https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...
At this point, there's no good reason to trust people in government as they seem to all have been captured by oligarchy, including here in the U.S. So this isn't a "don't worry" situation, it's something that should actively be contended with at a political level.
Then I asked him a question he didn't quite seem ready for. I observed that I was seeing the same thing, the writing of many books on the subject of preserving the Western traditions of freedom, and the subject of corruption and manipulation of the public. Then I asked him, "Has it ever worked?"
"What do you mean?" he said.
"Has the writing of these books, the sounding of the alarm bell, so to speak, ever worked to save them... to preserve them?"
The answer hung between us, and we paused for a moment, unwilling to continue the conversation to its logical conclusion. We moved on to discussing other topics. We did come back to the conversation a few weeks later. The small consolation was that future societies often used the criticism of the lessons learned in the past as guidance for forming new ones. Jefferson and Madison crafted the U.S. Constitution as much from the triumphs of Athens, Rome, and British Common Law, as from failures of these same institutions.
To answer your question more directly, I wish I knew. I only know of many ways that don't seem to work. Recording the fall as honestly as possible might help posterity, if the record survives.
Law code has some analogous structures to software programs, but the machines the law code executes on are made up of people, and it depends on the good intent and wisdom of the people executing the code. Good will, good intent, and especially wisdom seem to be in short supply, most especially among leaders beholden to the control of others. I think that's the underlying problem, the hardware of society, so to speak.
We've dismantled or corrupted most of the societal mechanisms that used to maintain the health of the said hardware, and we've failed to replace them with anything, or at least with anything anywhere near as effective. Mechanisms like education have been corrupted to steer our young people straight into the mob manipulation technologies of social media and ideologies of power maintenance for the new oligarchies. So we're back to "I wish I knew."
What do you think?
I believe the conclusion that it can't happen in the U.S. is incorrect.
If you don't think that sort of thing could happen, you should recall that the Trans-Pacific treaty being pushed in the U.S. by the Obama administration included provisions allowing U.N bodies to inspect compliance and sue local governments for things like climate violations (wealth transfer) or even firearms possession and compliance (end-run around the 2nd amendment). That is, these treaties were seen as a way to sneak in enforcement from extra-national entities for rules explicitly forbidden by the U.S. Constitution.
That particular treaty was dropped, in part, due to public outcry against it.
Liberty requires maintenance and defense. You cannot simply assume that once we enjoy some particular freedom there is no way to retreat or regress from it such that we lose it. Bureaucrats that cannot be fired by the head of the Executive branch are another example of this erosion by technicality.
So I don't find your conclusion obvious at all. I wish it were so simple.
This kind of rule-making follows the trick of getting the public to trade safety for liberty. The problem is that the same governments have created the lack of safety, provoking the unrest they know seek additional power to quash. We should say no.