There is a real chance of Donald Trump or similar taking power in the white house. "Mature" or not, every democracy is a despot away from crumbling.
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.
This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.
https://archive.org/details/EbenMoglen-WhyFreedomOfThoughtRe...
Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism itself.
There are people alive today, in the startup founders age bracket, who lived under Soviet-style communism and escaped it.
Get a grip.
That's what always happened and will be happening as long as there's more than one nation state. Moreover, the difference today is that we've created multinational corporations, which are basically like nation states, except they're not tied to the land and they can't raise an army openly.