Democracy doesn't ask before it kills.
I'm writing this from my apartment in Tirana, where I can hear the diesel buses groaning past on Rruga e Kavajës and smell the espresso drifting up from the café below. Life hums along. People argue about football, complain about traffic, plan their weekends. Meanwhile, bombs purchased with their tax money—and mine, and yours—fall on Gaza, on Yemen, on places most of us couldn't find on a map if we tried.
Nobody asked us about that.
This bothers me more than it probably should. I've spent years thinking about democracy, about what it means to have a voice in a system that claims to speak for you. As President of Free Astroscience, I talk a lot about making knowledge accessible, about bringing complex ideas down to earth where people can actually use them. But this question—this gap between what our governments do and what we actually consent to—feels like one of those problems we've all noticed but don't quite know how to name.
The essay I'm reflecting on today calls it the "silent mandate." It's the moment when your leaders treat your silence as permission, when the absence of your voice becomes, somehow, your agreement .
That's not democracy. That's something else wearing democracy's clothes.
The Weight of Three Words
Let me take you back to 1945.
Harry Truman, sitting at a conference table in Potsdam, scribbled three words in the margin of a telegram: "release when ready." That's it. That's all it took to authorize the statement announcing Hiroshima . One man, a handful of advisers, maybe a few cups of coffee going cold. No congressional debate. No public discussion. No moment where anyone asked the American people whether they wanted to cross that particular threshold in human history.
The atomic bomb entered our world not through democratic deliberation but through executive efficiency. Truman went to Congress afterward—not to justify what he'd done, but to propose an Atomic Energy Commission . The decision had already been made. The rest was just paperwork.
I think about this often. Not because I can judge whether Truman was right or wrong—I'm a 21st-century blogger in a wheelchair in Albania, not a wartime president facing Japan. But because the structure of that decision reveals something about how democracy actually works when the stakes get real.
We delegate power because we have to. That's the bargain. Modern societies are too big, too complex, too messy for everyone to vote on everything. So we elect representatives, and those representatives make choices, and most of the time, that's fine. Tax policy can be reversed. Healthcare reforms can be amended. Transport plans can be reworked.
War is different.
War converts your money into tools for killing. It decides whose children will die and whose will come home. It's irreversible in ways that economic policy simply isn't. A destroyed city stays destroyed. Dead soldiers stay dead. Trauma passes down through generations like a family heirloom nobody wanted.
The Ancient Bargain We Inherited
Here's what makes this worse: the logic justifying war without public consent is way older than democracy itself.
Before democracies existed, there were kingdoms and empires. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the 5th century, developed the concept of "just war"—the idea that violence could be morally acceptable if it restored peace or defended the weak . Centuries later, Hugo Grotius stripped away the religious framework and argued that the rules of war rested on reason, not divine revelation .
These were brilliant thinkers. They created sophisticated frameworks for evaluating whether a war was justified. But they never asked the democratic question: who decides?
They couldn't. They lived in worlds where kings ruled by divine right. The people weren't part of the equation.
We inherited their moral vocabulary—their careful distinctions between just cause and right intention, their principles about proportionality and necessity. But we forgot to update the source code. Democratic countries still use frameworks designed for monarchies. We debate what makes a war just without questioning who gets to make that judgment in the first place .
Michael Walzer tried to bridge this gap in the 20th century. Writing after World War II, he introduced the idea of "supreme emergency"—situations so catastrophic that normal moral rules might have to break . When a community faces ultimate destruction, leaders might need to do things that would otherwise be unthinkable. Bombing civilians, for instance.
Walzer was brutally honest about this. He said leaders who make these choices remain moral criminals, even if their crimes are necessary . It's an ethically arresting position. But it also reveals the danger: once you open the door to exceptions, how do you ever close it again?
And more to the point: why is this decision left to leaders at all?
The Distance Between Us and Them
I've been thinking about representation a lot lately.
From my window, I can see the city spreading out toward the mountains. Tirana is growing, changing, always in motion. People here escaped dictatorship not that long ago. They remember what it's like when leaders make all the decisions and the people just... live with the consequences. Or don't live with them.
