North Korea holds elections. On election day, citizens line up at the polling stations, turnout approaches almost 100 percent, and a parliament is duly elected. Then the people go home, and for the next five years power is exercised from the top.
We laugh at that. But look at what the system does, not at the ceremony.
In Sweden, Germany or the United States, citizens also line up on election day. Then they go home, and for four years a small circle of ministers, party leaders and senior officials governs. They write the budget, command the police and the military. They appoint officials and set the agenda. Between elections, the citizen’s role is to watch. Our democracy is alive one day out of more than a thousand.
The difference is that we may choose between several teams competing for the palace, while North Korea offers one list. It’s a huge difference in content, but it decides who rules, not how rule works. The formal structure is the same: a king and his court, a general and his officers, a leadership and its apparatus. Hierarchical power flows downward.
The blueprint from monarchies
This is no accident. Modern democracies grew out of monarchies. Revolutions replaced the king with a head of government and the nobles with ministers, but kept the vertical frame. We call it delegated sovereignty: citizens hand their power upward for a fixed term and hope it comes back intact.
Sometimes it doesn’t. The Weimar Republic had free elections, a constitution and civil liberties. A leader who came to power through that system used its own levers to dismantle it, legally and step by step. Russia still holds elections, and it is not alone. The seed was there all along. Everything a would-be autocrat needs is already in the governance system: top-down command over money, security forces and party discipline. He only has to take the chair.
The habit of obedience
The deepest inheritance is mental. After centuries of kings, we still expect someone to be in charge. Can you think of a society without politicians? Without a president? Most cannot. As long as the rulers are benign, we barely notice how dependent we are. When they are not, we discover how little we can do before the next election, if it comes.
No compromise needed
The standard defense is that representative democracy is the least bad option, because direct democracy would be too chaotic and too demanding for ordinary people. That is not true anymore. Secure digital voting, open deliberation platforms and AI-assisted debate let citizens take part only in the decisions they care about, when they choose, without handing their power to anyone else.
Peer Democracy spreads power horizontally instead of stacked vertically, and openness makes concentrating power, or staging a coup, hard to pull off. Representative democracy was a great leap beyond the absolute monarch. But it kept the throne. The next step is to remove it and give crowns to everyone instead.