactionary elements ultimately won by holding out until Their Guy took over the country, since the progressive or would-be-progressive forces were too disorganized in themselves to succeed at anything but being a force of chaos that gave reactionaries a solid causus belli for police crackdown.
At scale this was not at all Mao dictating his socialism to the common people and then beating it into them when they resisted (though some of his followers certainly did, and this mostly failed).
The Cultural Revolution is a very fraught topic, but you are doing Mao a disservice by essentially accusing him of "commandism", an error that he was very much against.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm