News.

Statistical says: "You could propose a bill which rounded up 20% of the population for orderly extermination. As long as the bill's title had something about stopping sex trafficking, protecting children, or catching terrorists it would pass 531 to 4."

It's worse than that, though.  Three of the four people voting against it would be Republicans who were hoping for 25%.

I'm not persuaded democracy has a future.  But in order to believe that, since I don't believe humanity has all of a sudden has gotten worse, I have to re-evaluate democracy's past, and it doesn't have much of that, either.  The reality has always fallen short of the ideals - not just "fallen short", really, because that suggests a remediable error, but fallen so far short as to make a mockery of the pretense.

In America right now, lobbyists are America's eunuch class - but they, I don't think, are the root cause.  The root cause is, I repeat this a lot, but the root cause is that democracy is built on Enlightenment ideals of rational self-interest which are found in humans only in certain exceptional circumstances (not people, mind you - circumstances).

The past several decades have seen the failure, destruction, or outright subversion of most of democratic society's social control mechanisms, the elaborate unwritten series of checks and balances that prevent us from indulging our ever-present hatred and blood-lust.  A new set of rules is, at some point, inevitable, but is unlikely to favor democratic norms.

In the meantime, while I continue to vote, I consider democracy at this point to be little more than an elaborate pantomime with typically tragic real-world consequences.  The entire institution is so clearly and obviously moribund and incompetent, and yet they retain the power to destroy millions of lives at will - "promoting the general welfare" is right out with an institution so far gone.