What makes you think a democracy can't be oppressive?

Even in perfect democracies there is something called the tyranny of the majority, where the majority can oppress the minority.

If we're talking about the US in particular, we have to recognize first that it's not even a perfect democracy, and there are many anti-democratic things about it such as the electoral college, and plenty more things that hinder democracy even where it exists (such as poor civic education, money's outsize influence in elections, extremely biased media, branches of government which shirk their balancing and oversight roles, etc).

Then, to get specifically to the oppressive aspects of the US, they range from slavery and lack of women's rights from its foundation, to segregation that existed in law up to the middle of the 20th Century (and arguably still exists in fact to some extent and in some places in the US even now), to the imprisonment in concentration camps of Americans of Japanese descent, to discrimination against people who weren't heterosexual, to the War on Drugs and police brutality which primarily impact minorities, to abuse, killing, and imprisonment of people who come to the US from other countries.

All this oppression and more has happened in what is ostensibly a democracy, and often likes to style itself as the world's greatest democracy.

And all of this oppression has had to do with identity, which required identifying people's race, gender, sexual preferences, or country of origin.

Such identification is amplified and made all that much easier in the age of computers, the internet, and gigantic databases on everyone. It's a data trove just begging for abuse.

To the imprisonment of those who refuse to surrender their privacy and submit an income tax return, and pay the income tax, to the prohibition of mutually voluntary economic interactions, like getting a haircut from an unlicensed barber, where barbers are licensed.

The important thing to remember is that oppression in a democracy is not perceived as oppression to the majority, so democracy will generally be perceived as non-oppressive, due to the subjectivity of what constitutes it.

All of human history is filled with bloodshed, tyranny, endless wars, conquering, slavery, piracy, vandalism, raiding parties, human sacrifice, religious battles and authoritarianism, with just a few punctuating moments of anything resembling democracy and recognition of human rights. That goes for every race, country, tribe, continent and creed. No heritage is innocent of that. That's the truth. 1776 didn't have to succeed. It very much could of ended with being squelched by the Crown and then where would we be today? Perhaps the Nazis would of won. Perhaps the Soviets would have developed imperial ambition in the absence of a strong US to keep them in check. Maybe the world would be a darker place. I suspect that without the U.S. that it would be, since that's the rule of history and not the exception.

Interning the Japanese Americans was of course wrong, but when you're fighting a world war and tens of millions are dying at the hands of Japanese (they slaughtered Chinese by the tens of millions)...it's very touchy isn't it? The lesser of two evils in that particular war was certainly the U.S.

Again, prior to world war 2 the world was still filled with imperial forces itching to conquer and enslave other people by the tens of millions. This is just 80 years ago...not that long ago. There was no where else in the world living up to the high ideals we seek to achieve today back then. The U.S. was that place for so many people to escape to. The Jews being one group. The Cubans being another. The Vietnamese being another. The Koreans being another. If you're going to paint the picture, paint it in the context of the world at the time and the subsequent actions in the wake of those problems. I think individuals deserve forgiveness after some time, and the same goes with nations, given that their behavior is corrected. There's nothing wrong with the movement towards more civil rights. But expecting things to go from millenia of imperialism to utopian democracy overnight, especially one saddled with so much legacy from that era, is naive. Again, it didn't have to go so well. It could have very gone south and ended up worse off for everyone.

Many of the founders were also elitists who didn't want anyone but landowning white men to run the country. They were wary of "mob rule" (ie. direct democracy), and preferred to have the elites rule. The jury's still out on whether they were right or whether direct democracy is actually better. Considering how much power and wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority in the US, I'm siding with having more direct democracy, not less.

"I get that it's easy to point out the hypocrisy of the phrase "all men are created equal" when slavery was still a thing in half the states, but it was a very tenuous situation to go against the crown of England in 1776."

The existence of slavery in the US wasn't just about 1776.. it lasted until 1865. The US was one of the last countries to end slavery.

"All of human history is filled with bloodshed, tyranny, endless wars, conquering, slavery, piracy, vandalism, raiding parties, human sacrifice, religious battles and authoritarianism..."

