§9 — The impotence of liberal democracy (this part is allowed to be frightening)

Here we let ourselves be afraid, briefly and on purpose.

The institution we trusted to check all of this — liberal democracy, the rule of law, the free press, the ballot — was built for a slower world and a different scale of actor. It assumes adversaries who share its premises, that exposure produces shame, that shame produces consequence. But what happens when the actors announce they regard the whole arrangement as an obstacle? When code and capital so far outrun legislation that the law is forever litigating the last decade while the next is already deployed? When the press meant to be the immune system is itself a holding of the manor? When a transparency law is passed and then met, as we saw in §3, with redaction, delay, and the quiet surveillance of the very legislators who demanded the truth?

The honest answer is that the old checks have grown slow, captured, and increasingly hollow, and we have not yet built the new ones. Our leaders, taken as a class, appear to carry less learning, less vocation, and less grace than the gravity of the hour demands; the offices remain, but the stature in them has thinned. This is the frightening part, and we will not soften it, because softening it is the very fatuousness we warned against. To insist the institutions are fine is to be well-adjusted to a sickness.