There is something unsatisfying about the way we talk about democracy. We treat it as if it were a mathematical equation, always yielding the same result. We treat it as a self-regulating system where power is neatly divided, and no one ever truly governs. But democracy is not an insurance policy. It promises nothing, guarantees nothing, protects nothing. It is just as capable of undermining itself as it is of elevating itself.
By Rafael Baroch
Perhaps this is liberalism’s greatest misconception: the belief that democracy is inherently liberal. That if you build enough institutions, power will dissolve into harmlessness. But power is never harmless, and those who try to divide it will eventually see it claimed. Not through procedure, not by committee, but by whoever has the will to decide. The question, then, is not whether democracy is failing but whether it is only now revealing its true nature. And if that is the case, why did we ever believe otherwise?
Donald Trump is in his second term. Hundreds of executive orders have already been signed, each time before the cameras, each time with a pen in hand, each time with a signature that speaks louder than a thousand congressional debates. This is no aberration, no deviation, no flaw in democracy. This is democracy. In its purest, unmediated form: the leader who decides and the people who cheer.
Liberal Democracy Stares into the Abyss. Not because Trump is destroying it. No, its tragedy is that it never truly understood itself. It sold itself as a system of reason, checks and balances, and rational deliberation. But that was never what democracy really was. Democracy is the unity of leader and people, the direct bond between those who decide and those who are decided over. The rest—institutions, the rule of law, consensus—is decoration, a well-meaning attempt to dress power in civility. But power remains power. And those who forget that lose.
The Fiction of Liberal Democracy
Liberal democracy was always a promise, but one built on a contradiction. It claimed to balance power while diluting it, guarantee freedom while imposing order, and preserve democracy while restraining its most volatile impulses.
It was presented as the end of history, a final, self-sustaining equilibrium in which politics would become procedural and governance reduced to administration. The struggle for sovereignty, the raw and often dangerous reality of power, was supposedly over.
This was the illusion. Liberal democracy was not resolving political conflict—it was a temporary suspension. It survived not because it had solved the fundamental question of power but because it had deferred it, buried it under a labyrinth of institutions, laws, and moral imperatives that obscured the underlying reality: that all governance ultimately rests on decision, and all decision-making requires a sovereign.
Liberal democracy relied on a set of fictions, each more fragile than its defenders were willing to admit. It claimed that legitimacy came from procedure rather than personality and that politics could be depersonalised and transformed into a rational discourse between institutions. It insisted that power could be neutralised through checks and balances and that law would always prevail over the whims of individuals. And above all, it preached that democracy was synonymous with liberalism—that the people, given the right conditions, would always choose moderation, dialogue, and incremental progress over forceful action.
But history has shown otherwise. Some of the most catastrophic authoritarian regimes of the modern era—Hitler, Stalin, Putin—did not rise in opposition to democracy but out of its ruins. This does not mean democracy itself inevitably leads to dictatorship. That would be an oversimplification.
Rather, liberal democracy, in its obsession with proceduralism and institutional safeguards, is structurally incapable of defending itself against those who reject its premises. It creates a system so focused on limiting power that, when faced with an existential crisis, it cannot act decisively—allowing those willing to seize power to do so unopposed.
This pattern is not coincidental. The Weimar Republic did not collapse because democracy was too strong but because it was too weak to withstand its contradictions. Hitler did not overthrow a dictatorship; he took control of a fragile democratic system that had lost its ability to govern effectively.
The same can be said of Russia in the 1990s: liberal reforms did not strengthen democracy; they hollowed it out, creating a vacuum that Putin exploited. Stalin’s rise was not a violent seizure of power from an external enemy but the logical consequence of a system that had internalised the idea that power must always be constrained by ideology rather than wielded with authority.
Liberal democracy is not the safeguard against totalitarianism that it pretends to be. On the contrary, it has been the single most significant breeding ground for totalitarian takeovers in modern history. When crises arise, it lacks the decisive authority to act, and when power becomes too fragmented, opportunists inevitably step in to claim it.
Yet, instead of addressing this fundamental flaw, liberals insist that their system is the only thing preventing tyranny. This is their most effective rhetorical trick: to suggest that any alternative to liberal democracy must be either fascism or chaos. The same logic dictates that anything outside the progressive worldview must be labelled as reactionary or oppressive. But this is simply false.
Democracy does not require liberalism to function. A sovereign democracy is entirely possible, where power is genuinely vested in the people rather than in unelected bureaucracies and procedural inertia. A system where governance is based on democratic legitimacy rather than judicial review and administrative constraints is not inherently authoritarian—it is simply more honest about where the real power lies.
History teaches us not that democracy leads to dictatorship but that a weak, indecisive democracy—paralysed by its contradictions—creates the very conditions in which dictatorship thrives.
The End of Liberalism, Not Democracy
And so we arrive at the core of the matter. It is not democracy that is disappearing under Trump. It is liberalism. And that is precisely why the old guard is panicking—not because they care about democracy in any meaningful sense, but because they are witnessing the unravelling of their version of it—the version built on institutional restraint, legal abstractions, and the illusion that power can be permanently tamed.
For decades, liberalism sought to dilute democracy into the process. It surrounded politics with procedural safeguards, judicial oversight, and bureaucratic inertia, convinced that history had reached a point where power could be administered rather than exercised. But power is never neutral, and democracy is not a managerial exercise.
It is a force—raw, decisive, often unsettling. Liberal democracy thrived only as long as no one seriously questioned its premises. The moment someone stepped forward and refused to accept its procedural constraints, the system had no answer—because it had long since lost the ability to defend itself.
Trump understands this. He has seen that liberal democracy is helpless against a leader who refuses to follow its rules. The system, built on the assumption that power would forever be mediated through institutions, was never prepared for someone willing to claim power directly.
That is why he is not merely an accidental president, a fluke of electoral politics, but perhaps the most significant revolutionary of the past hundred years: he is not abolishing liberal democracy but replacing it with something else.
The question is no longer whether liberal democracy will survive. That battle has already been fought, and it has already been lost. The real question is what will take its place. And whether it is something we can accept or will merely resist while it inevitably advances. Real politics is not a domain of negotiation and neutrality but a contest of power. And power, once reclaimed, does not return to abstraction.
And Trump? He rules. Openly, without masks, without pretence. Before the cameras, pen in hand—not as an anomaly, but as the embodiment of what democracy truly is.
What about the people? They cheer because they know the time of hesitant compromises is over.