"Interning the Japanese Americans was of course wrong, but when you're fighting a world war and tens of millions are dying at the hands of Japanese (they slaughtered Chinese by the tens of millions)...it's very touchy isn't it? The lesser of two evils in that particular war was certainly the U.S."

The point of my post wasn't to say there weren't reasons (some might say excuses) for the US to behave the way it did (extreme, widespread racism against minorities is one such reason and excuse), nor to deny that some countries were just as bad or even worse, but to recognize that massive, serious oppression did in fact happen in the US, despite it being some sort of a democracy.

Oppression in the US is still happening, is likely to continue, and will probably be greatly enabled by the easy availability of identifying information on the people within and without its borders.

Inevitably, when this topic of discussion comes up, I almost always see a response of this type, calling into question the entire foundation of the USA on the basis of the founding brothers being white slave owners, and it really bugs me, but I'm having a hard time trying to articulate it well...

I think it mostly centers around a very superficial understanding of the evolution of the enlightenment and the renaissance into the culmination of those that was the US. I would probably respond better if, when these arguments get thrown about, I heard discussion of the philosophical underpinnings the founders, in particular Madison, based their proposals on. Discussion or reference to individual liberty, natural law and natural rights, and such, as learned from study of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Hobbes and Spinoza, Montesquieu, etc.

I almost never see these referenced in this responses though, and to me it seems very dangerously close to "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", and I fear that the sentiment is growing so rapidly, as shallow as it may be, that the lack of understanding why America truly is a revolutionary country and is exceptional in history will potent some very turbulent times in the future.

Yes, the system was imperfect from the start, and has been even more imperfect in implementation, but to say then that the whole system (not saying you said this, but it seems thinly veiled to that affect often) must be thrown out is foolhardy at best. The shining light of America is that it has, in it's founding documents, a system designed to self-improve over time. I see our main problem as being the lack of memory of why each piece of that system is so important, and have allowed it to become corrupted. The path forward then is in seeking to enforce the core foundational principles the founders thought very hard about (such as Montesquieu's checks and balances system), and not to discard them just because they came from people that were imperfect.

It doesn't sound like you're actually disputing my main point at all, but wanting to shift the discussion on to whether the American system of government needs to be replaced and why, which is really off-topic.

Still, in response to your tangential point, I want to make clear that I'm not advocating discarding the entire American system of government, and my dissatisfaction with parts of it as they stand now does not stem from who the founders were.

I do think the system has proven itself to fail at meeting the high ideals that some of the founders professed to have. The system has proven itself to be highly corruptable, the checks and balances built in to the system have failed, and much of the Constitution is widely ignored or reinterpreted to mean whatever the people in power want it to mean.

These failures are not due to the founders owning slaves, but due to them being unable to foresee or adequately prepare the nation for things such as mass media, the internet, modern advertising and propaganda, and a slew of consequences of modern warfare, mutually assured destruction, the military-industrial complex, corporate dominance of the economy, enormous amounts of money being thrown at elections, the shutting out of third party alternatives, the poor civic education, widespread apathy and easy manipulability of the electorate, and on and on.

Despite the founders' short-sightedness and all the fialures and weaknesses in the American system of government, I am not an advocate of eliminating it wholesale. I believe reform is possible, and that it could be made more democratic, more accountable, more fair and just, and we don't have to scrap it all to do it.

However, I very much doubt the political will or consensus is there to make significant positive changes. If anything, I expect it to get much worse before it gets better.. if it ever will.

It arguably failed so long ago that virtually nobody notices. For the first ~century, corporations were allowed only in the public interest. To some extent, that reflected outrage at the excesses of corporations chartered by the English Crown. But there were also concerns about the concentration of money and power.

But that began to fail in the mid 1800s, with the rise of the railroad corporations, and their growing political power. And it ended with the 14th amendment and some Supreme Court opinions, which granted many citizenship rights and legal protections to corporations.

