[This poem is about real happenings in the real world right now!
See footnotes at the end]

This liberal democracy makes mistakes
Some poor, some lonely, drunken, gross, or fake
So let’s remove freedom from the many
They’ve botched the job, their culture runs on empty

Far better in Russia where the state’s the boss
There only good people get to talk,
are safe and get to keep their pennies,
while law and order reign

The only downside …, but please don’t you wake—
not ‘til we’ve got our men in place to take
your voting booths and correct any
odd error you might end up sending.

But shhh, sleep in, don’t stir or shake—
let law and order reign
that’s it, slumber soft, soon enough you’ll find
it’s rather too late to change your mind.

Author: That one guy, he was standing out front, flapping his arms like a bird, some kind of a loon
Editor: Bartleby Willard & Amble Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

Footnotes by Claude:

Stanza One

“This liberal democracy makes mistakes / Some poor, some lonely, drunken, gross, or fake / So let’s remove freedom from the many / They’ve botched the job, their culture runs on empty”

¹ The argument that liberal democracy has failed due to its own internal contradictions is not merely a fringe position — it has become a serious strand of intellectual and political thought in the United States and Europe. Emily Chamlee-Wright’s essay “How Liberal Societies Learn” (Persuasion, July 2024) is the clearest available rebuttal to this view, and the clearest explanation of why the messiness the poem’s opening stanza lampoons is actually the point. Chamlee-Wright — president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies — argues that liberalism is best understood not as a set of fixed outcomes but as a self-correcting system. Its four principal domains — political, economic, intellectual, and civic freedom — are in constant dynamic relationship with one another. Political freedoms enable free markets and free inquiry; free markets generate the abundance that sustains intellectual labor; civic freedoms let people experiment with different ways of living. The “secret sauce” running through all of it, she argues, is contestation: the principle that no government, no market actor, no intellectual authority, and no civic community can place itself beyond challenge. Because liberal environments are contestable, there is room to try things, make mistakes, adjust, and adapt. “The liberal promise is not that bad stuff doesn’t happen,” Chamlee-Wright writes. “What it promises is that with liberal norms and institutions in place, free people tend to find solutions.” https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-liberal-societies-learn

² The targets of that rebuttal form what Chamlee-Wright calls the “post-liberal intelligentsia,” or PLI — a diffuse coalition that includes self-described postliberals, Catholic integralists, common-good constitutionalists, and nationalist conservatives. “The PLI is united by a single, overarching belief,” she writes: “The constitutionally constrained liberal democratic order is the source of everything that is wrong in the world.” Their list of grievances is long — liberalism has atomized communities, delayed marriage, enabled immigration, degraded masculine virtue, sacrificed working-class Americans to global trade — and their proposed remedy is consistent: a new elite must emerge, set aside the separation of powers, seize the administrative state, and impose a pre-modern conception of “the common good.” Chamlee-Wright identifies a key rhetorical technique the PLI uses to advance this program: “freeze-frame storytelling.” These narratives point to something genuinely bad, tie it to liberalism’s tolerance of individual liberty, and then propose a top-down fix — while foreclosing any question about whether a non-liberal system would actually solve the problem better. Crucially, she notes that the PLI are not the tiki-torch crowd: “They are smart, bookish, (mostly) polite people with ideas. They do their organizing at conferences in glamorous ballrooms. Some hold endowed chairs at the country’s most prestigious universities.” That is precisely what makes them effective at moving the Overton window toward authoritarianism in ordinary political culture.

³ The most influential academic voices within this movement include Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, whose 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed argues that liberalism doesn’t fail despite its principles but because of them — that it atomizes communities, destroys tradition, and leaves individuals rootless. Deneen’s solution is not more freedom but less. Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule advocates what he calls “common good constitutionalism” — the idea that judges should not interpret the Constitution according to individual rights but according to a classical conception of the good, imposed by a wise executive. Vermeule laid this out in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/
Chamlee-Wright specifically names the PLI’s influence on mainstream politics: Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon all represent different entry points through which post-liberal ideas have moved from the seminar room into Congress, the White House, and right-wing media. These ideas found their most comprehensive governing expression in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint formally titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Project 2025 calls for dismantling independent federal agencies, replacing tens of thousands of civil servants with loyalists through “Schedule F” reclassification, centralizing power in the presidency, and restructuring the Department of Justice to serve the executive’s political agenda. Many of its authors went on to serve in the Trump 2.0 administration. The logic is precisely that of the poem’s first stanza: democracy produces the wrong results, so democracy must be managed out of existence. https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/report/mandate-leadership-the-conservative-promise

Stanza Two

“Far better in Russia where the state’s the boss / There only good people get to talk, / are safe and get to keep their pennies, / while law and order reign”

