Imagine living in a society where, one morning, on the radio you hear “ID cards are to be introduced, voluntarily at first, but the government plan to make them compulsory.”
If on the same day you hear the President/Prime-Minister/Fuhrer/Papa say “Well it’s your democratic right to protest, we can’t do anything about that unforunately, but you are quite clearly wrong and everything we’ve done and are about to do is right and it’s really got nothing to do with you.” you’d probably be justified in thinking that we no longer live in a democracy. You’d be wrong of course: we have never lived in a democracy.