Governors from the Democratic Party have vetoed bills in California and Maine that would have permitted farm workers to unionize.

(satire) *Man Tries To Regain Sense Of Control In Chaotic Universe By Learning To Juggle.*

Republicans are passing state laws to give themselves excuses to arbitrarily overturn elections for partisan motives.

Their planned elimination of democracy, followed by repression, could be lawful in a superficial sense. However, it would result in a blatantly undemocratic, thus blatantly illegitimate government.

No one knows how to make an institution that can adapt to all possible future situations without falling into a trap that perverts it into something worthless. But I did not expect to see that during my lifetime.

The United States had never implemented democracy and human rights fully and properly; there have been struggles over this through its whole history. But at least it provided a framework for that struggle, within which progress and victory were possible. If that is lost, where will it be possible to imagine victory? We may have a world in which all the pressing struggles are between one disgusting illegitimate regime and another. Will it be worth fighting for the US to prevent China's world domination if the US has become almost as repressive as China?

In that, in which the demand for democracy and human rights is seen as a distraction, one that people are permitted to talk about with some nostalgia only because that talk can have no consequences. In a few decades, what is now the United States may be split into dozens of little absolutist regimes that fight over whatever fragments of technology can still be used, and people will hardly remember what human rights once meant.

vast store of personal data that it has been found to have amassed unlawfully by the bloc’s data protection watchdog.*

To defend democracy requires anonymity. So the next challenge is to limit what data that agency, and other "security" agencies, can collect in the first place. Also what data businesses can collect.

*Bolsonaro Gave Brazil's Army New [Political] Powers. The Generals Won't Give Them Up Easily.*