Echoes of the Republic

The old fiction that America’s two major parties represent opposing interests—one for business, the other for working people—no longer persuades anyone who pays attention. Nor does the claim that they meaningfully occupy the ideological poles of right and left. The observant voter, that dwindling minority, sees that both parties have long answered to the same masters: corporations, financiers, and those who profit from the machinery of endless growth and permanent inequality. In 2024, the top one hundred billionaire families poured $2.6 billion into federal elections—one of every six dollars spent. Dark money reached a record $1.9 billion, more than double the amount in 2020. Corporate lobbying hit $4.4 billion, with Big Tech alone spending $61.5 million and employing one lobbyist for every two members of Congress. Their quarrels are theatrical. Their policies, however dressed in partisan language, converge upon the preservation of the same order.

But something darker has taken hold. The oligarchs who once influenced the system now rule it directly. They have seized one party outright, hollowed out the other through dependence on the same donors, and reduced the national contest to absurd theater. Thirteen billionaires with combined wealth exceeding $450 billion now hold cabinet positions in the federal government—the wealthiest administration in American history. The man who spent between $277 and $290 million to help elect the president—the largest individual political donation ever recorded—was rewarded with a government position granting access to Treasury Department systems containing Americans’ Social Security numbers and bank accounts. The performance conceals the deeper reality—that the constitutional balance envisioned by the founders has collapsed, not from sudden assault but from gradual surrender. We have kept the shell of the Republic while its substance has been drained away.

Today, all three branches of government serve the same masters—and it is not the people.

The Executive

On June 7, 2025, a president deployed approximately 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles after immigration raids sparked protests, claiming “incidents of violence and disorder…constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government.” The governor actively opposed the deployment, stating local police could handle the situation. Three months later, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled the action violated federal law, writing that “there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.” Judge Breyer described the administration’s rationale as “contrived” and warned of an apparent attempt at “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” It marked the first time since 1965 that a president deployed National Guard over a governor’s objections.

By October 2025, the president has authorized federal troop deployments to at least five American cities on fabricated claims of civil disorder, including to Washington D.C. claiming a “crime emergency” despite violent crime being at a thirty-year low, to Memphis despite crime at a twenty-five-year low, and to Portland where a federal judge found protests “generally limited to fewer than 30 people and were largely sedate.” When courts issued restraining orders, the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, declaring at an August cabinet meeting: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”

He orders the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents and protect allies, compiling an enemies list reminiscent of the darkest regimes of the twentieth century. On September 25, 2025, former FBI Director James Comey became the first senior government official indicted under the second Trump administration—four days after the previous federal prosecutor was fired for refusing to pursue charges he considered baseless, and four days after Trump’s former personal attorney was installed as the new prosecutor. She presented the case to the grand jury alone, without a single career prosecutor present. The president had posted on social media five days earlier: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.” A grand jury probe of New York’s Attorney General stretched five months despite federal prosecutors finding insufficient evidence. Investigations were ordered into a philanthropist’s foundation for potential racketeering charges. The Attorney General stated on national television: “Whether you’re a billionaire, funding organizations to try to keep Donald Trump out of office, everything is on the table. We will investigate you.”

He threatens to revoke media licenses for unfavorable coverage and uses emergency powers as instruments of ordinary governance. After a comedian criticized the president’s supporters on September 16, 2025, the FCC Chairman appeared on a conservative podcast the next afternoon threatening license revocation. That same evening, major network affiliates announced they would not air the program, and the network suspended it indefinitely. During the suspension, the company lost close to $5 billion in market value, employees received death threats, and approximately twenty affiliate stations refused to air the program even after its return. The president stated aboard Air Force One: “They give me only bad publicity or press, and I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” The FCC Chairman followed: “I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop…the consequences are going to continue to flow.” An FCC Commissioner responded: “The FCC does not have the legal authority, the constitutional right, or the ability to revoke a license just because the president does not like what that broadcaster is broadcasting. But the threats are the point.”

