Democracy Dies in Plain Sight
As I always say, our betters are determined that no change can be permitted on anything that matters - not least the surrender of the most agreeable nation states on the planet to the barbarian invasions. The sole purpose of politics is to provide some lame-o dinner-theatre cover for that: Scholz/Merz, Sunak/Starmer, Jeb/Hillary... That's all the choice anyone needs. The "firewall" against broader choices is increasingly unfeasible, so judges have to be pressed into service to provide a fig-leaf of legitimacy to a rigged system, and the jurists from Bucharest to Washington seem happy to play along. So "government by the people" dwindles down, nation by nation, to government by the permitted people, which is not quite the same thing.