In medieval Europe, artists painted visions of the danse macabre: a grim procession where kings, bishops, peasants, and fools were all dragged into step by the grinning skeleton of death. It was a spiritual warning: no matter your title or wealth, mortality is the great equalizer. Today, in the United States, we are dancing a different kind of death waltz. We are not prancing toward the grave, but civic exhaustion. The skeleton leading us is not the plague or famine, but polarization, spectacle, and nihilism. Whether we think of ourselves as participants or spectators, we are all moving in time to a rhythm we didn’t choose, played by conductors who profit from our fatigue.
Every election is heralded as “the most important of our lifetime.” With every passing election, campaign spending increases. In 2024, a record $15.9 billion was spent on electoral campaigns, marking the most expensive election in US history. Every debate stage resembles less a forum of ideas than a reality television set. Candidates do not advance arguments so much as audition soundbites. Outrage is rehearsed. Indignation is choreographed. Meanwhile, the media — the fiddlers in the corner tasked with keeping tempo — obligingly accelerates the beat with 24-hour commentary, panel discussions, and instant analysis. The question is never whether the song should end, only which side is dancing better.
Voters, too, are swept along. Some cast ballots with fervor, convinced that their chosen champion will deliver national salvation. Others participate reluctantly, voting with the tone of someone paying a toll. Still others declare themselves “apolitical,” as if sitting still absolves them from having their feet stepped on anyway. While voting behavior is certainly tied to personality, it is also erratic. The Pew Research Center found that between 2018 and 2022, most Americans voted inconsistently; they voted in one election but not another. This shows that in a dance hall this crowded, even the wallflowers get trampled; you are assigned a role whether you know it or not.
This relentless motion might be tolerable if it led somewhere. Increasingly, it does not. Our politics have become less directional than centrifugal — forever spinning, rarely advancing. The same policy debates recur with ritualistic predictability. Healthcare is always on the verge of reform. Gun legislation is always “complicated.” Immigration is always “up for discussion” next term. There is no resolution, only perpetual rehearsal. And beneath the dysfunction lies a more unsettling truth: many of the loudest actors in this drama do not actually seek resolution.
Cable networks depend on conflict to retain viewers. Political influencers require perpetual crises to maintain relevance. Fundraising operations thrive on alarmism. Even elected officials have discovered that dysfunction can be more rewarding than governance. A viral speech often matters more than a passed bill. A performative committee hearing generates more political capital than a bipartisan compromise.
This is not the first time American politics has descended into spectacle. The antebellum press fueled sectional animosity with headlines designed to provoke. The Gilded Age saw senators openly beholden to financiers. Watergate unfolded like serialized television. But those periods, turbulent as they were, still contained moments of reckoning, of pause, of recalibration. Outrage once had a half-life. Today’s crisis does not. Social media has eliminated silence. There is no intermission. Every scandal is immediately transformed into content; every tragedy becomes a prompt for engagement. Even our grief is optimized.
The result is not simply anger. It is fatigue. A 2023 Pew Research survey found that 65 percent of Americans describe themselves as “worn out” by politics. Not furious, but exhausted. In a functioning democracy, politics should be the mechanism by which a society decides how to live together. Increasingly, it is the very thing making coexistence intolerable. The question, then, is not how to shout louder. It is how to step away.
This is not a call for apathy. It is a call for discernment: the intentional withdrawal from political theater that masquerades as civic duty. We can refuse to reward performative governance. We can elect representatives interested less in virality than in stewardship. We can demand that politics resemble infrastructure rather than entertainment. Hope, after all, is not necessarily loud. It does not require constant motion. It requires direction.
The skeletons will keep dancing as long as we let them. The music machine will grind on as long as we keep feeding it our fear, our clicks, our attention. But we do have agency, not as dancers, but as audience members. One day soon, perhaps we will recognize that we are not obligated to clap. We are allowed to leave the ball.
Until then, the floorboards tremble. The tempo continually rises in a relentless accelerando. And all of us — kings, beggars, influencers, legislators — are spinning faster and faster in a dance that promises power but delivers paralysis. The question is no longer who leads. It is who will be the first to walk away from the music.
