In several western countries, we are witnessing a rapid decline of democracy.

From the USA, increased censorship of the president and many others is reported. Twitter now motivates this by how messages can be interpreted. Just like after the 9/11 attacks almost 20 years ago, overreactions to the events can be more destructive than the events themselves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) calls on the platforms to be more transparent and consistent in how they apply their rules, but seems to miss that government agencies are involved with the tech giants and ordinary people have no say in such decisions. Anyone who has been censored on by the tech giants knows how difficult and meaningless it is to try to contact them. Even the president appears to have no control of some government agencies. Whatever we think of Donald Trump, we need to realize that it is certainly not democracy if an invisible government together with huge corporations are imposing censorship to undermine their president, who said he would “drain the swamp”. In Wilhelm Agrell’s article in Swedish from 2017, with the translated title “Against the deep state, no one can win”, he writes that:

No one can control the guards anymore. If anyone ever could.

What Donald Trump has challenged are thus not clowns in Langley or easily drained small puddles on the edge of the Washington swamp, but the deep state in its most developed and expanded form. In such a power struggle, in the long run there is only one possible winner…

Another example is Sweden, which now has a new pandemic law, strongly criticized for giving the government dictatorial powers. There is a risk that such temporary laws can be extended and abused.