Liberal democracy was once a form of government. Now it has become a shallow civic religion and it really sucks.

The Carolabrücke in Dresden collapsed over six months ago, and the city still has yet to pull the rubble out of the Elbe, let alone outline concrete plans for its replacement. Democracy!

The plague chronicle has been operating at low capacity for some weeks now. This has been a time of transition for me – of moving vans, of boxes, of packing and unpacking, of great chaos, as I have begun shifting my life from the pre-Alpine foothills of upper Bavaria to the forests of east Thüringen. Finally I am back, with sore muscles from lifting things, but otherwise energised than ever. The prose has been building within me, like waters behind a dam.

Unfortunately, everyone is talking about tariffs right now, and economic matters fall beyond the competence of the plague chronicle. I don’t have much wisdom to offer on the present hullabaloo. Instead, I will use my return post to get a rant off my chest.

There is a thing that happens every time I write a post – like my last one – that refers to American or French or European “democracy.” This thing, is that an earnest constitutionally-minded person will stop by my comments or fire off an email to inform me that the United States or France or whichever country I characterised as being a Democracy is in fact not a democracy. It is a constitutional monarchy, they will tell me, or it is a constitutional republic, or whatever it might happen to be. Get it right eugyppius! Why can’t you get this through your head eugyppius! Stupid eugyppius!

I welcome corrections, but this particular nitpick has begun to irritate me. I don’t know what has been happening to these people, such that they can remain oblivious to the sheer level of retard our discourse has achieved since my student days. Perhaps they have spent the last 35 years in a coma, like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, awaiting the second coming of socialism. We are in the throes of a bizarre civic religion and nobody gives the slightest shit about the legal distinctions that may set self-proclaimed constitutional republics apart from self-proclaimed parliamentary democracies. All roads must be cleared, all innocents sacrificed, all offerings burnt before the terrible, uniform political idol we call Democracy.

Capitalised Democracy is not the same thing as a republic or an uncapitalised democracy; it is not even the same category of thing. When I talk about “democracy,” I am almost always referencing capitalised Democracy, because capitalised Democracy is the only thing anybody cares about or wants to talk about anymore. Below the fold I am going to explain what capitalised Democracy is and why it is bad and why I hope we can get rid of this ridiculous concept, which is stupid and stultifying and should be an insult to any thinking person.