The collapse of western bourgeois democracy. Why and what comes next? Toby Rogers Iām still chewing on this line from Giorgio Agambenās book, Where are we now? The epidemic as politics (to read my earlier book review click here ). Agambenās thesis, repeated throughout the book, is that: We are experiencing the end of an era in the political history of the West, the era of bourgeois democracy founded on constitutions, on rights, on parliaments, and on the division of powers. This model was already facing a crisis: constitutional principles were increasingly being ignored, and the executive power had almost entirely replaced the legislative by operating ā as it now does exclusively ā through legislative decrees [aka āexecutive ordersā]. With the so-called pandemic, things went further: what American political analysts called the āSecurity Stateā ā which was established in response to terrorism ā has now given way to a health-based paradigm of governance that we term ābio...