"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Winston Churchill, November 11, 1947.
Chaos, fear, and uncertainty are the truest companions of democracy. This isn't a bug but a feature, and one that we as a society often misunderstand. To many, these conditions are unnerving, uncomfortable, and perhaps even terrifying. But true democracy doesn’t aim to eliminate discomfort; it embraces it. Democracy is deliberately messy with its debates, conflicting interests, and painstaking deliberations. The problem we saw in the 2024 election is that many people are unwilling or unable to live with this chaos. Faced with fear and uncertainty they turned to the seductive promises of authoritarianism and fascism.
It serves no purpose to pass judgment on everyone who made that choice. Many of them were reacting as most humans would when feeling backed into a corner. And let's be honest, 2024 was a year designed to back people into corners. The hurricanes were relentless, the economic shocks unending, and the cultural divisions too deep for a mere Band-Aid to heal. It's not that most people were dumb or malicious, although some clearly were, but that they were afraid. And when people are afraid they crave certainty. They crave clear answers, strong direction, and simplicity, all of which are luxuries that democracy doesn’t usually offer.
This is where fascism enters the scene, draped in reassuring promises. It says: “I will give you order. I will simplify the chaos. I will take the burden of doubt from your shoulders.” And when every news story feels like another punch to the gut and every problem seems intractable those promises sound pretty good. Democracy asks us to embrace complexity, but fascism offers a comforting simplicity. It’s a lot easier to follow a leader who says, “I alone can fix it” than to trust a system that relies on debate, compromise, and slow, incremental progress.
In 2024 the air was thick with fear. Hurricanes devastated the coasts and the federal response was too slow, too bureaucratic. It was democracy trying to function. But in a situation where every minute counted, bureaucracy felt like betrayal. People were left without power, without homes, without answers and with televised images of chaos feeding into a growing perception that democracy was failing them. Democracy, though, isn’t built for speed. It’s not built to bulldoze over dissent or sidestep process, and that’s both its greatest strength and its Achilles' heel. People in crisis don’t always appreciate the beauty of compromise. They just want action.
And so, we ended up where we are today. We elected someone who said they would cut through the red tape and promised to restore order, and who named scapegoats that felt plausible to anxious people. The 2024 election was about the failure of patience. It was a collective lashing out against the uncomfortable truths that democracy demands we face. Instead of accepting that solutions take time, that progress involves setbacks, and that the voices of many will never be as quick as the voice of one we chose speed and strength over dialogue and deliberation.
None of this is new. The clumsy dance between democracy and authoritarianism has been going on for centuries. When the Weimar Republic struggled to meet the needs of a battered German population in the 1930s Hitler was there to promise decisive action and national rejuvenation. When Italy fell into economic turmoil Mussolini offered swift, uncompromising solutions. Now it’s 2024 and our own version of this dance played out. The more rigid we became, the harder that dance got. Frustration with the plodding, seemingly inefficient mechanisms of democracy turned into a willingness to hand power to anyone who promised certainty even if that meant giving up freedoms we had once held dear.
Fascism thrives in fear. It’s worth considering that while democracy asks us to believe in collective power, fascism preys on our darkest suspicions about one another. It tells us that democracy’s chaos is an existential threat, that the people we disagree with aren’t just wrong but are dangerous, that our fears can only be calmed by consolidating power in a single, righteous force. And this is exactly what played out in 2024 during a year where patience was in short supply and desperation opened the door to dangerous simplicity.
The truth is democracy has failed because we’re unwilling to accept the discomfort of uncertainty. The electorate's turn to fascism wasn't just about one charismatic leader or one disastrous year. It was about a fundamental impatience and unwillingness to accept that chaos, fear, and uncertainty are inherent in governing a diverse society. The easy answer was to embrace authoritarianism, to silence dissent, and to put trust in a single figure rather than in each other. In doing so we forgot that democracy is supposed to feel uneasy, that it’s supposed to challenge us, that the conversations it requires are often infuriating precisely because they involve so many different voices.
And we forgot that the chaos of democracy is what makes it resilient. When we silence voices we miss out on perspectives that could help us navigate crises better. When we stifle dissent we lose the ability to adapt, to learn, and to grow stronger. Democracy’s weakness, especially its inability to act quickly without due process is also its greatest defense against tyranny. The checks and balances that make it slow are the same ones that keep it accountable and that prevent any one person from seizing too much power. By rejecting those checks and balances in 2024 we didn’t just choose order over chaos but to abandon the very thing that protects us from tyranny.
So here we are with a government that promises clarity, simplicity, and strength, but at the cost of freedom, dissent, and true representation. This is not the end of the story of course. It’s just a data point where we must decide whether the comfort of certainty is worth the price we’ve paid. We need as a nation to remember what democracy is really about. It’s not about efficiency, nor speed, but about representation, diversity, and the courage to face uncertainty together.
It’s easy to love democracy when everything is going well. But when we’re fearful and things are chaotic our commitment to democratic ideals is truly tested. We failed that test in 2024. With luck we can survive to learn from it and choose to embrace the messy, uncomfortable truth that democracy is superior even though it requires compromise. We must recognize the truth that our strength lies not in uniformity but in our willingness to face the chaos of governance together.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
