This research note critically examines the structural failures of Mexico’s post-2000 democratic transition, arguing that the rise of illiberal populism under the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) is not the cause but the consequence of a stalled and superficial democratization process. While formal electoral procedures were strengthened, underlying issues such as state capture, elite dominance, widespread corruption, and socioeconomic exclusion remained unaddressed. By reducing democracy to procedural minimalism, political elites failed to deliver substantive democratic outcomes, eroding institutional legitimacy, and fueling public disillusionment.

As ecological and political collapse force us into collective descent, we need mythic structures that can help us integrate darkness and decline into democratic practices and institutions. Enlightenment demands for perpetual ascent from darkness toward luminosity are ill-suited for these challenges. We develop an alternative mythos through contrasting readings of two texts. First, Ursula Le Guin’s story of “Omelas” reveals how enlightened societies maintain themselves by proscribing empathetic engagement with their underworlds. Second, the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld, offers a radically different cosmology wherein voluntary descent with open ears, radical vulnerability, and empathetic engagement with suffering become conditions for sociopolitical transformation. “Earth democracy” creatively embraces rhythms of descent and regeneration. We suggest ways social movements might embody these principles.

The animal question in politics is as old as politics itself. It is a question that drives my own work, where I consistently confront an absence of animals viewed on their own terms, in and for themselves, in conceptions of political life. Animals are often part of the story, but as mystical and allegorical figures, sacrificial bodies, and constitutive limits of the civil state. Modern liberal democracies take on the latter position of marking animals as the exit from politics, largely writing them (and nature more generally) out of the narrative altogether.