On his first day in office, he declared a “National Energy Emergency” claiming “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” despite government research showing fossil fuel production had reached record levels. In April, he invoked emergency powers to impose tariffs, declaring that trade relationships with “each and every country in the world” posed “unusual and extraordinary threats”—including nations he dismissed as places “nobody has ever heard of.” He declared a border emergency claiming America’s sovereignty was “under attack” despite December 2024 recording the second-smallest number of border encounters since August 2020, representing an 81% decrease from the previous year. He invoked emergency powers eight times in his first hundred days—more than any modern president in the same period—transforming what were meant to be extraordinary measures into instruments of routine policy preference.

When Congress appropriates funds he dislikes, he withholds them in defiance of the Impoundment Control Act. The Government Accountability Office issued six formal findings by September 2025 that the administration violated the law requiring presidents to spend funds as Congress appropriates. Congressional investigators estimate the administration has frozen, canceled, or fought in court to block more than $410 billion in funding—for electric vehicle infrastructure, early childhood education, school upgrades, emergency shelter programs. When challenged, the budget director dismissed the findings as “non-events with no consequence. Rearview mirror stuff.” The administration removed public access to agency funding data until a federal court ordered its restoration in August 2025. On September 26, the Supreme Court allowed the withholding of $4 billion in foreign aid just weeks before the funds would expire, despite a lower court finding the administration had no discretion to refuse spending what Congress had appropriated. Justice Kagan warned in dissent: “At issue is the allocation of power between the Executive and Congress over the expenditure of public monies.”

When statutes require Senate confirmation of senior officials, he ignores the Appointments Clause, leaving “acting” loyalists in place indefinitely. One official simultaneously served as Senate-confirmed Secretary of State and acting administrator of another agency before that agency was closed entirely and its workforce reduced from over twelve thousand to seven hundred eighteen employees. Federal courts found multiple violations of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. Criminal defendants challenged appointments in federal court, arguing the administration’s interpretation would allow “never-confirmed, FVRA-ineligible shadow officials” with “no limits or eligibility requirements” to serve “indefinitely.” The executive branch has become not an executor of law but the law itself.

The Legislative

Congress, paralyzed by faction and captive to donor interests, has ceased to function as a coequal branch. For fiscal year 2025, it enacted zero of the twelve full-year appropriations bills required by law—the last time all appropriations passed before a fiscal year began was 1997. Instead, on March 15, 2025, it passed a continuing resolution extending the previous year’s funding levels, eliminating $15.9 billion in approved projects, and mistakenly omitting routine provisions that threatened the nation’s capital with over $1 billion in cuts.

On October 1, 2025, the government shut down. As of October 8, approximately 750,000 federal workers remain furloughed, with 420,000 working without pay. Air traffic control towers have closed due to sick calls, causing flight delays. National parks began shuttering. The Senate has failed three times to pass funding bills—on September 30, October 6, and October 8—with the Majority Leader stating the chamber would “keep voting on the same competing bills over and over.” The Speaker canceled the House’s return to Washington, keeping members in their districts, and declared: “The ball is in the court of the Senate Democrats.” The Minority Leader responded: “His members aren’t even here doing their jobs, they’ve been home for weeks.” A controversial administration memo suggested furloughed workers may not receive guaranteed back pay, contradicting a law the president himself signed in 2019. Congress cannot pass a budget without brinkmanship and shutdowns.

It cannot enforce subpoenas or conduct genuine oversight. In August 2025, the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for closed-door depositions to multiple former officials, including five former Attorneys General, two former FBI Directors, and various political figures. Yet courts have given little legal help to congressional committees, causing subpoena fights to drag out for years with no conclusive ability to enforce them quickly. Following a 2020 circuit court ruling, Congress lost a key option for civil enforcement and now faces three inadequate choices: referral to the Justice Department it seeks to investigate, slow and uncertain civil suits, or an inherent contempt power unused since the 1930s and described as “cumbersome, inefficient, and unseemly.” The Afghanistan withdrawal investigation exemplified these challenges, with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claiming subpoenas were unenforceable because they interfered with presidential powers.

