Democracy is slipping away in front of our eyes. Take the UK: Brexit was supposed to be about restoring democratic control – choosing Representatives who could shape the nation’s path. Yet today, voters can still pick their leaders, but not the policies that matter. The elected are boxed in, terrified of doing the hard work of addressing the public’s real concerns. Instead, they dodge, suppress, and shame those concerns into silence. And when the ballot box stops delivering answers, people turn elsewhere – towards movements and figures who will promise to listen. The elites are scared of the people. They look back at 1930s Europe and see only racism and fascism in any expression of national identity. But here’s the irony: it isn’t the people who are authoritarian – it’s the elites themselves. They cannot conceive of the majority as anything but a dangerous mob, so they cocoon themselves in bubbles where dissent is “fringe.” They never notice that they themselves are becoming irrelevant. And when reality presses too hard – on immigration, on culture, on crime – they reach for a ready deflection: Palestine. A safe foreign cause to posture about, where chanting slogans and waving flags is easier than fixing what’s broken at home. And this isn’t just Britain. In the U.S., the left convinced themselves that Donald Trump was a fascist aberration. But what does that say about them, when millions turned to him in the first place? If you can’t imagine why people reject your worldview, maybe it’s not them who are in “la-la land.” It’s you. The same media that styles itself as democracy’s watchdog couldn’t predict his rise, because they stopped listening long ago. The supreme irony is that the “democrats” of our age – those who claim to defend democracy against the mob – are the very ones hollowing it out. They won’t engage, they won’t adapt, they won’t confront hard truths. Instead, they muzzle dissent, wave Palestinian flags, and congratulate themselves for protecting “liberal values.” But democracy means trusting the people, not policing them. And without that, the word itself becomes an empty slogan.

Posted by Fred Bassett