You cease to be a "fringe crank" when the Vice President of the most powerful nation on the planet has directly referenced you. Being a verifiable direct influence on the richest people currently calling the shots and guiding the direction of reality also removes your "fringe crank" denomination.

Otherwise, Peter Thiel's company has billions of dollars of contracts with the government in completely non-trivial spaces (mass surveillance and military).

Calling one of the richest, most connected-with-power individuals on the planet a "fringe crank" is somewhat ridiculous.

They were fringe cranks. Now they are part of the intellectual backbone for the actual administration running the country, which moves them from fringe crank to real threat to democracy.

Hmm. If elite overproduction is the problem, then destroying education is one way to try to fix it...

I'm not the author, but I am pretty well aligned with what the author is saying.

> Is it really just citizens vs subjects? left-right, ying-yang, black-white?

Much of modern history is in one of these two modes of operation because the "middle" is an illusion. What we think of as the "middle" is a set of systems which choose the trade-offs from those two things across different axes for different times. This process, when done well, also creates dynamism that drives us forward.

When the system that is designed to keep them within a certain set of bounds (the Overton Window is closely tied to this) breaks, for any reason, then you are at risk of revolution which drags us one way or the other for a period of time. Historically that revolution has been towards authoritarianism, not freedom.

> Are the anti-democratic paths deliberate or simple drift?

They can be both - there is an ongoing, deliberate strategy to fight against democracy which is gaining in strength as a result of drift caused by the failures of the current paradigm, accelerated by technological change.

> I am not clear of the "not good enough jobs" how it fits to the arguments.

Not enough good jobs is measuring the wrong thing, which is part of the point. Should the system produce good jobs or human flourishing? Right now we say good jobs, and if people can't get those, that tells the people that the system has failed and opens the door for other paradigms.

> I am not convinced in deterministic path for tech.

There isn't a deterministic path for tech. However, the way technocrats think and what society measures has a strongly directional effect on it, and right now it is pushing tech towards extraction.

> I am also certain this is inconsistent across the Western nations, let alone the world.

It is inconsistent in velocity, but it doesn't appear to be in direction. I'm open to arguments as I have an American-centric viewpoint, but it seems like most other western nations have embattled liberal governments or right wing leaders and they are undergoing substantial oscillation between the two.

> finally, (real/true/proper) democracy has some very serious practical problems. "More democracy" may not fix what the author does not like.

They're not arguing for a "real democracy" to fix it, they're saying western democracy has gotten stuck in a local minima which no longer works, and you can make a paradigm shift without throwing out the democracy, but those who believe in Liberalism (as in liberty) need to both:

A. fight to retain democracy B. fight to create a new paradigm using democratic systems that works better

The best way to evaluate the latter is what metrics we judge success with. Right now that is highly biased towards things like GDP, employment, trade, etc. A new paradigm could emerge around better metrics for human flourishing.

An example: for many decades the number of people getting a college educations has been an important metric to countries. Why? If you play it out in a low-regulation market economy you can easily end in a system where college is a (government supported) tool for wealth extraction from future generations of citizens. If the focus was never about college educated and was instead based on "public educational attainment" we could have invested in better public school teachers, reduced student/teacher ratios, further pushed college curricula into the classroom, etc.

Liberals (as in liberty) understand very well that democracy is the worst form of government… until you look at the other options. This means that democracy may not be the best at any given point in time, and a democracy may get trapped in a local minima after substantial societal change, or that it may be out-competed by a well-run authoritarian government; it is, after all, susceptible to all the natural failings of human nature. Yet, for all its flaws, democracy remains the only system that consistently honors the principle that no person is born above another, that every individual deserves a voice in shaping the conditions of their own life, and that the human desire for self-determination is not a defect to be corrected or stamped down.

Anything less... well, give me liberty or give me death :)