I enjoy beating up Milton Friedman and his acolytes for his belief that if people truly cared about the environment, they'd pass better laws protecting it. The fundamental issue is that "tyranny of the majority" is something explicitly warned against and protected against in the constitution, yet whenever a 50.009% majority votes for something, it's just the way it is and that's the law, suck it.

Because fundamentally, we don't have a 'pure' democracy. We have a representational democracy and the allocation of districts and representation is undemocratic. If anything, I would say the past 150 years of politics have been an exploration in achieving undemocratic ends within an ostensibly democratic system.

If a county is 51% catholic and 49% protestant and a vote is held as to whether protestants deserve to own property, there's a very real chance that the catholics are about to strike it rich. That's a "democratic" result but obviously not a humanitarian one. Things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights exist because tools beyond pure democracy are necessary in order to provide a fair and humane quality of life for the minority but without teeth they're just aspirational.

The issues we're seeing here are that (1) the public can agree that cracking skulls is bad (2) The police can pass legislation that cracking skulls is bad (3) the mayor can issue specific decrees that cracking skulls is bad but (4) the cops can still crack skulls and go "what are you going to fucking do about it?"

And the lack-of-answer is driving a lot of the protests right now.