I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy — death by a thousand papercuts — will be lead to catastrophic tipping points.
As a ChemEng, I can't help but compare the current coordinated attack on the democratic rule of governments worldwide to having multiple batches of emulsions undergoing phase-inversion [0]: only so much fascism can be added before things collapse into a greasy turd.
That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to. I would argue that the root cause of the sad state of democracies is the fact that we were coaxed into a snafu by virtue of accepting the false equivalence of capitalism and democracy: the first does not warrant the other; in fact they are most times at odds.
I am also reminded of the Behind the Bastards podcast and their episodes on Adolf Eichmann's careerist pursuit enabling the Holocaust... leading me to wonder how many people are burning the world down as part of a KPI... Or, in other words, are our economic systems and forms of government vulnerable to the paperclip problem?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_inversion_(chemistry)#In...
>I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy
I'm not a fan of democracy. You wouldn't be either, if you thought about it for very long... you just can't help yourself, it was championed as some sort of virtue ever since you were old enough to realize that governments existed. From kindergarten or pre-k.
The things you'd claim you like about democracy aren't even things that make it a democracy. The one (and only) criterion of democracy is "can you vote". And there are better ways to get all the other things than voting... voting/people do not scale. It is the undoing of democracy, people get what they deserve from it. Good and hard.
>That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to.
It does not scale. You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger, true "the beatings will continue until morale improves" style. If I can figure out how to strike out on my own and be a million miles away from you when you rally for your most ambitious attempt yet, that's what I will do.
> It does not scale. It scales pretty well; but we have let our guard down and naïvely thought the problems would sort themselves out by virtue of voting. We "live in a society", that means casting a vote on a paper ballot won't make the farmer understand the downstream effects of fertilizer runoff, nor the impact to communities of a CEO outsourcing away jobs. We can't go about living our lives without trying to meet each other halfway. And we won't survive without finding a way to make being nice to each other mandatory.
> You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger [...]
On the contrary, I'm trying to prevent it from getting smaller. And, even better, to improve on it (we're a community of hackers and tinkerers after all, right?)!
We are all much more vulnerable to autocratic regimes nowadays due to the erosion of privacy rights and deregulation (again, the threat of instrumental convergence — the paperclip problem — threatens the fabric of society: censorship in the name of advertising-friendly content, spying in the name of targeted advertisement, and the weaponization of targeted ads and "the algorithm" propping up foreign-state-funded populists/autocrats).
Defining something in the negative is always tricky. What are some better designs, or design principles?
Sortition. If no one can vote, then there can't be any of the chicanery that comes from that. Political parties couldn't exist, because a party can't help someone get elected. We no longer have the problem of the only people in office being those who wanted to be in office enough to go to the trouble. No need for term limits (people are unlikely to win office twice, let alone more often).
And yet it preserves everything you like about democracy.
I get the impression myself that no singular approach is perfect. They've all been tried and all have flaws. That and different functions of government might actually benefit from different methods.
This is why most practical real world systems tend to be a hybrid of several different designs.
Eg... the US constitution gives us Direct elections (congress) , indirect elections (president via electors, though that has been somewhat undermined), Sortition (juries), lifetime appointment (judges), appointment based on merit (civil service), and probably a few more that I've missed. One can even argue -if one would like to try- that separation of powers counts as anarchistic (certainly it is anti-archon).