But property-based identity held a lot of currency by the time 1776 rolled around: it established credibility as an actor with some real agency and independence within trade relations, and therefore our modern nations have built their legibility around property. And what we've done since is to either try to position everyone somewhere within the property system, or to turn towards an authoritarian model to create identity without ownership(as in the various communist experiments, or the flat, hidden authority in "Tyranny of Structurelessness").

So when we have the idea of something like identity theft, or corporate personhood, that's a thing generated of having an identity to own, cascading down into human relationships as property, personal branding, etc. And the largest, most developed function of the legal system in the US is to make judgments about property. But we also have systems of identification that are imposed in an authoritative fashion(the SSN, DL, passport, etc.) - every nation is a mixed identity market in this way.

And in this respect I think the philosophy is truly starting to fail in a world which has so greatly automated ownership, and we will need to consider both identity and property at the same time to reach useful alternatives.

So to use your example of more democracy. One of my pet peeves is when people say we are a democracy. We are a constitutional democratic republic to be precise. There are elements of democracy, but we elect representatives. The problem to me is that the representatives no longer represent us. If you consider moving them towards representing the people democracy than I am all for that. What I am not for is a move towards rights of groups as opposed to individuals, because history has shown that ends up being abused.

All in all, I hope that reform is possible, but it is hard to see the pragmatic path there with how bad the system is currently, so we agree there. I just hope it doesn't devolve too much, because if it does, in this age of technology it will be extremely bloody for all involved.

However, I cannot change my government provided identity.

Right now I can have multiple identities: one for work, one for my WoW guild, one for security research.

With a single centralized identity provider I couldn't do that. They wouldn't just be able, they would by default associate my personal and professional associations.

I feel that the risk of a single central (and especially government run) identity provider is that it can chill freedom of association by disallowing you to anonymously, or if not anonymously then disconnectedly associate with people or groups.

Historically "identity" wasn't a right, but something imposed on people, for better tracking and controlling them by authorities...

>In an oppressive state identity surely could be oppression, just like everything else, but in a democratic country?

Oppression is not about democratic vs totalitarian state. McCarthy and Hoover, to mention just two examples, reigned over others in the good ole democratic US of A.

Not to mention very few (if any) countries have actual direct democracy, or give the people say in how they want to be governed, from the constitution and downwards.

I used to own a wonderful book about the history of data science. As I recall, starting in maybe the 1600s, experts in France and Germany were tasked with tracking populations, birth and death rates, economic activity, and so on. And the primary goal was to aid in military planning. Unfortunately, I've lost the book and forgotten the title and author. And the search terms are so topical as to be useless.

I do recall reading it, however.

Identity is a philosophical problem and a relationship, and so far we've managed to kick the can down the road of what an identity might mean outside the nation state, but the internet may prove to be a bit of a forcing function in deciding some of these questions we had the luck to avoid. I've been doubtful of digital identity startups because most of them are just substituting an opaque problem in crytography for the capital-H hard problem in political philosophy, which originates in prehistorical problems in collecting a census.

Maybe OAuth with some OIDC extensions and attributes solves everything, and FIDO has solved it, but if there were a way to bet against that, personally I'd go all in.

I recommend starting there on personhood, as like the role of gravity in your analogy, it's a complex enough topic that it would be worth reading up on, since it's more plausible that the details of it matter than the implication that I am some kind of wizard engaged in mesmerism.

I'm not talking about "identity" as in "being somebody".

I'm talking about identity as in identification, documents, and so on -- which is what we were discussing (as in "identity provider" in software terms).

The existence of centralized identity is what enables those databases. They're all indexed by the centralized identity. You give Facebook your "real name" and location and the same thing to your bank and they correlate them in a database. If you were using a different identity for each one they couldn't do that.

On the other hand, creating some kind of national ID authentication system would make it much worse, because then things would require that. You couldn't sign up under a pseudonym, so now even the things that are currently separate or that you can keep separate if you want to would be forced into being correlated with everything else about you in those databases. It's an attack.

In Belgium, changing your name is virtually impossible. The king (ostensibly) has to grant permission; you need to provide a "valid reason". This never made sense to me.