Albania joined NATO. We're part of the Western democratic world now. But I watch the news—the protests in London, the marches in Rome, the demonstrations across Europe and America—and I see something shifting . People carrying signs that say "not in our name." Ordinary citizens organizing flotillas to break blockades and deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, defying their own governments .
These aren't fringe movements. They're widespread, coordinated, persistent. They suggest that people are waking up to the gap between what their representatives do and what they themselves would choose.
But here's the cruel irony: protest happens after decisions are made. It's the language we're forced to speak when institutional channels close. Governments can acknowledge our demonstrations, even tolerate them, and still claim our silence equals approval . Dissent becomes a safety valve that releases pressure without changing the system.
We need something better.
What Consent Could Actually Look Like
I don't pretend to have all the answers here. I'm simplifying complex political philosophy for accessibility, which means some nuance gets lost. But some ideas feel worth exploring.
Transparency as a starting point. Every military intervention, every arms shipment, every alliance commitment should come with a public explanation. You can't deliberate about a war you don't even know is being fought . Information shouldn't be classified by default. The burden of proof should fall on those who want secrecy, not on those demanding accountability.
Deliberative assemblies. Imagine spaces where randomly selected citizens come together to discuss military action before it happens. Not to command, but to question. Not to replace parliament, but to stand beside it . Iceland tried something similar after the 2008 financial crisis—ordinary people reflecting together on constitutional principles with the help of independent facilitators . It worked. Why couldn't it work for decisions about war?
A war veto. For conflicts that aren't direct self-defense, citizens should have a mechanism to confirm or refuse participation. Not a referendum on every tactical decision—that would be chaos. But a moment when democratic will reappears precisely when the stakes are highest .
These aren't utopian fantasies. They're adaptations of mechanisms that already exist in various democracies. The question is whether we have the courage to apply them to the gravest decisions our societies make.
The Silence We Must Break
Sitting here in Tirana, I can smell the city—exhaust and espresso and the particular dust that rises when old Ottoman buildings stand next to new glass towers. I can hear Albanian and Italian and English mixing in the street below. I'm part of Europe and outside it, rooted in the Balkans with their long memory of war and the Mediterranean with its longer memory of empire.
From this vantage point, the contradiction seems stark.
We call ourselves democracies. We pride ourselves on having overthrown kings and dictators. We built the United Nations to create an order based on peace . And yet we continue to wage wars—directly, by proxy, through arms sales and military aid—without ever asking the people who fund them whether they agree.
The "democratic peace" theory holds that democracies don't fight each other. That's technically true. But peace at home often conceals conflict abroad . We just shifted the theater of battle. We kept fighting instead of working to end wars.
The essay I'm reflecting on asks a question I can't shake: "When violence is carried out in our name but without our voice, what kind of democracy remains?"
I think the answer is: one that's lost its way.
True democratic sovereignty doesn't live only in the ballot box. It lives in the ongoing capacity to be called to reflection when history demands it. It lives in spaces where power pauses long enough for conscience to catch up .
War forces this question into the open because war is where the stakes are absolute. If we can't demand consent for the decision to kill, what can we demand consent for?
Where We Go From Here
I don't know if these ideas will gain traction. I don't know if democratic systems will evolve fast enough to meet this challenge. What I know is that more people are noticing the gap—feeling it, naming it, refusing to accept that their silence equals permission.
The real "silent mandate" isn't the one citizens endure. It's the one we must break . The duty to speak when silence has become convenient. The refusal to let our names be used without our voices.
Defending democracy in times of war means asking hard questions about what democracy actually is. It means recognizing that representation, however necessary, creates distance. And it means insisting that some decisions—the ones that turn our wealth into weapons and our neighbors into casualties—deserve a higher standard of legitimacy.
From my apartment in Tirana, watching the evening settle over the city, I can hear the muezzin's call to prayer mixing with church bells and the general noise of secular life. It's a reminder that people of wildly different beliefs can coexist when the structures around them make space for difference.
Maybe that's what we need for democracy too. Not a perfect system—those don't exist—but one that makes space for us to question, to deliberate, to occasionally say no. One that remembers that consent isn't just about elections every few years. It's about the continuous conversation between power and the people who grant it.
The bombs are still falling. The wars continue. But the conversation is starting.
And conversation, I've learned, is where change begins.
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