For what it's worth, implementations like Delta Chat support encrypted subject lines[0].

Also, it would be relatively simple for mail providers to act as two halves of a Cypherpunk remailer[1]. By that I mean that when alice@sender writes an email to bob@recipient, the sender server only sees "remailer@recipient" as the recipient and the recipient server only sees "remailer@sender" as the sender.

That approach just requires some onion-layering of the emails with encryption, and a reserved key-pair advertised per mail server.

[0] https://delta.chat/en/help#how-does-delta-chat-protect-my-me...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk_anonymous_remailer

True but people with private communications don't usually need to hide their metadata. Who cares if they know you are communicating with your friends and family if they don't know you are complaining about the thin skinned government.

Anonymity is an issue, but it is far from the most important issue.

Rather than fixing our democratic systems, the digital revolution may have just made them worse, by encouraging societies to entrust the counting of ballots to machines, and then unsurprisingly stop trusting those machines as soon as they give an answer that half the population don't like.

Even in societies that still rely on analogue vote counting, it is unclear whether instant access to digital information has made societies more informed or misinformed on average.