When history looks back on the United States, I predict there will be three major criticisms. The first is that we spent money like drunken sailors on shore leave. The second will be that there isn’t a patch of dirt on the planet anywhere that our fearless leaders in Washington—who have been bent over for years by the weapons industry—haven’t declared that we have a vital national interest in. And perhaps the dumbest of them all is American women and their beta male accomplices declaring that murdering the next generation is “health care.” Since we have spent considerable time lately on the final point and already given the Darwin Award to these troglodytes, I have decided to meditate on the first point, which leads directly to the question of whether democracy in its current form in the United States is workable. I will save you the suspense and declare it isn’t.
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I want to start by reminding everyone of what a trillion dollars is. We throw around the word “trillion” so casually that it has become almost meaningless. So let’s consider the true scale of a trillion. A million seconds is about eleven and a half days. A billion seconds is nearly thirty-two years. A trillion seconds is nearly 32,000 years. Or consider cash: $1 trillion requires ten billion $100 bills. Laid end to end, those bills would stretch roughly 969,000 miles—enough to circle the Earth about thirty-nine times.
Now consider what we spend in a single year. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal budget deficit totaled $2.0 trillion during the first eleven months of fiscal year 2026. We are not talking about the national debt accumulated over generations. We are talking about the additional hole dug during eleven months of a single fiscal year. CBO’s July estimate put the full-year 2026 deficit at about $2.1 trillion. That deficit gets added to the debt we have already accumulated. And does everyone understand that when the federal government spends more than it takes in, the difference has to be financed?
But, since we have such brilliant politicians spending money on our behalf, let’s explore how else we could spend $2 trillion rather than simply allowing the number to disappear into the abstraction called the federal budget.
I mean, as long as we are blowing the money, let’s look at an alternative use. The Census Bureau reports that 34.5 million Americans—10.2 percent of the population—lived below the official poverty line in 2025. Divide $2 trillion among those 34.5 million people, and it comes to roughly $58,000 per person, or about $232,000 for four people.
Now consider Richmond, Indiana. The Census Bureau estimates its 2025 population at roughly 35,000, and recent Census data put the median value of owner-occupied housing there at a little over $114,000. Richmond isn’t just a cheap dot on a map. It is a small Midwestern city with Earlham College, a historic downtown and Depot District, cultural institutions, parks, and trails. On paper, $232,000 is more than twice that median home value. Maybe we couldn’t buy a palace for every poor person in America. But it is all about the scale. Two trillion dollars is so much money that our minds are almost incapable of processing it.
And so, given the potential alternate uses, I must ask the question: What the f-ck are they doing with our money?
William F. Buckley Jr. famously wrote that he would rather live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the Harvard faculty. What once sounded like comic exaggeration now occasionally sounds like a reasonable experiment. Could the first 2,000 people we bumped into on the street possibly do worse than our politicians? If we can even imagine sums capable of transforming the lives of tens of millions of Americans at the rate of a single year’s deficit, what exactly are we buying instead? You would have to ask the succession of dunce presidents and Congresses of both parties that helped build the modern fiscal state.
THE JOB OF DEMOCRACY
Our problem gets worse when we come to the realization that we put these people in office. We can no longer simply lob grenades at Washington, D.C. We are the ones who have repeatedly screwed up. Bottom line, we haven’t done the job required to live in a democracy.
One of America’s earliest admirers, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to the United States nearly two centuries ago and argued that a new political science was needed for a new democratic world. But what passes for political science today looks less like science than religion. Statistics, data, or responsible analysis interferes with preferred conclusions. We have sacred doctrines, forbidden questions, and heretics, and perhaps no doctrine is treated as more sacred than universal suffrage. So let’s commit a little heresy and call bullsh*t on it.
Alexis was a French aristocrat who traveled to America with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont, a fellow French magistrate. The ostensible reason they came was to study America’s prison system. But they used the opportunity to perform a full dissection of the young democracy. They traveled widely through the United States and Canada, met political leaders and ordinary citizens, and eventually produced works that reached far beyond prisons.
Tocqueville admired a great deal about America, but he was no romantic about democracy. He wrote that universal suffrage produced neither all the good nor all the evil Europeans attributed to it, and he was struck by the fact that the most able men were rarely placed at the head of American public affairs. In his interviews with Americans of some note, they repeatedly told him that the American people elected dopes. Obviously, nothing has changed. Alexis worried about democratic individualism and citizens retreating into private life rather than taking on the responsibility of citizenship. At the same time, he saw local government, voluntary associations, and habits of participation as potential counterweights to democratic weakness.
His Democracy in America was an effort to understand the conditions under which democracy could survive. People were not born knowing how to govern themselves, reconcile private interest with public obligation, or understand the workings of government merely because they possessed political rights. But America was full of institutions in which citizens could practice those habits.
Tocqueville was especially struck by Americans’ tendency to organize. They formed political, religious, commercial, and civic associations. They governed towns and counties, sat on juries, attended meetings, raised money, elected officers, and worked with people with whom they did not always agree. These organizations were not merely clubs. They functioned as schools of citizenship. People learned how to keep records, run meetings, persuade neighbors, lose votes, accept decisions, compromise, and take responsibility for something beyond themselves.
That leaves us with a much harder question than whether politicians are idiots—which is already obvious. What happens when the schools of citizenship weaken but everybody is still loosed upon the voting booth? What happens when citizenship becomes something we possess rather than something we practice? In other words, what happens after about 150 years of faking it?
