The slow crawl of California's vote count is not merely a technical glitch. It is a symptom of a deeper rot, a bureaucratic decadence that would make a Roman proconsul weep. We have here a state that prides itself on being the vanguard of progress, yet it cannot tally ballots with the efficiency of a Victorian parish council.
The delays, the finger-pointing, the endless legal wrangling: this is what happens when a society loses its sense of civic urgency. The Golden State has become a laboratory of administrative entropy, where process trumps outcome. One thinks of the late Roman Empire, with its layers of officials and its endless paperwork, while the barbarians nibbled at the borders.
California's vote count is a mirror of our times: a people so entangled in their own procedures that they forget the purpose of the exercise. The frustration is real, and it is deserved. But do not blame the postal service or the pandemic.
Blame a culture that has elevated inefficiency to a virtue. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that a nation must be administered with dispatch. California, meanwhile, offers us a masterclass in how to turn a simple act of democracy into a protracted, exhausting drama.
The lesson is clear: when a society loses its appetite for speed, it loses its grip on reality.
