From pandemic to protests: Is the West prepared for tyranny?

In The Republic, Plato warns that democracy, for all its promise, carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. When liberty becomes license and disorder grows, the people, yearning for safety, invite a “protector,” a figure who soon becomes a tyrant. Though written over two millennia ago, this insight reads less like a philosophical abstraction and more like a clinical diagnosis of the West’s political arc, from the COVID pandemic to the unrest in the streets of Los Angeles.

Plato had lived through the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, when Athens, once the beacon of direct democracy, was defeated by militaristic Sparta. Democracy had failed in the face of prolonged war, indecision, and populist short-termism. In 404 BCE, Sparta imposed the Thirty Tyrants, an oligarchic regime that suspended civil liberties, executed dissidents, and ruled by fear. A few years later, democracy returned, but scarred, shaken, and diminished. The West today echoes that cycle.

The pandemic as political conditioning

When COVID-19 struck in early 2020, the West was caught off guard, not just biologically, but politically. What began as a public health emergency quickly became a global experiment in compliance and social engineering. In a matter of weeks, borders were sealed, freedoms curtailed, and surveillance normalized. Under the banner of science and safety, governments expanded their power with unprecedented speed, and citizens, gripped by fear, largely accepted it. At the time, many of these measures were justified. But their longer-term effect may prove more dangerous than the virus itself. The pandemic taught democracies how easily civil liberties could be suspended, and how quickly populations could be trained to obey when dissent was labeled not just wrong, but immoral. What began as temporary emergency measures quietly embedded themselves into the framework of governance.

During the pandemic, a host of new mechanisms of control were introduced. Contact tracing apps, digital vaccine certificates, and QR-code-based access to public life became normalized in many countries. Social media platforms enforced new standards of speech, suppressing dissenting views, often in coordination with state institutions. Emergency legislation was passed by executive decree or fast-tracked through parliaments, often with little debate or oversight. Although many of these tools were later dismantled or softened, the psychological and legal infrastructure remains intact. The West has been conditioned to accept surveillance, censorship, and crisis governance as part of the new normal. Plato’s fear was not that a tyrant would conquer the city by force, but that the people, out of anxiety, would ask him to.

A fragile world order

The pandemic unfolded against the backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating geopolitical environment. Since 2019, the international system has been rocked by an escalating rivalry between the United States and China, with tensions over Taiwan growing more acute. Military drills near the Taiwan Strait have intensified, diplomatic relations have soured, and both sides increasingly speak in the language of deterrence and red lines. In Eastern Europe, the Russian invasion of Ukraine shattered assumptions about the permanence of the post–Cold War peace. What began as a regional land grab has drawn NATO into a grinding proxy war, forcing Western democracies to reevaluate their defense strategies and energy dependencies. In the Middle East, the recent escalation in Gaza has reignited long-dormant fault lines, not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but within Western alliances themselves. The humanitarian catastrophe has polarized public opinion and strained diplomatic unity, exposing contradictions in the West’s commitment to universal human rights.

These crises, taken together, mark the end of a stable global order and the beginning of a more volatile era. Much like Athens in the late fifth century BCE, today’s democracies are facing threats from without and fragmentation from within. The international system is more fragile, more unequal, and more polarized than it has been in decades. In this context of global instability, domestic disorder becomes more difficult to manage. Populist movements surge, institutional trust erodes, and the consensus that once held liberal democracies together continues to unravel.

From lockdown to backlash

The protests erupting today, from Los Angeles to Paris, from Ottawa to Tel Aviv, are not isolated events. They are symptoms of a deeper political malaise. What connects them is not ideology, but a shared sense of betrayal: that elites have used the crisis to consolidate power, that the rules are enforced selectively, and that individual freedom, once sacrosanct, is now conditional.

In Los Angeles, the decision by federal authorities to deploy troops without state approval is a stark example of the growing rift between local governance and centralized control. The imagery of military vehicles on American streets, framed as a measure to restore order, echoes Plato’s warning that democracy, when seen as ungovernable, eventually gives way to imposed authority. What begins as protection quickly morphs into domination.

Tyrants in new clothing

Today’s would-be tyrants do not storm the gates with armies. They arrive with dashboards, data models, and carefully worded mandates. They do not silence opposition with clubs, but with content moderation policies and terms of service agreements. Their power lies not in force, but in bureaucratic inevitability. In Plato’s day, the tyrant was a warlord. In ours, he may take the form of a public health czar, a predictive security algorithm, or a government-approved digital identity system that quietly tracks and regulates the contours of our daily lives.

What comes next?

Plato never romanticized democracy. He saw it as the most fragile of regimes, brilliant in its ideals, dangerous in its excesses. Its freedoms, he warned, eventually breed inequality, division, and demagoguery. Its collapse is not accidental but inherent. What comes next, then, is not a matter of if, but when, and more importantly, how. The “protector” may already be among us, whether as a politician, a platform, or a public health regime. Whether he becomes a philosopher or a tyrant depends on the vigilance of the people. If the public demands accountability, transparency, and restraint, democracy may endure. But if it continues to trade liberty for safety, and complexity for control, then Plato’s warning becomes prophecy.

And yet, a deeper question remains. Is the worst scenario, the curbing of liberty, the centralization of power, the suppression of dissent ever a necessary evil in the face of existential threat? History suggests that it may be. From wartime Athens to modern pandemics, societies under siege often justify extreme measures for survival. At times, such responses are indeed essential. But Plato would caution that the danger lies not only in what we do during crisis, but in what we become because of it. A people who learn to submit in fear may not remember how to stand in freedom.

The modern challenge is not simply to act in times of emergency, but to unlearn emergency thinking once the threat has passed. Our threats today are more persistent, less defined, and more easily manipulated than in the past. We are told to remain on alert, not just against viruses and violence, but against misinformation, disruption, and dissent. In such an environment, the suspension of liberty may begin as temporary, but risk becoming institutionalized. The protector, once welcomed, may no longer need to ask permission to stay.

In the West today, the biological crisis of COVID has passed. But its political aftershocks are far from over. The habits of submission, the architecture of control, and the appetite for order remain in place. If we are not careful, we may find ourselves not in Plato’s Republic, but in the dystopia he tried to warn us against.