Of course there's a cost to this. Liberal democracy is intensely annoying and always expands to embrace whatever kind of diversity is too much diversity. That'

Of course there's a cost to this. Liberal democracy is intensely annoying and always expands to embrace whatever kind of diversity is too much diversity. That's how it can be a target for fascist uprisings: people want to pretend they're open to all things and have all freedoms as long as there are no consequences. In reality, there's one cost to restriction and another cost to multiculturalism and diversity. If you look at it in a-life terms you see the autocracies as plateaus. Stuff gets locked down, and there's no progress. But progress hurts. Liberal democracies and their tolerance of diversity are about coping with all the unaligned interests of starkly different people, knowing that combining those people is what gets you startling progress. It can almost be reduced to simple mechanical terms, like recombination in a genetic soup. It's always possible to crush inconvenient genes and have everyone the same (to a point, and if you're determined enough). And then, you don't have those genes anymore, and your future's narrowed.