In Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, a prince and his courtiers retreat into a castellated abbey to escape the pestilence ravaging their land. Behind iron gates, they hold a masquerade of grotesque beauty. Music fills the air, dancers twirl across marble floors, and laughter echoes through lavish apartments. They believe themselves insulated from the disease and decay facing those outside the walls. Yet a masked figure enters their midst. Disguised as a reveler, Death itself has come to remind the privileged that no wall is high enough to keep mortality at bay.

Nearly two centuries later, the allegory feels uncomfortably close. As Americans grapple with government dysfunction, an unaffordable health-care system, and deepening national division, reports of a new ballroom planned within the White House evoke the same eerie tableau: music swelling while the country trembles outside the walls. What stirs unease is not the opulence itself but what it represents: the recurring urge of power to beautify itself amid crisis, to polish marble and gold while the foundations of democracy crack beneath it.

In every age, the powerful have sought refuge in ritualized grandeur. Versailles glittered while grain riots spread through France. The czar's Winter Palace glowed with chandeliers as revolution gathered outside. Poe understood this pathology: the dance as denial, ornament as anesthesia. The ball is not held in spite of the plague; it is held because of it, a desperate insistence that beauty and privilege can shield the few from contagion and chaos.

What makes Poe's vision enduring is not its gothic dread but its moral clarity. The Red Death is not merely a disease; it is truth itself — mortality, accountability, consequence. The masked figure represents what privilege tries to wall off: the shared human condition. Every masquerade ends the same way. The masks fall, the music stops, and truth stands bare before the light.

In our own moment, denial thrives in spectacle and performance. We mistake pageantry for leadership, image for substance. The ballroom becomes a mirror in which the powerful see not their people but only their own reflection. Too often, the rest of us mistake their performance for progress.

Yet history, like Poe's masked intruder, is patient. No fortress, architectural or ideological, remains impermeable forever. The greater danger is not that the privileged dance but that the rest of us begin to move to their music. Democracy rarely collapses in one grand waltz; it erodes through a thousand small steps of distraction and denial.

In the end, every ballroom falls silent. The measure of any nation is found not in its splendor but in its mercy, for no republic endures without compassion. A strong nation is not built in ballrooms but in hospitals, schools, and communities where we meet each other's needs. The Founders understood that a republic survives not through grandeur but through the daily practice of virtue, humility, and compassion. No amount of marble or music can drown out the quiet command to care for our neighbors who are suffering, to ignore it is to build a palace on sand — and to dance while the floor cracks beneath us.