[DFHippie]

Really it's both. The leaders find stories the voters respond to, which gives them power. The leaders find and exploit a flaw in the voters which the voters are happy to expose.

The leaders should speak truth and act in the common interest. The voters should love the truth rather than lies, and should be mature enough to own their mistake rather than seek fairy tales in which their selfishness is good, even heroic.

Also, the voters in the US aren't uniquely bad. It's just that there's a deep cultural fissure in the US which is ripe for exploitation. It's easy to make the voters prefer punishing their neighbors over any other goal.