Not pointing at any specifics here, but once upon a time there was a political party, and it talked great words about the values it stood for. It had a constitution about how its policy was decided, democratically, by its members. It said what its values were as they pertained to workers rights and individual liberty.

And it was all lies, because ultimately its constitution meant nothing. It gave the illusion of democracy, but what the party did was ultimately decided by three people over drinks one evening in HQ. Its professed values about how individuals should be empowered, and workers protected, turned out to be the exact opposite of how it behaved when it conducted its own business.

And for a long time, it didn’t matter, because times were, at least in the party’s part of the world, relatively benign.

But when the bogeymen came to tear apart everything the people had taken for granted, to the cheers of a baying mob, all the words of the hypocrites meant nothing. They expected others to play by the rules that they themselves ignored.

And so they were utterly unequal to the task of fighting the monsters.

And the tragic thing is, I could be talking about any number of different political parties in any number of western democracies, and everything I wrote above would still apply.