This is not a campaign argument or a psychological critique. It’s a systems diagnosis: what happens to politics when friction is removed. The moral failure at issue here isn’t ideological; it’s geometric. Individuals matter less than the curvature they impose on the moral field.
Democratic norms are often misread as decoration—ceremony layered on top of “real” power. In reality, they are friction. Procedural delay, transparency requirements, independent institutions, and adversarial media are all resistance mechanisms. They slow action on purpose. They make cost visible and responsibility unavoidable. Norms are not etiquette; they are moral resistance.
Authoritarian systems move in the opposite direction. Flooding the zone, saturating the information space, and generating chaos are not persuasion tactics so much as opacity engines. Confusion destroys legibility, and when legibility collapses, judgment is suspended. This mirrors climate denial logic almost perfectly: contest the signal, delay response, displace cost. Moral eligibility itself becomes the enemy.
This is where Donald Trump matters—not as an aberration, but as an optimizer. His political mode is relentlessly transactional: deal, leverage, dominance exchange. That style reads as honesty because it abandons euphemism. But orientation, not tone, is decisive. Cost is acknowledged—not truthfully of course—but never borne by its causes, and so always flows outward.
Hiding and redistributing costs is characteristically what I call the dark apex of moral space. Authority and power curves inward while cost curves away: toward institutions, future generations, or externalized populations. Feedback is refused. Legitimacy becomes personalized. Domination, in this sense, isn’t cruelty—it’s feedback refusal. Authority without cost-bearing remains informational, not moral.
This is why “democracy dies in darkness” isn’t a metaphor. Darkness is loss of legibility. Media collapse isn’t just an economic failure; it’s moral infrastructure decay. When watchdogs fail, responsibility no longer terminates. Judgment doesn’t vanish—it’s delayed and displaced, often onto people who had no agency in the original decisions. In the current moment moral infrastructure is attacked.
Transactional politics inevitably metastasizes into offshore finance, regulatory arbitrage, and crypto-mediated opacity. That isn’t ironic or accidental; it’s structurally required. Systems optimized to remove friction must flee accountability. Optimization without responsibility always seeks darkness. That’s why I say fiat lux.
And yet this cannot stabilize. Displaced cost accumulates. Moral curvature propagates across generations. Systems that erase friction lose meaning before they lose power. Unsustainability isn’t ideological—it’s geometric.
The counterpoint is not optimism but adaptation. Moral space doesn’t disappear; it reasserts itself. When old guardrails fail, new ones emerge—through law, culture, institutional redesign, and simple fatigue with opacity. Meaning systems evolve to restore friction.
Legitimate politics is outward-radiating authority. It accepts cost, slows action, and submits to visibility. Love of country is self-decentering under pressure, not symbolism.
This isn’t about one man. He’s a stress test, not an exception. The real question is whether democratic systems can re-encode friction fast enough. The problem isn’t that people cannot discover truth, but that it is severed from responsibility. Their power is derived from the consent of the governed. Never forget that. “In a democracy, the people get exactly the government they deserve.”
