I’m reminded of an old essay from Siskind that tried to break down the different approaches to disagreement as either “conflict theory” - different people want different, mutually incompatible things - and “mistake theory” where we all want the same basic thing but disagree about how to get it. Given the general silicon valley milieu’s (and YudRat’s specifically) affinity for “mistake theory” I think the susceptibility to authoritarianism and fascism fits remarkably well. After all, if we all want the same basic thing the only way the autocrat could do something we don’t like is if they were wrong, so we just have to get a reasonable enough autocrat and give them absolute power, at which point they can magically solve all problems. See also the singularity God AI nonsense.

If I had my wish, it would be that this doesn’t just remind people of how authoritarians can be/are evil or incompetent, but also that the general structure isn’t actually more “efficient” because whatever delays the democratic process introduces are dwarfed by the inevitable difficulties of just trying to do anything at the scale of any modern state, much less the sheer scale of the USA.