But, of course, the government won't have to use breakable crypto; only the citizenry will be beholden to that requirement. So instead, it will merely be those 'essential' industrial players, now constantly finding their foreign rivals to have the upper hand in trade negotiations and to seemingly predict their moves.

I think that's the key here: broken crypto, on a large scale, doesn't just mean a panopticon; it also means whoever's using it will inevitably suffer large-scale economic stagnation. Standardizing on breakable crypto is equivalent to making laws with large loopholes to allow industrial espionage into the country.

If you want to scare people into defending crypto, point out that it's the shield on the arm of the negotiators who sign things like the TPP agreement. Small business owners—even if they themselves have no trade secrets to protect—will be directly affected by whether crypto can protect the secrets of their industry from their foreign equivalents. (Your local {sports clothing, christmas ornament, office furniture} industry recently take a nosedive? Maybe someone was cornered into a bad deal because all your local supply-chain logistics were plain on the table to China, but theirs were a mystery to us.) And small business owners are a pretty good voting bloc.