Last Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards presented a scene familiar to American cultural life: celebrities applauding winners, elegantly dressed guests posing for photographs, and broad smiles under bright lights. But in the glow of that televised spectacle, there was one glaring absence — no meaningful acknowledgment of the deepening crisis gripping this country, no public expression of revulsion at the killing of an American citizen by a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis earlier this week.

The Golden Globes merely illuminated a broader pattern. The silence on display that evening is not confined to Hollywood; it reflects a deeper, more pervasive failure across American elite culture, including politicians, corporate executives, academic leaders, and other stewards of institutional authority. What might once have been framed as prudence has hardened into avoidance. Silence has become habit.

History offers a clear warning about such habits. In 1963, writing from a Birmingham jail cell, Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. issued a direct rebuke to the white clergy and civic leaders who counseled patience while injustice persisted. His words remain among the most searing moral indictments in American history: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” King understood that injustice is sustained not only by its perpetrators, but by those who possess influence and choose quiet over courage. Silence, he argued, is not neutrality; it is complicity.

That lesson was tragically confirmed in 20th-century Europe. In Germany, many elites — industrialists, professionals, clergy, and cultural leaders — accommodated themselves to Hitler’s rise, believing that proximity to power would protect their interests. Instead, their cooperation lent legitimacy to barbarism and ultimately contributed to the destruction of their own society. The seeds of elite downfall were sown not in resistance, but in compliance — in the belief that moral distance from power could be maintained while benefiting from its favor.

The killing of an American citizen by federal agents should have demanded national reckoning. Instead, it was met with muted reaction, deflection, or silence. While the Golden Globes offered a symbolic snapshot of elite disengagement, the deeper failure lies in the routine quiet of those with cultural, political, and economic authority — those who understand what is happening and yet choose not to speak. This silence is not born of confusion, but of calculation, fear, and a lack of courage.

We often invoke The Washington Post’s famous warning that “democracy dies in darkness.” But darkness alone is not democracy’s greatest threat. Democracies can survive ignorance; they cannot survive abdication. Democracy dies when those who know better choose silence — when applause replaces conscience, and complicity becomes the governing ethic of the elite.