At best, elections are about the efficiency of government. You're in trouble when the big topic is corruption, and you're in the red zone when the major issue is tyranny. That's where we are now in the U.S., and tyranny is on the march across the world.

Tyranny doesn't have to be one absolute dictator crushing dissidents with jackbooted death squads. You can be just as tyrannized by mobs of feuding petty potentates. They don't have to hold any government office. The key element of tyranny is the use of force to crush dissent.

Can anyone doubt that core notion of tyranny is ascendant in the United States and across much of the free world? "Cancel culture" is defined by the use of force to crush dissent. Tyranny loves to present itself as "consensus" without mentioning that it silenced all disagreement.

Tyranny doesn't have to mean all-consuming micromanaging authoritarianism, although in the modern world it usually works out that way. The scope of what America's founders deemed tyrannical would seem like small-government libertarianism by today's standards.

The Founders saw that the way certain burdens were imposed on them was tyrannical, even though the weight of those burdens would seem very light by the standards of 21st Century trillion-dollar-deficit mega-government.

It's a grave mistake to think you can't be tyrannized as long as you have *some* freedom left. It's an incredibly dangerous mistake to assume you can't be tyrannized as long as you still have some voting rights. Voting is NOT invincible armor against tyranny.

Most of the world's despotisms have some pretense of voting, some thin veneer of democracy they pull over their depredations to insist the people are oppressed and brutalized with their own consent, for their own good. The key question is whether meaningful dissent is nourished.

Yes, *nourished*, not just nominally permitted. If agreeing with the ruling party is free but dissent carries steep costs, you're in the soft outer fringes of tyranny, and the hard stuff isn't far away. It's never a big leap to say that what was penalized should now be forbidden.

We're getting FAR too comfortable with the use of force to silence dissent. Look at how the distinction between "protests" and violent actions like riots, looting, and "occupation" has been blurred. A genuine protest is not compulsive.

Once "protesters" start seizing buildings, destroying property, shutting down public roads and facilities at their pleasure, assaulting people, and using less overtly physical means to make agreement with their ideology MANDATORY, they have become tyrannical.

We're also allowing far too many issues to be taken off the table for voters. You're still allowed to vote, but not on as many matters of substance as your grandparents were. The list of supposedly "settled arguments" and inescapable diktats has grown oppressively long.

For as long as I can remember, I've been unsettled by the old chestnut that "if you don't like what the bums in office are doing, you can vote them out." That is NOT a sufficient check against tyranny. It never was. The bums have far too many ways of retaining their power.

And where do you go to vote against the people looting your shops, shutting down your streets, getting you fired from your job for expressing the wrong opinions? Too much of your livelihood depends on who wins elections, who has power, not on what YOU CHOOSE for yourself. /end