To insist that he won the 2020 election is lunacy. To double down on oil and gas while Pacific Palisades burns is lunacy. To mistreat federal workers is lunacy. But in a nation of, by, and for the people, the truest lunatics are the people themselves. Some voted a convicted criminal back into office—lunacy. Others, in their moral fervor, voted against him, lending legitimacy to a grotesque spectacle—lunacy. And beneath it all festers the grandest lunacy of all: the belief that democracy, this wheezing, blundering, corrupt farce, is the highest achievement of governance.

But this is no ordinary madness. The truly insane man, in rare moments of clarity, knows he is insane. Here, the disease is more insidious. The people, gripped by the delirium of their own exceptionalism, preen and strut, each convinced of their righteousness, each blind to their absurdity. This is not merely insanity—it is insanity fused with vanity, armored in ignorance, made incurable by conviction. A nation drunk on its own mythology, mistaking collective folly for genius, hurtling toward ruin with the smug assurance of the divinely chosen.

The Founding Fathers, in their grand wisdom, fashioned this bold experiment some 250 years ago—an experiment Plato dismissed as “a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.” Aristotle was even less charitable, calling democracy “a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments.” Yet, undeterred by these ancient warnings, the Founders pressed forward. Give them credit, if nothing else, for audacity.

A century later, before the whole contraption had fully collapsed under its own absurdities, Mencken penned his scathing indictment: “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” Naturally, his warning was ignored. Through the Cold War, the republic staggered along, held together perhaps only by the necessity of a common foe. When that foe crumbled under its own ineptitude, the triumph was mistaken for proof of our superiority—the so-called end of history. In truth, it was only the beginning of our decay. With no enemy left to distract us, we turned inward, finding in each other the adversary we so desperately required.

Today, the nation’s learned men—its political scientists and historians—see the defects in the system but remain paralyzed by their veneration of the Founders, those sainted architects whose wisdom, they insist, must be beyond reproach. And so, they ignore the simplest truth of all: democracy, far from being the best system of governance, may well be the worst. And yet, in a supreme irony, some believe the cure for its failures is even more democracy—that every last idiot must vote, that the solution to a drowning man’s plight is to pour in more water.

In any other system, one’s neighbor’s ignorance is a private misfortune, a thing to be pitied or ignored. But in this glorious contraption, his folly dictates policy, his delusions shape law, and his vote carries the same weight as that of a man who can think. His stupidity is not merely his own burden—it becomes yours. The result? Endless strife, a nation at war with itself, where neither side can abide the other, where civility is a relic and compromise a fool’s errand. This polarization, so often bemoaned, is not an accidental affliction of democracy—it is its natural and inevitable product. The disease is not division; the disease is democracy itself.

Our nation has done some good—that is undeniable. We helped defeat fascism in World War II, rebuilt shattered nations through the Marshall Plan, and led advancements in science, technology, and human rights. Yet for every noble act, there is an atrocity to match. We reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ash in an instant. We propped up brutal dictators—Pinochet, Suharto—when it suited our interests. We orchestrated coups, armed death squads, crushed democratic movements in the name of preserving freedom.

Consider the Iraq War. Under false pretenses, we decimated a nation, claiming weapons of mass destruction that never existed. We killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis at the cost of thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars. We bombed cities, tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, turned a sovereign nation into a lawless wasteland. We imposed democracy at gunpoint, failed, and were expelled in disgrace. Even the insane must admit our guilt. And yet, our so-called representatives—elected, but never to be mistaken for leaders—were never held accountable. Instead, they avoid foreign travel for fear of arrest as war criminals. We, the people, did nothing. Some marched, some protested, some shouted into the void—but in the end, it changed nothing. In a government of, by, and for the people, these crimes are not just the government’s—they are ours. To live under this system is to share in its sins, no matter our personal opposition. We cannot wash our hands of them when we fund them, enable them, and resign ourselves to their continuation.

Never mind the slow, grinding ruin of the planet—on top of that, to live under this system is to endure an unending deluge of verbal vomit, spewed forth by both sides with tireless enthusiasm. Once, democracy’s flaws were masked by institutions, by a semblance of decorum, by the illusion of competence. Now, the façade has crumbled, leaving only the raw, unfiltered chaos of a nation that has lost even the pretense of wisdom. The newspapers, the radio, the television—once mere nuisances—have now been eclipsed by the digital sewer, where misinformation, outrage, and tribal hysteria reign supreme. It is a carnival of ignorance, owned and operated by self-anointed visionaries who, having hollowed out public discourse here on Earth, now set their sights on the stars. A sickening spectacle: a cacophony of self-absorbed, oblivious fools, each convinced of their own genius, each deaf to their own absurdity.

Once a proud American, I no longer recognize this nation. Count me out.

- Not One of US