The Great American Shrug
What happens when a nation treats a roadmap for autocracy like a campaign 'brand'? Have we stopped being citizens and started being an audience? It’s time to talk about how we lost the version of ourselves that was supposed to care enough to keep our democracy. We were told our democracy had guardrails. What we didn’t realize is that guardrails are made of people—and those people decided to stop checking. We didn’t lose our freedom to a secret plot; we lost it to a collective shrug. Our new reality is that America has become a spectator State.
He told us what he wanted to do before he was elected; he told us he didn’t want any more elections and wanted to keep running as the nation's leader regardless of term limits. And we shrugged. He was voted in anyway.
We are living in the space between the country we were promised in civics class and the reality sitting right in front of us. For generations, we leaned on foundational beliefs that have turned out to be hollow.
We were raised to believe that the American citizen was a vigilant watchman. The theory was simple: if a candidate openly threatened the mechanics of democracy, the "informed electorate" would see it as a structural alarm bell and collectively reject it. We thought there were certain "disqualifiers" that no one could survive.
When he said he wanted to bypass the traditional limits of power, we didn't reach for the history books—we reached for the remote. We treated his intent like a campaign "brand" rather than a literal roadmap. We watched the dismantling of our norms as if it were a high-stakes season finale, waiting to see what happened next rather than realizing we were the ones the house was falling on. We traded our role as participants for the comfort of being an audience.
And now another, more painful realization: our belief that freedom is a permanent, physical property we own. We treated liberty like a house we inherited—something that would just always be there, requiring no maintenance, as solid as the Earth.
We had a blind faith in "checks and balances," as if they were a series of automated tripwires that would stop any overreach. We assumed the law was a machine that ran itself. From where I sit, it’s clear that those checks were never made of iron; they were made of people. And when those people decide to stop checking—or when the spectators decide that "entertainment" is more important than "process"—the guardrails don't just break; they vanish.
The USA is no longer the "land of the free" in the way the brochures described it. That version of America relied on a citizenry that prioritized the process over the personality. By voting him in after he told us exactly how he would dismantle that process, we didn't just break a rule; we proved that the myths we believed about ourselves were never actually true.
We didn't lose our democracy because of a secret plot. We lost the version of ourselves that was supposed to care enough to keep it. We chose the remote over the responsibility, and now we are left watching the credits roll on a myth we thought would last forever.