It legislates by continuing resolution and press release. In its abdication, it resembles not the Roman Senate of the Republic but the Senate of the Empire—still meeting, still debating, but powerless to constrain the ruler it nominally advises. Sixty-four percent of Americans believe major donors have “a lot” of influence on how members of Congress vote, compared to only fourteen percent who believe constituents have such influence. Research published in 2023 found “a robust relationship between donors and speech” in Congress, with donor activity shaping not just votes but legislative priorities and agenda-setting. One study found that sixty percent of billionaire wealth now derives from “inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections” rather than merit. These are the masters Congress serves.

The Judiciary

Most perilous of all, the Supreme Court—once the guardian of limits—has become the instrument of their removal. On July 1, 2024, in Trump v. United States, the Court grants the president immunity so sweeping that criminal accountability for official acts effectively vanishes. Chief Justice Roberts writes for the majority that presidents have absolute immunity for actions within their “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and presumptive immunity for all official acts unless prosecution “would pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” The decision covers actions “so long as they are not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.” Critically, Roberts rules that courts may not inquire into presidential motives when dividing official from unofficial conduct, calling such inquiry “highly intrusive.”

Justice Sotomayor opens her dissent with words that will echo through history: “Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.” She concludes: “Whether described as presumptive or absolute, under the majority’s rule, a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution…In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” A former federal judge states: “There is no support whatsoever in the Constitution or even in the Supreme Court’s precedents, for the past 200 years, for this reprehensible decision.”

In abandoning the Chevron precedent on June 28, 2024, the Court strips regulatory agencies of authority to interpret and enforce the laws Congress enacts, transferring power from the legislature to the judiciary and, by extension, to the executive the judiciary favors. Chief Justice Roberts declares that courts, not agencies, must “decide all relevant questions of law” and claims agencies “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” The decision overturns precedent cited in over eighteen thousand lower court decisions and seventy Supreme Court cases. Justice Kagan warns in dissent that the Court “gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law…the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.” She provides examples of technical questions courts must now decide without deference: “whether and when an ‘alpha amino acid polymer’ qualifies as a ‘protein’ under the Public Health Service Act, or whether one population of squirrels is ‘distinct’ from another under the Endangered Species Act.”

The Court declines to enforce the Impoundment Control Act or the Appointments Clause, ignoring clear statutory and constitutional text. On September 26, 2025, it rules that private parties lack standing to sue over spending law violations—effectively making the Impoundment Control Act unenforceable except by a comptroller general the executive could simply ignore. Judge Florence Pan warns in an appellate dissent: “The Supreme Court and our court have stated in no uncertain terms that the Executive, as a constitutional matter, has no authority to disobey duly enacted statutes for policy reasons. Yet that is what the majority enables today.”

On June 27, 2025, the Court rules that federal district courts generally lack authority to issue nationwide injunctions protecting non-parties from executive orders. Justice Barrett writes for the majority that such injunctions “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” Justice Jackson warns in dissent: “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law…a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.” Rights now depend on geography and litigation status. For the first time in modern history, constitutional protections may vary by state depending on whether parents sued.

Through emergency orders on its shadow docket, the Court allows the president to fire officials whom statutes protect from at-will removal—commissioners of independent agencies that Congress deliberately insulated from political control. On September 22, 2025, the Court grants full review signaling likely overturn of the 1935 precedent protecting such officials. Justice Kagan dissents, writing that emergency orders reveal “how that eventual decision will go” and criticizes “the impatience to get on with things—to now hand the president the most unitary, meaning also the most subservient, administration since Herbert Hoover (and maybe ever).”

It strikes down precedents by ideological fiat while leaving standing decisions that expand corporate and executive dominion. What was once judicial review has become judicial complicity. Legal observers characterize the Court’s current term as “executive power, executive power, executive power,” noting the Court’s decisions “may be fueling Trump’s maximalist approach to executive power” in 2025.

Thus the separation of powers, the very architecture of the Constitution, exists now only as echo. The branches that were meant to check one another instead reinforce one another’s dereliction. Congress surrenders; the president seizes; the Court sanctifies. The forms persist—elections are held, opinions are issued, sessions convene—but their meaning is gone. We recite the rituals of democracy while living under the logic of autocracy.

