WARNING: this debate attacks American democracy and suggests it to be "soft despotism". This shouldn't be taken personally. Before arguing, I strongly suggest to look up Alexis de Toqueville and his essai Democracy in America. It is originally written in french but there are translations:
Thus, After having thus successively taken each member of the
community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme
power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the
surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and
uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic
characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is
not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by
it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power
does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but
it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till
each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and
industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and
gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily
than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and
that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty
of the people.
Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting
passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they
cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary
propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a
sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the
people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular
sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for
being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own
guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings,
because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the
people at large who hold the end of his chain.
By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just
long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A
great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort
of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of
the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of
individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the
nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to
obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. I
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