> "For example, in December 2020, Tillis introduced legislation to make it a felony to run a pirate streaming site. Just two weeks later, the proposal was attached to the massive 5,600-page, $900 billion COVID spending bill. As a result, Tillis' bill became law before most lawmakers—to say nothing of the general public—had time to read it."
Is it just me, or democracies have been flirting quite often with authoritarianism? Canada, for example, has been taking some worrisome measures recently. Now US is following suit, although in a much smaller scale.
Democracy- straight democracy- is a terrible way to avoid authoritarianism. So long as a majority agrees, anything goes.
Un-democratic checks are required in any such system to prevent a tyranny of the majority. Unelected judges, co-equal to but with different powers than a legislative or executive body, are one such example.
There's not a perfect system yet, because at the end of the day, it's always just a bunch of imperfect people in a shared imaginary game. I'm not holding my breath for technology to save us either, because I don't imagine any AI will do a better job- it'll have to be trained on human interpretations of that imaginary playground, after all.
Is it just me, or democracies have been flirting quite often with authoritarianism? Canada, for example, has been taking some worrisome measures recently. Now US is following suit, although in a much smaller scale.