The timeline of 2025 makes visible what might otherwise remain abstract. In June, federal troops deployed to Los Angeles over a governor’s objections—a federal judge would later call it an attempt at “creating a national police force.” In September, the Justice Department indicted a former FBI Director four days after the president’s personal attorney was installed as prosecutor. That same month, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to withhold $4 billion in congressionally appropriated funds, while Justice Kagan warned of executive power unchecked. By October, the government had shut down, 750,000 workers furloughed, and Congress had passed zero of its twelve required appropriations bills. The oligarchs who funded this transformation—thirteen billionaires in the cabinet, one man’s quarter-billion-dollar investment yielding a government position with Treasury access—now govern directly. The forms persist: courts issue rulings the executive ignores, Congress meets but cannot fund the government, elections are held but determined by billions in dark money. What was constitutional architecture has become constitutional theater.

It did not happen overnight. For decades, both parties courted the same wealth, privatized public life, and distracted voters with culture wars while dismantling the civic foundations beneath them. Oligarchic money captured the means of communication, turning news into spectacle and grievance into commodity. In 2024, billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion—$5.7 billion per day, three times faster than the previous year—creating 204 new billionaires, nearly four per week. Meanwhile, median household income increased just $1,040, a statistically insignificant change, remaining essentially flat compared to pre-pandemic levels. The top one-tenth of one percent saw income growth of 1,003% from 1979 to 2021 while the bottom twenty percent experienced 132% growth—meaning top earners’ incomes grew 7.6 times faster. The top ten percent of earners now own 66.6% of all wealth.

Yet on his first day in office in 2025, the president signed executive orders declaring war not on this inequality but on diversity programs, defining sex as “immutable biological classification,” and mandating only two gender options on federal forms. Within two weeks came orders banning transgender military service, pardoning abortion clinic protesters, and threatening to withhold education funding from schools allowing transgender athletes in women’s sports. Five hundred seventy-five anti-LGBTQ state bills were introduced in 2025, with fifty-four passing into law. Twenty-seven states now ban gender-affirming care for minors, affecting 40% of transgender youth. The Attorney General launched a “Civil Rights Fraud Initiative” to prosecute diversity programs while the Civil Rights Division lost sixty percent of its workforce.

When discontent grew, anger was redirected away from the architects of inequality toward the scapegoats of convenience—immigrants, minorities, the powerless. A survey of thirty-six countries found sixty percent of respondents identified “rich people having too much political influence” as the primary cause of inequality, and sixty-six percent of Americans want major economic system changes or complete reform. Yet analysis of the president’s inaugural address and major speeches found he “spent most of his time on the ‘invasion’ of illegal immigrants” and “surprisingly had little to say about his economic plans,” focusing instead on what he termed a “revolution of common sense” emphasizing cultural grievance. Greed, hatred, and fear again proved their ancient utility: they divide the governed and unite their governors.

The result is the government we now inhabit: a Republic that remembers its own name but not its meaning. The Constitution functions as civic décor—invoked ceremonially, ignored in practice. Statutory law becomes optional, precedent disposable, truth negotiable. The president acts; the Court justifies; Congress applauds or cowers. The citizen, bewildered and exhausted, retreats into private life, convinced that participation is futile.

And yet, elegy need not end in silence. The very act of recognizing loss is the beginning of renewal. What has been hollowed out can, in principle, be refilled. But it cannot be refilled by faith in institutions that have already abdicated their purpose. It must begin where the Republic began—in the conscience and courage of ordinary citizens who refuse to mistake ritual for reality. Renewal, if it comes, will come not from those who rule but from those who remember what ruling was meant to serve.

For now, we inhabit echoes. But if we still possess the capacity to listen—to hear the faint music of the Republic beneath the noise of power—then the silence need not be permanent. The dance may yet begin again, not at the command of the puppet master, but when the people cut their strings and remember they were never meant to dance to another’s tune.

