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The truth is Democrats aren't going to do shit to "save democracy," and anyone who thinks or thought they were is delusional.
Notice, the Democrats never ran on how exactly they were going to save democracy. The reason they didn't is that saving democracy is incredibly unpopular. If you actually want to save democracy, you have to pass very unpopular laws.
Mainly, you need to strip the presidency of all the emergency powers Congress has given it over the years, dismantle the post-9/11 security and surveillance state, and disband ICE.
Here is the problem. Doing any of these things will literally get Americans killed. If you dismantle the unconstitutional mass spying apparatus, inevitably, eventually, there's going to be some terrorist attack that occurs that that spying could have prevented. If you disband ICE, inevitably some person who happens to be an illegal immigrant is going to kill some white woman, and it will be found out that ICE would have deported them before it happened.
In these cases, I would argue that the deaths are worth it. I am absolutely willing to trade some safety for freedom. Freedom is worth fighting for; it's worth dying for. It's worth seeing innocent people die for it.
That's the core problem. The tools of a dictator are also the tools of ordinary law enforcement. If you strip away the dictator's toolkit, you also disempower law enforcement, which means some otherwise preventable crimes will happen. And your political opposition can latch onto those few rare cases and crucify you with them.
This is why Democrats cannot save democracy. Ultimately, they are complete cowards. Saving democracy requires courage and conviction. It requires a politician to look the voters dead in the eyes and say, "some of your children are going to die because of this bill I am proposing, and that is an acceptable loss I am willing to pay to ensure our children get to live in a democracy."
I've never seen a Democrat running on that kind of message. But that's what it would take to actually save democracy. And this is why it will not be done.
Most people rejected his message. They hated WoodScientist because he told the truth.
To be honest, I think there's a serious possibility, if a president attempted to dismantle the "national security" apparatus, the NSA would stage a false flag attack themselves to discredit them and protect their positions. Even if the president had hard evidence that they had done so, it's doubtful that Americans would believe it or care. There'd have back to back media coverage talking about how the move puts Americans at risk and warning of an attack, then an attack happens, people's minds would be made up in an instant, and any pushback would be seen as both treasonous and blindly loyal to the president.
Look at the Cold War and how many times the CIA manipulated elections or overthrew democratically elected leaders, just for the sake of bananas being a little cheaper from a minor country half the world away. Do people really think they didn't have contingencies in place for the possibility of a socialist president being elected, or just one who interfered with their aims? Why? Did they just have so much respect for democracy? Or did they somehow lack the capability to interfere, when they so easily did so abroad? And if they had contingencies then, what happened when to actually break that power?
The last time a president really acted against the aims of the intelligence community was when JFK fired Alan Dulles, months before he was assassinated. Dulles somehow ended up on the investigative committee into the assassination. Whether he was behind it or not, he was treated as above suspicion despite having the clearest motive.
Even if you somehow avoid getting assassinated and stop them from orchestrating a false flag, it's likely they have connections in the media they can use against you. Try to suppress that, and you're an evil authoritarian tankie. Basically any tool that the president, or that any head of state around the world, can use to survive when US spies are trying to get rid of them, is "authoritarian," which in turn can be used to justify acting against them more openly.
Oppressive measures are seldom effective at their stated purposes: people are not safer in totalitarian states than they are in those with human rights. They're just unsafe for different reasons. Being at the mercy of a well-resourced mob of armed goons with official backing is not better than being preyed on by a number of small, disorganised non-state groups.
Look at arming police in the US. The end result is thousands of people per year being killed or maimed by those police. And yet crime rates are no lower than in countries where the police are less homicidal.
Similarly, pervasive surveillance captures a vast volume of largely irrelevant information, leading to the use of automated threat detection systems that invariably generate false positives that cause innocent people's lives to be ruined. Yet there is no protection from threats from state actors and their collaborators who act with impunity.
It's a false tradeoff. Adoption of increasingly authoritarian measures is not a free lunch and has the potential to kill even more children for other reasons. The costs of operating a surveillance society, with all its IT, weapons and snitches, have to be paid somehow. Typically that money comes from dismantling services that actually protect people's lives and health. They're sure as shit not going to take it from the military or the police.
The innocent lives lost to criminals should be weighed against the innocent lives lost to these law enforcement groups enabled by the spying apparatus.
That's not something any Democrat would ever do.