The average person doesn't think that far ahead. They just hear "a cause I like can be furthered by implementing 1984" and so they support it.

Check out any comment section on transportation policy, environmental policy, professional licensing for trades other than software. Look at how HN, people who should know how this sausage is made, schemes about how policy and technology can be used by government to enforce it's will and preferences upon other people in ways they cannot avoid or resist. It's not a case of divide and conquer, it's a case of completely lacking principals. Nobody believes in privacy, civil rights or that the application of government violence in should be expensive and difficult and politically fraught when it's an application that they like. Nobody is thinking far enough ahead to wonder how those systems will be used when the whims and dispositions of government and society shift.

Just this morning I was reading a comment where some jerk was scheming about how the government should (the implication being that now that AI makes it easy to automate) scrape property listings and fine people for not pulling permits when there's a diff from the prior listings and that the whole thing can be automated and anyone innocent can just have the government tour their home to prove it.