Incompetence and Buffoonery: The Threat to Democracy

Preface to the Reader

There was hesitation before I posted the essay below. Not for its merit, but for its timing. I wonder, truly, whether we have already passed the point of rupture—whether the buffoonery we witness in scandals such as Whiskeyleaks (the use of the Signal app by U.S. cabinet officials and others to discuss classified war plans) is not merely incompetence, but a smokescreen for something more deliberate, more calculated, and far more lethal. If the jesters, clowns, and buffoons distract, it may be only so that the knife may fall unnoticed. This essay, then, may read not as prophecy but as postmortem—or as warning flung desperately against a wind already turning. And yet, even still, I believe it must be said.

Note to the Reader

This essay is written not as a partisan screed, nor as a nostalgic lament for some imagined golden age, but as a meditation—part moral reckoning, part civic warning—on the condition of a republic that has allowed itself to descend into spectacle, incoherence, and institutional decay.

It is addressed to those who still believe that government, for all its failings, remains a public trust; that civic virtue is not an antiquated ideal; and that the health of a nation may be measured not merely in wealth or might, but in memory, restraint, and the character of its leaders and laws.

The tone is deliberately severe, for the times are unserious. The satire is not meant to entertain, but to unmask. Where irony sharpens, it does so to reveal truths that cannot be said plainly without losing their edge. And where the anger beneath the prose surfaces, it does so not in despair, but in the hope that the reader, too, is angry—and unwilling to become numb.

This is not a call to revolution, but a call to remembrance, to vigilance, and above all to responsibility. If the republic is to be rebuilt, it will not be by those who broke it, nor by those who profited from its breaking, but by those who, though weary, still believe it is worth the rising.

The Farce of Ruin: On the Buffoonery, Cowardice, and Consent that Endanger the Republic

It becomes difficult indeed to weigh if the republic is more greatly endangered by ignoble, incompetent lackeys such as now populate the greatest offices of state, appointed by the bitter, vengeful, demented, and oft confused and wholly arbitrary despotic personality that resides in the executive mansion, courtesy of the cult of resentment, hate, and fear, than it would have been had he appointed more able men and women to execute his whims and vices. For in one case, we face the farce of ruin—the slow, stumbling, ignoble unraveling of a once-proud polity into absurdity and impotence. In the other, we would face tyranny executed with precision, method, and perhaps permanence. Yet if there is any comfort to be found in chaos, it is this: incompetence leaves wreckage; competence might have left chains. But wreckage, at least, invites the labor of rebuilding—if the will, the memory, and the courage yet remain.

This is the bitter paradox of the present hour: that we may find ourselves grateful not for wisdom, but for the want of it; not for virtue, but for its absence. That the republic’s temporary reprieve lies not in the strength of her institutions nor the vigilance of her people, but in the vacuity and vanity of her despoilers. These are not statesmen in the Roman sense, nor even villains in the Shakespearean; they are caricatures—jesters costumed in stolen robes of office, bumbling through decrees, barking orders not out of conviction but impulse, devoid alike of strategy and shame. And yet, we dare not laugh too loudly. For every laugh chokes on the question: how long can a republic endure when the machinery of its survival is entrusted to hands unfit to hold it?

The Rise of the Cult: Resentment as Political Theology

Power, once grounded in consent and law, now derives its strength from a darker source: resentment. Not merely disappointment or disillusionment, but that deeper, more corrosive sentiment born of perceived humiliation, of grievance nurtured until it metastasizes into dogma. No longer content to reform what they claim to hate, the votaries of this new creed seek instead to destroy—to salt the fields, poison the wells, and tear down every institution that once restrained ambition with honor, and pride with duty.

This is not politics in any meaningful sense. It is theology by other means—a bitter creed that worships neither God nor country but the self, wounded and wrathful. Its high priests preach vengeance cloaked in patriotism, its sacraments are insult and spectacle, and its liturgy is grievance repeated endlessly, unexamined and unrelieved. To belong to this cult is not to believe in anything beyond the negation of others: the “elites,” the “experts,” the “traitors,” the “others”—those perpetual abstractions upon whom every failure may be pinned, every fear projected.

Thus, the executive, himself a totem of grievance, is not admired in spite of his vices but because of them. His incoherence becomes a form of authenticity; his cruelty, a mark of strength; his ignorance, proof that he is unsullied by the corruption of thought. This is the logic of the mob, sanctified and enthroned. It does not seek truth, only validation; not justice, but vengeance. And from such poison grows not a polity, but a pack.

