Pretty simple. Old people talk about the "American Experiment" as if it were an irreproachable success, young people realize the results are mixed and there's no obvious way out. Authoritarians are therefore able to exploit this easier than any other alternative.

Mounk is right about the necessity for technocracy, but he frames it as if it must live within today's broken representative democracy. I propose we do away with general representatives completely. They made sense before the telegraph, and I guess at hyper local levels. We should elect cabinet-level officials directly and individually grant them domain authority based on direct democratic vote. Or something similar to this.

Portland has a city commissioner government, where commissioners are elected at large and then assigned by the mayor to specific domains which they may or may not be expert in, and may or may not have campaigned for. Completely backwards.

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