Democracy's Zombie Phase: The Myth-work That Keeps It Walking

Why the left–right spectacle and racialized "Christian civilization" stories are so effective at masking who actually runs the show.

I don't think I am alone in sensing that what we call "democracy" increasingly looks like a costume...the motions remain (votes, debates, headlines), but the substance (public power over real decisions) has thinned. When people feel locked out of the levers that matter...budgets, ownership, treaties, infrastructure–they become ripe for identity dramas that promise meaning and control. That's where whiteness-as-myth and "Christian civilization" storytelling enter: they convert diffuse anxiety into a simple script with heroes, villains, and a call to arms. It's emotionally persuasive, operationally useful, and structurally empty.

This essay stitches those together: how formal democracy gets hollowed out; why polarization is an asset, not a bug; how whiteness was engineered and keeps being repackaged; and what viable upgrades to democratic life actually look like.

Formal vs. substantive democracy

On paper: we vote, parliaments deliberate, parties alternate.
In practice:

Agenda power sits with large donors, lobbyists, and corporate/legal bureaucracies.
Narrative power sits with media conglomerates and attention platforms that decide which problems are visible in the first place.
Perception power sits with algorithms that personalize outrage and reward the most polarizing takes.

When agenda, narrative, and perception are privatized, elections become ritual...important but insufficient. People shout while procurement rolls on; hashtags trend while surveillance capabilities expand; culture-war bills pass while housing, water, and grid maintenance lag behind lived reality.

Net effect: democracy walks and talks, but the soul...responsive public agent...drifts. Call it a zombie democracy.

Neoliberal capture: the policy autopilot

Since the 1980s, both "left" and "right"management teams have largely agreed on a macro-template: privatize public assets, deregulate markets, outsource state capacity, and keep finance dominant. That continuity turns elections into a choice of managerial style, not operating system. You feel it as deja vu: new cabinet, same incentives; new slogans, same pipelines and price signals.

If the operating system doesn't change, identity conflict becomes the easiest way to differentiate products, politics as brand war.

The security expansion that rarely rolls back

Crisis after crisis (terrorism, migration spikes, pandemics, cyberattacks, interstate wars) justifies "temporary" exceptional powers: data sharing, watchlists, predictive policing, border tech, financial surveillance. Temporary becomes normal. Each expansion is framed as safety; sunset clauses are rare; oversight trails capability.

A public that feels seen by cameras and ignored by budgets turns inward toward thrive. That's the perfect moment to sell purity myths.

Polarization as theater, not accident

Polarization is efficient. It's cheaper to mobilize fear than to build police. It's easier to retweet an enemy than to reform permitting or procurement. So identity conflict is curated: men vs. women, immigrants vs. "natives,"left vs. right. secular vs. religious. While neighbors quarrel, the real levers...land use, energy systems, supply chains, monopolies...move quietly.

This is not conspiratorial; it's structural. Attention markets monetize division. Parties monetize outrage. Media fills a 24/7 demand for drama. The result is predictable: the more we fight inside the frame, the less we change the frame.

A short, honest history of "whiteness"

"Whiteness" isn't biology; it's a membership technology....a legal/economic identity invented and refined to organize loyalty and distribute advantage.

Iberia, 1400–1500s: Limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood") tied ancestry to privilege against Jews and Muslims– proto-racial sorting fused with religion and class.
Colonial Virginia, late 1600s: after cross-racial labor unrest, elites hardened lines: hereditary slaves if you mother was enslaved (partus sequitur ventrum), anti-miscegnenation laws, and a policing role for poor Europeans. A new umbrella– "white"– split potential allies. Divide- and- rule was the point.
U.S.law, 1790--20th century: citizenship restricted to "free white persons," then courts spent a century deciding who counted ("common sense" whiteness trumped science).
Empires & apartheid: color bars, pass laws, and indigenat codes exported graded belonging across colonies.
After WWII: many once-excluded Europeans (Irish, Italians, many Jews) were folded into whiteness in the U.S. through policy (GI Bill, FHA loans, sub-urbanization). Membership expanded when it stabilizes the order.

Mechanics: law draws boundaries; institutions enforce them; culture mythologizes them; material dividends (safety, housing access, job queues) keep them desirable. It's elastic– borders of "whiteness" expand or contract with power needs. That's why it feels "natural" while constantly changing.

Why whiteness fuses so easily with "Christian civilization"

Not because Jesus preached it. Jesus was preached it. Jesus was a brown, Jewish teacher who sat with outsiders and broke purity codes. The fusion happens because religious symbols carry centuries of moral weight. Wrap a political identity in crosses, "heritages," and "defending Christendom," and you launder a power project as tradition. Doctrine is optional; vibes are enough.

