The Last Illusion of the West: The Death Rattle of Democracy
Given that I had little interest in adding yet another essay about the Charlie Kirk assassination to the flood of commentary already saturating the internet, I decided to take a different route. Instead of echoing the noise, I wanted to step back and explore something more enduring, at least to myself. A thought experiment. What if the true fault line in our politics is not between left and right, but between the sacred illusion of democracy and the uncomfortable possibility that its failures are not accidents, but inevitabilities?
The modern West treats democracy as a sacred word, a kind of civic incantation. The idea of even questioning its merits is taken as the type of heresy historically reserved for religious apostasy. The idea of a ‘good’ man speaking critically of democracy is treated as unthinkable, almost as if it were a thought crime. Ironically, especially in the case of the American form of democracy, the system has proven itself insufficient in the role of guarantor of liberty and stability. On the contrary, democracy has become the manufacturer of a peculiar and corrosive aristocracy: one defined by self-promoting, uncouth social climbers elevated not by virtue but by media spectacle and partisan machinery. The delusional assurance that America is a constitutional republic has become an embarrassing mantra repeated by both sides of the aisle, in a desperate attempt to convince themselves that the rights they learned about in elementary school still exist or ever did to begin with. But what if this slavish obedience to democracy was completely undeserved?
What the Greeks once warned as ochlocracy, the rule of the mob, has metastasized into something far worse: a regime where the mob’s passions are left unfulfilled, yet those very passions become a vulnerability that allows self-obsessed climbers to rise, tossing out ideological bread crumbs and pleasing rhetoric while delivering nothing of real significance. Out of partisan devotion, which is the least respectable form of tribalism, at least half the population pretends these careerist husks are remotely tolerable at any given time. Meanwhile, because parties expect nothing from their members beyond repeating the right words on camera, the quality of politicians declines and the nation itself continues to decay.
One of our country’s most important freedoms is that of free speech.
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