The Democracy Papers Eighteen

How We Got Here

We told ourselves the system would hold. That democracy had guardrails. That if things got bad, rules would kick in and stop them from getting worse. But rules don’t enforce themselves. Not that bad guys care about rules anyway.

This didn't happen out of nowhere, like some believe. We fed the trolls. We humored them. We let them poke and prod and test their boundaries without any real consequences. And when they demanded more, we caved. One compromise at a time. This is what happens when good, well-meaning people operate under the assumption that playing fair will work against those who play dirty and why you should never bring a knife to a gunfight.

Compliance in Advance

The first mistake wasn’t even made by the 'bad guys'. It was made by those of us who assumed this was still ‘business as usual.’ That the system would self-correct. That it wasn’t our job to shut things down before they spiraled. But institutions don’t protect themselves. They require people willing to say no before the damage is done.

Instead, we complied in advance. We let the Overton window shift, inch by inch. We ignored the warning signs when fascists realized they didn’t need to seize total power overnight, they just had to see how much they could get away with. We have been watching our agencies get defunded, irreplaceable expertise purged, bad-faith actors be given platforms under the guise of ‘debate,’ We assumed the system would eventually step in. It never did.

A Physical DDoS on Our Government

Now, we’re seeing the end result: a deliberate, coordinated denial-of-service attack on the hallowed institutions that keep this country running.

The government isn’t being dismantled in one clean strike. It’s being drowned in noise, in administrative sabotage, in mass firings, in bureaucratic gridlock that keeps essential services from functioning. Every department, every agency, every federal program that millions of Americans rely on is under attack. Not by bombs or soldiers, but by deliberately sown chaos.

• Career civil servants are being forced out not because they’re bad at their jobs, but because they’re too good at them.
• Essential government functions are being overloaded with bad-faith requests, nonsense policies and intentional mismanagement to slow them to a crawl.
• Leadership is being replaced with loyalists whose sole job is to break things faster.
• Critical services like FEMA, NOAA, USAID and the Department of Education are being left leaderless, defunded or outright gutted under the guise of ‘efficiency.’

This is what happens when an entire government is forced to spend more time fighting internal sabotage than actually doing its job.

The Myth of the Failsafe

We told ourselves that a democracy this old couldn’t collapse overnight. That our courts, our Constitution, our checks and balances would keep us safe. That there would always be a line that couldn’t be crossed.

But there is no magic failsafe. No system, no rule, no founding document can protect itself against people willing to break it. A system is only as strong as the people willing to fight for it.

The worst part is that many of those who helped usher in this crisis aren't the villains. They were people who thought they were keeping the peace, who assumed someone else would step in, who wanted to believe this was all temporary.

Don't Feed the Trolls

The time for humoring bad-faith actors is over. This is not a drill, it’s a demolition. They are burning down the system in real time and the only way to stop them is to stop pretending they’ll respect boundaries that no longer exist.

No more compliance in advance. No more waiting for a savior that isn’t coming. No more treating this like business as usual.

We fight now. Or we lose everything.