Your blog post parallels ideas that I’ve been musing about myself. An artist I know turned my thoughts on democracy into a comic, the second one of the set here. And my pet hard-SF setting assumes much of what you describe at the end of your post—remote-controlled infantry allowing the powers-that-be to ignore popular disapproval (including having put down the ‘Blue Revolution’ across most of the planet), leading to an oligarchy in fact if not in name.
Your blog post parallels ideas that I’ve been musing about myself. An artist I know turned my thoughts on democracy into a comic, the second one of the set here. And my pet hard-SF setting assumes much of what you describe at the end of your post—remote-controlled infantry allowing the powers-that-be to ignore popular disapproval (including having put down the ‘Blue Revolution’ across most of the planet), leading to an oligarchy in fact if not in name.