⁴ Russia under Vladimir Putin offers the most visible contemporary example of what post-liberals tend not to say aloud: that replacing liberal disorder with authoritarian order requires silencing, imprisoning, and killing people. Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who reported on atrocities in Chechnya, was shot dead in her apartment elevator in Moscow in 2006, on Putin’s birthday: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/oct/07/russia.pressandpublishing. Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and leading opposition figure, was shot on a bridge within sight of the Kremlin in 2015: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31669061. Alexei Navalny, the most prominent opposition leader of the Putin era, survived a nerve-agent poisoning in 2020 — the Novichok was applied to his underwear by FSB agents, documented in extraordinary detail by Bellingcat’s open-source investigators: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/09/14/fsb-team-of-chemical-weapon-experts-implicated-in-navalny-novichok-poisoning/ — was imprisoned on fabricated charges upon his return to Russia, and died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68320881.

⁵ The freedom to “keep their pennies” fares no better. Putin’s Russia is a kleptocracy — a system in which political power and economic ownership are inseparable, and the state extracts wealth upward rather than distributing it downward. Investigative journalist Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (2014) documented how Putin and his circle accumulated vast personal wealth through control of the state apparatus, energy companies, and the courts. British financier Bill Browder, once the largest foreign investor in Russia, watched his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky die in pretrial detention after uncovering a $230 million tax fraud carried out by Russian officials; Browder’s subsequent campaign led to the Magnitsky Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 2012, which Putin has considered a personal affront ever since. Browder has told this story at length here: https://www.billbrowder.com/magnitsky. Transparency International consistently ranks Russia among the most corrupt nations on earth: https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/russia. “Safe and get to keep their pennies” applies, in Putin’s Russia, to exactly one class of people: those who are useful to the regime and have not yet become inconvenient.

Stanza Three

“The only downside …, but please don’t you wake— / not ’til we’ve got our men in place to take / your voting booths and correct any / odd error you might end up sending”

⁶ The most extensively documented attempt to “correct” an election result in American history unfolded between November 2020 and January 6, 2021. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden by 306 to 232 Electoral College votes and by more than 7 million popular votes. Trump’s own Attorney General, William Barr, stated publicly that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome: https://apnews.com/article/barr-no-widespread-fraud-6f965cdad3bfde06be943095d7d4a68. Trump’s campaign and allies filed more than 60 lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging results; they lost virtually all of them, including before judges Trump himself had appointed. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), led by Trump appointee Chris Krebs, coordinated a joint statement from election officials across the country calling the 2020 election “the most secure in American history”: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election. Trump fired Krebs days later.

⁷ The effort to reverse the results operated on several tracks simultaneously. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify Electoral College votes on January 6th, a role Pence correctly concluded he had no constitutional authority to play. Trump’s legal team promoted a scheme to have fake slates of electors certified in seven states Biden had won. Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, in a conversation recorded and later released, and asked him to “find 11,780 votes” — precisely the number needed to flip Georgia. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump said. “Which is one more than we have.” The recording was first obtained and reported by Georgia Public Broadcasting and KQED: https://www.kqed.org/news/11853529/i-just-want-to-find-11780-votes-in-recorded-call-trump-pushed-official-to-overturn-georgia-vote. Raffensperger refused.

⁸ The “Big Lie” — the claim that the 2020 election was stolen — can be assessed as a lie rather than merely a contested claim for several concrete reasons: no court found evidence sufficient to validate it; Trump’s own senior officials rejected it; and internal communications revealed in congressional investigations and civil litigation showed that figures in Trump’s circle privately acknowledged Biden had won even as they publicly claimed otherwise. Sidney Powell, one of the most aggressive promoters of the stolen-election theory, later said in a defamation lawsuit that her claims were so extreme that “no reasonable person” would have taken them as statements of fact. Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News in 2023 after Fox’s own internal communications showed hosts and executives knew they were promoting claims they privately regarded as false. NPR’s thorough coverage of the case, including the internal communications that proved so damning, is here: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170339114/fox-news-settles-blockbuster-defamation-lawsuit-with-dominion-voting-systems

⁹ Trump has since made his preferences about electoral outcomes explicit. During the 2024 campaign, he told a group of Christian conservatives at Turning Point Action’s Believers’ Summit: “Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. … In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.” The full quote and video, along with Trump’s own subsequent attempt to explain it, are documented at Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vote-four-years/. He has called for the termination of “rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” when they stood in the way of reinstating him to power — a statement NPR covered in detail, including the reaction of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who said anyone seeking the presidency who believed the Constitution could be suspended “would have a very hard time being sworn in”: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1141096473/mcconnell-trump-terminate-constitution. The Trump 2.0 administration has moved systematically to place loyalists in charge of the agencies responsible for administering federal elections, prosecuting election fraud, and controlling the machinery through which voting is organized and certified. The poem’s sleepy reader is invited to notice, before it is too late, that the “odd error you might end up sending” is the name the powerful give to votes they didn’t want.