A Clarifying Note on "The Performance of Power"
When I write about democracy's rubble phase, I should clarify what I mean. Pro-democracy forces haven't been defeated. We can still win elections and bring about democratic regeneration. The midterms still matter. 2028 still matters. Democracy is not out of the fight. Democratic possibility still exists within our institutions.
But we cannot credibly claim the United States is currently functioning as a democracy. Authoritarian forces have seized the machinery of the state. Courts retain sufficient popular legitimacy to constrain full consolidation of authoritarian control, but they are losing ground daily.
We haven't lost the war for democracy. But we exist in a state of interregnum—not democracy, not yet full autocracy, but something suspended between them. Recognizing this isn't defeatism. It's the clarity required to understand what kind of fight we're actually in.
You’ve named it exactly. Rubble is not ruins.
We live in neither democracy nor autocracy.
It’s a liminal space. Fragile enough to collapse. Still porous to renewal.
To call it defeat is self-deception in reverse. To call it democracy is worse.
The fight is real. So is the possibility.
(Interregna, after all, are when futures get written.)
I think this is very true, but it worries me the extent to which the US may have allowed vested interests like ES&S, Eaton, Dominion and Palantir to take over the management and provision of the firmware and software by which votes are now captured. I heard that a recent software update, without any official oversight, placed the electionware config.ini on the other side of the firewall, where it is not even encrypted or write-protected. Updates are frequently made also to the TRIPP UPS software, to which Windows allows root access, without even a net change manifest. Perhaps all is under control and I'm just feeling a little paranoia but I wonder whether sham elections for all three houses may be the order of the day in the US from now on. It would hardly be the first autocratic regime to stage phoney elections to placate the public, but this may be the first that's technologically accomplished enough to pull it off convincingly.