Reddit mentions of Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (Chicago Studies in American Politics)

I'm going to skip over a lot of the specific examples you've presented because a) in the American context I don't think they are an accurate representation and b) in the comparative context I'm woefully ignorant. But in general I think you should check out Stealth Democracy by Hibbing and Theiss-Morris. It's central finding is that Americans claim to be small-d democratic but they underestimate how difficult governing actually is. They think the fact that things don't magically get done to match their preferences must be due to the incompetence/corruption of the elected representatives and so tend to favor empowering technocrats and businessmen instead of "career politicians."

You also seem to be overestimating how ideological the average person is. To be frank, most people don't think much about concepts like "democracy" and couldn't give you a particularly precise definition. So they're happy to say that they support democracy while also not having a clear view of what that entails (or, as a friend of mine likes to say: "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.") On this point you may want to check out Neither Liberal nor Conservative by Kinder and Kalmoe. Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels is another good read.

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>But unlike independents, moderates are more likely to be Democrats. The average moderate in the Voter Study Group data is solidly center-left on both economic and immigration issues. This, I think, has mostly to do with linguistic history: Republicans have long embraced the “conservative” label, but for decades Democrats ran away from the “liberal” label, leaving “moderate” as the only self-identification refuge for many Democrats. (Only recently has “liberal” again become a fashionable identification for the left.)
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>Consider the typical ideology survey question, which gives respondents three options: liberal, moderate or conservative. A voter who identifies as neither liberal nor conservative has only one other option: moderate. And moderate sounds like a good thing. Isn’t moderation a virtue?
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>As the political scientists Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe put it, after looking at five decades of public opinion research, “the moderate category seems less an ideological destination than a refuge for the innocent and the confused.”8 Similarly, political scientist David Broockman has also written about the meaninglessness of the “moderate” label, particularly as a predictor of centrism.
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>The takeaway is simple: As they must with independents, any pundit who talks about “moderates” as a key voting bloc begs that second follow-up question: Which moderates?9