How We’re Torching Our Own System
The most chilling image from America’s historical lynchings wasn’t the rope—it was the burning cross. That flaming symbol served a dual purpose: it didn’t destroy the cross to eliminate it, but set it ablaze to weaponize it, transforming a symbol of protection into an instrument of terror. Today, American democracy has learned this same twisted lesson, burning its own sacred institutions not to destroy them, but to use them as weapons against political opponents.
Walk past any courthouse today and you might glimpse democracy’s burning cross—not a literal wooden structure, but the Constitution itself being set ablaze by the very people sworn to protect it. Federal agencies weaponized against political enemies. Electoral processes manipulated to eliminate opposition voices. Civil liberties transformed from shields protecting citizens into swords cutting down dissent. This isn’t government breakdown—it’s government perfection. Democracy has achieved its ultimate potential as a system where majorities can use democratic tools to eliminate democratic opposition permanently. The Constitution burns brightest when used not to limit power, but to justify unlimited control over minority voices.
German legal scholar Carl Schmitt understood this dynamic when he declared that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception”—the power to suspend normal rules inevitably becomes the power to weaponize those rules against enemies. Today’s America demonstrates Schmitt’s insight in real time as democratic majorities declare states of emergency, claim existential threats, and justify suspending constitutional protections for their political opponents.
James Madison believed constitutional engineering could prevent this outcome. His solution in Federalist 10—extending the republic to prevent any single faction from gaining tyrannical control—assumed that majorities would voluntarily restrain their power to preserve democratic institutions. Madison’s fatal error was believing that constitutional mechanisms could prevent majorities from weaponizing those very mechanisms against minorities. Today we see Madison’s cure transformed into democracy’s poison. Separation of powers becomes gridlock designed to prevent minority voices from accessing governance. Checks and balances become weapons majorities deploy against minority power while balancing exclusively among themselves. The extended republic Madison championed simply means democratic immolation occurs on a continental scale. Abraham Lincoln articulated democracy’s essential requirements: consent of the governed, majority rule, but always under the rule of law. Lincoln’s faith in democratic self-limitation proved tragically naive. His “House Divided” speech revealed democracy’s most dangerous tendency—the majority’s belief that it can democratically vote to deny the humanity of some citizens. When democracy votes to exclude voices from participation, it doesn’t violate democratic principles; it fulfills them.
French observer Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed the early stages of this democratic immolation during his 1830s American journey, observing how democratic despotism operated by “going straight for the soul, not the body.” Tocqueville recognized that democratic tyranny would be uniquely insidious because it would emerge from democratic processes themselves—not as their negation, but as their fulfillment. Contemporary America has achieved Tocqueville’s nightmare: citizens self-censor rather than face social exile, democratic participation becomes personally dangerous, and the majority’s power to ostracize creates more effective control than formal tyranny ever could. The burning cross becomes internalized as each citizen carries the flame of democratic terror within their own conscience.
John Stuart Mill’s warnings about “tyranny of the majority” proved insufficient because Mill failed to anticipate how democratic societies would weaponize social ostracism more effectively than legal persecution. Today’s “cancel culture” represents the perfect fusion of governmental and social tyranny, where algorithmic mobs enforce majoritarian will through coordinated digital violence.
The most terrifying aspect of democracy’s self-immolation lies in how it has normalized political emergency. Contemporary democratic societies no longer need formal declarations to suspend constitutional protections—they simply declare political opponents threats to democracy itself, justifying any measures necessary to preserve democratic institutions from democratic enemies. This appears in systematic targeting of political opponents, weaponization of federal agencies, and transformation of political disagreement into existential threat. When democratic majorities claim that minority voices constitute threats to democracy, they create permanent justification for suspending democratic protections. Political intimidation operates through this logic: majorities don’t formally suspend constitutional rights—they create environments where exercising those rights becomes personally dangerous. Police forces, courts, regulatory agencies, and educational institutions all become instruments in this cycle, operating in what philosopher Walter Benjamin called the “murky penumbra” between law-making and law-preserving functions. They preserve democratic law by making new law that eliminates democracy’s capacity for self-correction.
Democracy’s burning cross illuminates the fundamental contradiction at the heart of self-governance: democratic systems depend on citizens voluntarily restraining their democratic power, but democracy provides no mechanism to ensure such restraint. Citizens can vote to eliminate voting rights, use free speech to silence speech, employ democratic processes to end democratic governance—all while claiming to defend democracy from its enemies. This represents not the failure of democratic institutions, but their success. Democracy has achieved its ultimate potential as a system of majoritarian domination that weaponizes its own sacred symbols against political dissent. Contemporary “democratic backsliding” misdiagnoses the problem by assuming democracy is under attack from external forces. In reality, democracy is committing suicide through perfect operation of its own mechanisms. Majorities have learned they can use democratic power to eliminate democratic opposition permanently, transforming election victories into permanent conquest and constitutional protections into weapons of political war. The burning cross appears on courthouse steps not as violation of democratic norms, but as their fulfillment.
The fundamental question becomes unavoidable: Where did this grand experiment in self-governance go so catastrophically wrong? The answer lies not in democracy’s recent failures, but in its foundational impossibility. Democracy’s promise—that citizens can govern themselves through voluntary cooperation and mutual respect—depends on virtues that democratic systems cannot cultivate and cannot require. Perhaps ancient philosophers were correct to view democracy as inherently unstable, destined to collapse into tyranny through operation of its own mechanisms. Aristotle’s classification of democracy as the “perverted form” of rule by the many may have been prophetic rather than prejudicial. When citizens use democratic power primarily to advance narrow interests rather than common good, democracy becomes a system for legitimizing mutual predation.
Could democracy be reformed to prevent this self-immolation? Constitutional amendments requiring supermajorities for fundamental changes, stronger minority protections, institutional buffers against majoritarian passion—all such proposals assume democratic citizens would voluntarily constrain their power to preserve democratic institutions. But democracy’s burning cross reveals the fatal flaw: majorities who have tasted the power to eliminate enemies will not voluntarily surrender that power to preserve abstract democratic principles. Maybe the only honest conclusion is that democracy, like all political systems, contains within itself the mechanism of its own destruction. The burning cross will continue illuminating democratic landscapes until citizens learn to love their system more than their causes, to value process more than outcomes, to treat democratic institutions as sacred precisely because they are fragile. But democracy provides no mechanism to ensure such learning, and historical experience suggests majorities prefer conquest to constitutional constraint when given the choice. The cross burns brightest when democracy wants to terrorize its own citizens, and the flame shows no sign of extinguishing.
The ashes of democratic norms drift across a political landscape where citizens fear their own government not because it has become tyrannical, but because it has become perfectly democratic—responsive to majoritarian will, efficient in operation, and ruthless in eliminating dissent. Democracy’s burning cross reveals not the failure of self-government, but its terrible success.
We have met the enemy of democracy, and it is us.
