The concept that rejecting the political posture of an individual or political movement or party can constitute “treason” in a pluralistic democracy is oxymoronic.  

The allegiance of a citizen in a democracy is to the corporate concept of the “People”, not to any person or political party, and certainly not to any serving government.  Perhaps not even to the “State”.

The principal political duty of individuals in a democracy is to maintain their civic responsibilities by informing and educating themselves, exercising their reason and common sense, and sharing their opinions with other citizens without fear of reprisals, calumnies or ridicule. 

The foregoing is something almost entirely absent from current discourse in purported Western democracies.  Perhaps the “adjective “Western” now changes the nature of the noun modified making it synonymous instead with oligarchical autocracy and dictatorship.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.