re: #300 Romantic Heretic

When a democracy gets to that point it will stop being a democracy. The majority will make sure all opposition to it is crushed.

Humans may talk about freedom and democracy, but they much prefer power and autocracy.

Coming back to this and have to say I disagree inasmuch as I think conflating democracy with freedom is the key error. It’s the American fetishization of freedom and myth making around our own history that tells us to think of the two terms as somehow intrinsically linked but in reality it’s a No True Scotsman situation. Nothing about democracy per se protects freedom except theoretically for the freedom to vote, after that democracy gets to wash its hands of the consequences and it’s only the finite inertia of norms and structural legal protections that stand in the way. Or, like Tom Lehrer sang, “Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down, that’s not my department says Wernher Von Braun”