there is in fact no logical contradiction between democracy and total surveillance

I didn't say there was, just that there is a general societal association between surveillance and bad things. (Surveillance -> Secret Police -> Scary governments doing bad stuff).

I imagine if the dominant cultural narrative of the last century was of centralised and authoritarian but benevolent states social attitudes would be a lot different. As it is all those features are lumped together into totalitarianism in the popular consciousness.

This perception makes people unwilling to support/vote/campaign for privacy reducing options even when there is an obvious net benefit (e.g. DNA and fingerprint databases would solve a lot of crimes at minimal cost in western liberal democracies).