The first rule of dying democracies is that nobody notices until the casket is already lowered into the ground. By then, the guests are too busy checking their phones to clap, or to care, or to even remember whose funeral they’re attending. America, it turns out, is the kind of family that shows up late to the burial with half-eaten Chick-fil-A bags and then wanders off before the preacher’s done.
Yes, we’ve become a nation of sleepwalkers, drooling on the pillow while the walls cave in around us. And yet, even as fascism plays peek-a-boo in broad daylight, the overwhelming response from the general public has been a shrug, a scroll, and maybe a TikTok about sourdough starters.
ICE as Community Theater, But with Guns
Take ICE. The agency now behaves less like law enforcement and more like an improv troupe with automatic weapons. Think “Yes, and…” but with checkpoints. They’ve decided their role in this national tragedy is to cosplay as a twenty-first-century Gestapo, storming neighborhoods, staging raids, and waiting for someone to blink wrong so they can manufacture the “threat” they need. The irony is grotesque: the same people who complain about “Big Government tyranny” cheer while that tyranny drags brown families into vans on live TV.
But we don’t riot. We don’t march. We don’t even change the channel. We scroll past the clips, mumbling something about “both sides are bad,” as though there’s a second side to unmarked vans prowling the streets.
The Military as Background Extras
Meanwhile, soldiers in fatigues are now part of the cityscape—set pieces in a stage play nobody paid to watch. They hover on corners with rifles, reminders that the government doesn’t just want your vote, it wants your obedience. The creeping militarization of everyday life used to be the kind of thing we’d point at in foreign countries and call a dictatorship. Now it’s the kind of thing we breeze past on the way to Starbucks.
People once risked their lives to protest Vietnam. Today, we barely risk a parking ticket to protest democracy itself dissolving in real time. The apathy isn’t just staggering—it’s weaponized. Power has learned that it doesn’t need permission if the crowd’s asleep.
The DOJ as Personal Hit Squad
The Justice Department—once imagined as a bulwark of law and principle—has been remade into a private law firm for one man’s vendettas. Enemies get indicted on live television, trial dates scheduled like season finales. Allies skate, facts vanish, and loyalty is the only currency that counts. The entire apparatus is a reality show in robes, with the Constitution reduced to the fine print of a nondisclosure agreement.
This isn’t justice. It’s weaponry. It’s not blind; it’s cross-eyed, squinting only at whoever the President’s thumbs decide should be destroyed today. Yet what’s the public response? “Well, I heard he had it coming.” Or, “That’s just politics.”
Politics? No. This is the undoing of politics—the raw domination of one man’s will, replayed nightly on a fractured cable landscape where no two channels agree what country we’re even living in.
Misinformation as the New National Anthem
The lies aren’t whispered. They’re shouted. The claim that immigrants are spreading disease, that political enemies are running child sex rings, that the press is the enemy of the people—all of it so nakedly false it would be laughable if it weren’t lethal. And yet the lies circulate because truth has no circulation desk left.
Every American now inhabits a private news universe. Some get their headlines from Fox, others from MSNBC, others from TikTok clips so chopped up they may as well be fan fiction. There is no longer a baseline of fact to disagree about. We’re not debating reality—we’re franchising it.
And here’s the kicker: nobody trusts anyone, but everyone trusts something. My truth. Your truth. Their truth. The end result? No truth. Which is the perfect climate for authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism with a Smile
Trump, the accidental Caesar, leans into this environment like a shark that’s learned blood tastes like Diet Coke. He doesn’t just survive in the chaos—he thrives on it, bending each fresh crisis into proof of his “plenary authority,” that magical term Stephen Miller flung like a spell into the discourse.
It doesn’t matter that the term essentially means “unlimited power.” Half the country shrugged. The other half laughed nervously. Very few asked: what happens when he actually uses it?
But the thing about authoritarianism is that it doesn’t arrive jackbooted in the night—it arrives in a golf cart, smiling, waving, insisting everything is normal. And by the time you notice the bootprint on your neck, it’s too late to complain.
The Toilet Bowl Spiral
Let’s be clear: this country is circling the drain. The water’s already spinning. The smell is unmistakable. And yet the national mood is: “Eh, it’ll probably be fine.”
We’re governed by apathy now, not laws. Apathy is the new Speaker of the House. Apathy runs the courts, dictates the headlines, fills the streets.
We are a culture that can’t hold a thought longer than a meme, can’t sustain outrage longer than a news cycle, can’t even remember which lie we were supposed to be mad about yesterday.
Democracy isn’t being murdered. It’s being ghosted.
The Failure of Outrage
Where are the mass strikes? Where are the crowds outside courthouses? Where are the sit-ins, the walk-outs, the boycotts? They’re gone. Replaced by hashtags, by change.org petitions, by YouTube rants monetized with ads for protein powder.
The people who once chained themselves to lunch counters now refresh Twitter for dopamine hits. The people who once defied water hoses now film TikToks explaining why voting doesn’t matter.
We are too comfortable to rebel, too distracted to notice, and too exhausted to care.
When the Alarm Finally Rings
And here’s the darkest truth: by the time we wake up, it’ll be too late. By the time the tanks roll not just through city streets but through our neighborhoods, our protests will be drowned out by the clanking of machinery already in motion. By the time the news anchors are jailed, the presses shuttered, the unions dismantled, the dissenters disappeared—then, maybe, we’ll start to panic.
But panic is useless when the doors are already locked.
The warning lights are all flashing. The Gestapo cosplay. The militarization of life. The lies accepted as gospel. The weaponization of law. The silencing of speech. The decay of truth itself.
And yet: silence. Shrugs. Snores.
The Great Shrug
America’s obituary will read: “They could have stopped it. They chose not to.” Not because we lacked power, but because we lacked will. Because the country of revolutions decided TikTok dances were more important than revolutions.
We are not being conquered. We are being abandoned—by ourselves.
The Final Yawn
It doesn’t end with a bang. It doesn’t even end with a whimper. It ends with the sound of a collective nation rolling over in bed, hitting snooze, and mumbling, “Wake me when it’s over.”
The tragedy is not that democracy is breaking apart. The tragedy is that nobody gives a flying shit until the pieces fall on their own heads. By then, there’s nothing left to defend, only ruins to photograph.
And those photographs? They’ll get three likes, maybe four, before being buried under the next viral distraction.
Sleep well, America. The funeral’s already scheduled.