The Machinery of Power: Incompetents in High Places

Once, high office required at least the semblance of merit—a capacity for governance, a grasp of statecraft, or, at the very least, the discretion to defer to those who possessed it. No longer. The new qualification is loyalty alone: loyalty not to the Constitution, not to principle or country, but to personality. And not even to a consistent personality, but to a flickering candle in a tempest—unstable, moody, and perpetually affronted.

Thus have the halls of government been peopled with jesters, flatterers, and feckless opportunists. Ministers of the treasury who do not believe in numbers, secretaries of education who scorn learning, envoys who sabotage diplomacy, and legal advisors who treat the law as a nuisance to be outmaneuvered rather than a structure to be upheld. Their résumés are padded with failure, their careers propped up by sycophancy, their ambitions tethered not to public service but to personal advancement through proximity to power.

Yet their greatest failing is not simply what they do, but what they permit. Their very mediocrity becomes the shield behind which greater abuses are concealed. For while the citizenry scoffs at the spectacle—the press conference gaffes, the mangled grammar, the contradictions piled upon contradictions—policy proceeds maliciously, cruelly. Freed from oversight, insulated by noise, the machinery grinds on: protections undone, laws abandoned, rights weakened, government dismantled, alliances broken. The clown at the helm distracts the gaze, while the bureaucratic knife goes unnoticed beneath the velvet tablecloth.

And in this lies the genius of institutional vandalism: not to destroy with one mighty blow, but to dull the blade slowly—through mismanagement, attrition, and the silent resignation of the capable and the firing of tens of thousands. A thousand small indignities, each one tolerable, each one dismissed, until the edifice no longer stands, and we wonder not when it fell, but how we failed to notice.

The Counterfactual: What If the Tyrant Were Wise?

One is almost tempted to breathe a sigh of relief at the chaos, for chaos is its own limit. A despot who contradicts himself hourly, who governs by whim and forgets his decrees by dusk, is a tyrant only in name. He may wish to rule absolutely, but lacking consistency, foresight, or discipline, he becomes instead a figure of grotesque parody—dangerous, yes, but disarmed by his very incoherence. We may survive him not because of our strength, but because of his weakness.

But imagine, if you will, the inverse: a tyrant possessed of intellect, method, and clarity. One who governs not in the service of ego but of vision—however malignant. One who surrounds himself not with cowed incompetents, but with men and women of ruthless efficiency, cold logic, and administrative precision. This is the tyrant history has known best. It is not the fool who builds the gulag or writes the blacklists, but the functionary with a plan, the theorist with a chart, the orderly mind untroubled by conscience.

Had our moment produced such a figure, how much swifter the erosion of liberty would have been! How much more subtle the theft of rights, how much more durable the machinery of oppression! The republic might not have looked so disordered—it might have seemed vigorous, decisive, strangely efficient. But beneath the appearance of control, the soul of the nation would have already been extinguished, its people transformed not into rebels or resisters, but into docile instruments of the state’s will.

The question, then, is no longer whether we are fortunate in our calamity, but whether we understand its nature. For fools can be replaced. But should a day come when their successors wear the same mask but wield it with purpose—then the hour will be far darker, and the laughter that once served as shield will curdle into silence.

The Theatre of the Absurd: Democracy as Entertainment

If the republic falters from within, it is not only because of those who hold the levers of power, but because of those who have come to see governance not as a civic duty, but as a form of entertainment. The forum has become a stage, the statesman a performer, and the electorate an audience demanding sensation. Nuance bores, compromise offends, and truth is a distant, flickering ghost—unwelcome and unprofitable.

In such a theatre, absurdity is not a bug but a feature. Every gaffe becomes a meme, every outrage a headline, every policy a subplot in an endless narrative of grievance and spectacle. The media, desperate to retain its vanishing grip on attention, ceases to inform and instead curates the drama—cutting, splicing, amplifying. The body politic is no longer a deliberative citizenry but a viewership conditioned to react, not to reason.