Link that to the Great Replacement myth (a modern French export): demographic change is framed as conspiracy and extinction. Complex policy failures...housing under supply, wage stagnation, school under investment...get scapegoated as "they are replacing us." Fear clarifies, rallies, monetizes.

Why politics loves this mythwork

Fear is fast. It mobilizes turnout and donations quicker than plans do.
Boundaries are simple. Us/them beats zoning reform in a slogan.
Elasticity is handy. The in-group can expand (to build a coalition) or contract (to police purity) on demand.
Moral cover is powerful. “Protect families, faith, heritage” beats “protect my donor’s rent-seeking” in public.
It distracts. While neighbors fight over identity, oligopoly power, extractive finance, and surveillance quietly grow.

This is narrative alchemy: turn diffuse anxiety (jobs, climate, instability) into a sharp identity drama (race, religion, nation). It’s persuasive—and it fixes nothing.

The historical arc you feel in your bones

Late Roman Republic, Weimar Germany, Bronze Age palace economies—different eras, same rhythm:

Expansion stretches systems and narratives to their limits.
Saturation accumulates hidden fragilities (debt, inequality, brittle supply chains).
Shock exposes the seams (pandemics, droughts, wars, financial panics).
Hollowing turns collective forms into ceremony.
Reconfiguration follows—sometimes regenerative, often authoritarian.

Where are we now? In the global North, somewhere between hollowing and the fight over reconfiguration.

So… is democracy dead?

Not dead—zombified. The body walks; the animating spirit is weak. That doesn’t mean fatalism. It means clarity: don’t confuse theater for power.

The constructive question is what replaces the hollow bits:

Bad path: oligarchy with democratic branding; or openly illiberal rule justified by permanent emergency.
Good path: polycentric democracy—more nodes of real decision-making, closer to where people live.

What a real upgrade looks like (polycentric, local, measurable)

Skip the vibes; change the levers. A non-exhaustive starter kit:

Citizen assemblies with binding powers on budgets, land use, and climate plans (randomly selected, stratified by demographics, expert-informed, streamed for accountability).
Participatory budgeting at city and regional levels (a fixed % of capital budgets decided directly by residents).
Anti-monopoly enforcement and procurement reform (break local oligopolies; open vendor lists; publish plain-language tenders and performance dashboards).
Public data trusts & algorithm audits (make platform curation auditable; require civic APIs; treat certain datasets as commons).
Community wealth building (municipal enterprises, co-ops, public banks; keep value circulating locally).
Energy & housing basics (municipal utilities, community solar/wind, social housing pipelines with by-right approvals and land-value capture).
Safety with rights (narrow emergency powers with true sunsets; independent oversight over surveillance tech; scale up non-police crisis response).

These aren’t utopian; they’re already working in pockets. The task is to federate the pockets and measure what matters.

How to stop feeding the spectacle

Shift from identity to structure. When someone blames migrants for housing, show the build rates, permitting delays, and land-use rules. Keep the conversation on mechanisms.
Debunk purity with history. Every European identity is syncretic; “pure” is a recent marketing term.
Separate faith from tribalism. Put Jesus’s boundary-crossing practice next to nationalist cherry-picking; the contrast teaches itself.
Build cross-cutting coalitions. Wages, rents, transit, clean air—issues that align across identities are kryptonite to divide-and-rule.
Starve the outrage economy. Reward long-form, cite primary docs, log corrections, track budgets—not just takes.

Bottom line

Whiteness, “Christian civilization,” and left–right cage matches are not accidents. They’re tools—emotionally potent and endlessly flexible—designed to keep a distracted public out of the engine room while the same operating system runs.

You don’t fix a zombie by arguing with it. You rewrite the code: move attention to budgets, ownership, law, infrastructure, and the ecological limits shaping all of it. That’s where real power lives, and where a living democracy can still be grown.

A compact checklist you can use this month

Pick one material lever (housing permits, air-quality rule, open procurement, transit lane).
Draft a one-page explainer: problem → structure → proposed fix → who decides → how to measure success.
Convene a small, mixed group (across identity lines) to refine it.
Present it to the body that actually holds the lever (council, agency, utility).
Publish the exchange and a scorecard.
Repeat. Federate with neighboring efforts.

Noise dissolves in the face of practiced, measurable, shared work. That’s how you un-zombify a democracy—one lever at a time.