At the Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, an older gentleman sat quietly upright and ate his burrata. Shots. Panic. He stayed seated. Bad back, he said afterward. New tuxedo. Dirty floor.
That is cool. It is also an image for something larger.
“Thousands from the journalistic and political elite of the country have now experienced what countless other Americans have had to live through in their schools, offices, shopping centres, and churches.”
— Brian Stelter, CNN, after the attack at the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner 2026
The Formula
More violence. More security. Less democracy. Less mass.
That sounds simple. Too simple, some say. But look at the history.
9/11. After that: the Patriot Act, mass surveillance, Guantanamo. No reversal since then. The exception became the norm. Not because someone planned something evil. But because fear does that — it creates structures that stay.
The USA had four hundred and twenty-five mass shootings in 2025. Four hundred and twenty-five. Most of them: without a specific target. Nobody in particular. Just — shots.
When the target is a president, the system responds immediately. When the target is a shopping centre, almost nothing happens. That is not a conspiracy. That is priority. And priority is politics.
The Division
America is half and half. Not left-right as before. Deeper. Two realities that no longer touch.
One half sees firearms as a cultural attack. The other as a public health crisis. Both have arguments. Both no longer talk to each other.
That is the real problem. Not the violence alone. But the fact that there is no longer a common answer.
In this paralysis, something grows. Not tyranny from above — that would be too dramatic. More like: exhaustion from below. The masses stop believing they count. They no longer vote. They no longer demonstrate. They look away.
That is the moment where democracy loses, without a sound.
The If
I am not saying: it will definitely happen.
I am saying: it happens, if the two halves continue to stand past each other. If exhaustion wins. If no one believes in their own voice anymore.
America has institutions. States as counterweights. Courts that still function — sometimes. That is not nothing.
But institutions only hold if enough people believe in them. Belief is not a feeling. Belief is action.
The question is not whether America is a democracy. The question is whether enough Americans still act as if it were one.
That is the if.
By René Jochum and Claude (Anthropic). License: CC-BY-4.0.