And what is the role of the elected official in this new dramaturgy? Not to lead, but to brand. Not to govern, but to trend. They issue not laws, but slogans. They trade not in facts, but in feels. Even their failures become assets, for in the logic of the spectacle, visibility is power, and infamy sells just as well as virtue—often better.

Worse still, even those who know the performance is a fraud feel trapped within it. To disengage is to surrender the stage to the most unscrupulous actors; to engage is to be complicit in a system that rewards noise over thought, allegiance over principle. This is the final genius of the absurd republic: to create a politics where participation itself feels degrading, and yet absence feels dangerous.

Thus the state becomes not a polity of free and deliberative people, but a spectacle of exhaustion. We scroll, we jeer, we despair. But rarely—too rarely—do we act.

The Fragility of Memory: When History No Longer Speaks

No tyranny begins as tyranny. It begins in the forgetting. A forgetting not only of facts or dates, but of the moral weight of precedent, the slow accumulation of civic wisdom, the lessons written in blood and ink by those who came before. When memory is intact, it serves as conscience; when eroded, it becomes convenience. We do not recognize the fall because we no longer remember what it was to stand.

Once, a statesman would rise in the chamber and quote Pericles or Lincoln, Cicero or Solon—not merely to adorn his speech but to anchor it in tradition, to draw from the well of republican virtue. Now, even such allusion is dismissed as elitist pedantry. The past is regarded not as a guide but as a burden, and history is reduced to a buffet of misremembered grievances, curated to flatter the resentful and indict the dead.

In this vacuum, lies grow bold. Fictions parade as fact, myths usurp monuments, and the record of what was is rewritten by those who benefit from what is. The archives decay; the historians, sidelined or silenced, speak to a shrinking audience. Memory becomes tribal, curated by algorithm and sentiment. The young no longer study the fragility of freedom because it is no longer taught. The old recall its price, but their warnings are heard as the mutterings of a defeated past.

And what, then, remains? A citizenry adrift—cut loose from history’s moorings, vulnerable to every charlatan with a flag and a grievance. The republic, in such a state, is no longer endangered by enemies at the gates, but by the silence within. Not the silence of censorship, but the quieter, more dangerous silence of indifference. The silence that follows when memory no longer speaks and no one cares to ask what it once said.

Wreckage or Rebirth?

It is tempting, when surveying the present wreckage, to surrender to despair—to believe that the republic, having stumbled so absurdly into decline, can never be set aright. The pillars have cracked, the roof sags, and the foundation seems to shift beneath our feet. But wreckage, for all its tragedy, is not the same as ruin. What has been shattered can, in principle, be rebuilt. The question is whether the will endures, and whether the anger now rising can be forged into resolve rather than simply rage.

For there is anger—mounting, justified, and no longer concealed. It grows not within the cult, but outside it, among those who have watched with clenched jaws as the instruments of governance were handed to buffoons and cowards, as the executive strutted and raged, as the political class bowed and curtsied, mumbling excuses, averting eyes, trading principle for position. And it is not merely the executive that earns their ire, but the entire edifice of acquiescence—a legislature that mutters indignation but funds the farce all the same; a judiciary that, cloaked in solemnity, too often validates the very abuses it ought to constrain. These are not neutral bystanders. They are collaborators by convenience, guardians turned ushers to a constitutional catastrophe.

And so the citizen watches, furious and exhausted, as the republic’s very stewards conspire in its diminishment. Yet this fury, though dangerous if left to fester, may still be redemptive if rightly directed. The task is not to lament the collapse of a golden age that never was, but to resist the entrenchment of a cynical age that need not be. The republic will not be saved by the institutions that failed to defend it, nor by the party machines that greased its fall. If salvation comes, it will be through memory rekindled, virtue rediscovered, and courage reclaimed—not in grand gestures, but in the hard, slow work of rebuilding what was squandered.

We stand, then, not at the end, but at a crossroads between farce fulfilled and tragedy averted. The clowns will fall—their nature guarantees it. But what comes next will not be dictated by their collapse. It will be shaped by those who remain: the watchful, the angry, the resolute. The question is not whether the republic can rise again, but whether we still believe it is worth the rising.