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE A CITIZEN?
Before we decide who should vote, there is a more basic question: what does a democracy have the right to expect from a citizen? We have spent generations talking about the rights of citizenship, and for good reason. But self-government has always carried duties as well: obeying the law, serving on juries when called, paying taxes lawfully owed, participating in civic life, and accepting that membership in a political community occasionally requires us to put something ahead of ourselves.
American history also gives us a warning. Restrictions on the voting franchise—including literacy tests and other ostensibly neutral qualifications—were often administered discriminatorily, especially against Black citizens. A competency test can and has been used unfairly against other Americans. But the abuse of a question does not make the question itself disappear. Americans are neither bothering to understand the issues or even the people who they are voting for.
Voting is really important, but we make up for it by really sucking at it. We conveniently bitch about it largely because we are responsible for the shitty results. And we give no thought to the rest of the world, who consider it a good day when they are not beaten by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Our voting does not just suffer from a lack of knowledge of the issues or who we vote for. We vote as if we are merely deciding what happens to us and us alone. But we shouldn’t be. We are participating in decisions about their neighbors’ property, taxes, schools, wars, laws, public debt, and children’s future. Which leads to the obvious question—if we require a license to drive a car, operate heavy machinery, ride a motorcycle, or own a dog, why in the hell do we allow people to simply show up at the voting booth without the slightest ability to vote intelligently? What in the world are we teaching in our public schools if we are not teaching our kids the mechanics of American government and how to distinguish the Constitution from a rhinoceros?
Tocqueville understood another democratic temptation: faction. When political power is widely distributed, groups naturally discover that government can be used to advance their own interests. They form factions. This kind of power play is used by all voter classes. People with little property favor spending from which they benefit while paying comparatively less in taxes. In fact, the bottom half of income earners—an incredibly strong political coalition—pay less than 4% of federal income taxes. Wealthy individuals and corporations have their hands in the till through favored deductions, subsidies, bailouts, tariffs, contracts, and regulations that protect them from competition. The mechanisms differ by political party.
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Let’s start with the Democrats, only because I like them less. Their coalition includes voters who demand government benefits, subsidies, and expanded programs while increasingly treating demands for personal responsibility as somehow cruel or oppressive. The message is that society owes you something because you have suffered, because you belong to a particular constituency, or simply because somebody else has more than you do. At some point, a functioning republic has to be capable of saying, “We cannot afford this,” and you can’t have a never-ending supply of public benefits. Maybe we can’t pay for your desire to have five kids that you can’t afford, or on the flip side, we can’t pay for your third abortion. Maybe you should get off drugs, or maybe you should have stayed in school. Maybe you should have done something to help yourself.
Republicans have their own mob, and in some ways it’s even worse. Banks, defense contractors, corporations, agricultural interests, and businesses seeking tariffs, subsidies, and favorable tax treatment are every bit as obnoxious about government largesse. These are people who adore the free market right up until the free market kicks them in the ass. Then suddenly they discover socialism. Let’s steal from the public, create a massive banking and housing crisis, and then ask for a bailout from the politicians we control.
The poor call their demands assistance. Corporations call their demands economic development. Banks call their demands financial stability. Defense contractors call their demands national security. Universities call their demands student aid. Politicians call the entire transaction democracy.
In his Politics, Aristotle distinguished government directed toward the common advantage from corrupted forms directed toward the private advantage of the ruling group. And he was not merely worried about the poor exploiting the rich. Oligarchy could be equally corrupt. Rich men could govern for themselves just as easily as poor men could. The problem was not which faction won. The problem was faction itself replacing the common good.
There is a sickness of the soul behind this kind of politics: an utter disregard for anyone but yourself. And that is completely incompatible with life in a democratic republic. Democracy asks ordinary people to exercise power over other ordinary people. If the citizen cannot distinguish between what he wants and what the community can responsibly sustain, elections are little more than robbing a convenience store.
Plato approached the same problem from the direction of appetite and discipline. In the Republic, his critique of democracy is bound up with a society in which desires multiply, restraints lose legitimacy, and it becomes a free-for-all where the electorate robs the treasury. Plato’s warning is that a people incapable of governing its own appetites cannot effectively run a government.
We are right at the point in history that Plato described 2500 years ago. In our time, Woodstock and its aftermath became a cultural expression of that revolt against restraint—sans soap and water. Thoughtful opposition to the Vietnam War existed alongside a much broader counterculture. The antiwar movement, the New Left, hippies, feminists, sexual revolutionaries, and assorted Marxists were different movements with different objectives, but they traveled on the same bus, and the price of admission was simple: you support my liberation, and I’ll support yours. By the middle of the next decade, the revolution had escaped the communes and entered ordinary American life. Tom Wolfe popularized the description of the 1970s as the “Me Decade,” and he did not mean it as a compliment. Today, we see this playing out between the Left and Militant Islam, allies today and eventual enemies.
Somehow we have migrated from the belief that democracy carries responsibilities and consequences to a hardened belief that imposing almost any responsibility upon citizens constitutes some unspeakable violation of their freedom. We have even jettisoned the most basic responsibility associated with voting: knowing who and what the hell we are voting for.
THE PRICE OF THE BALLOT
We have finally arrived at the question I have been circling from the beginning. If voting is an act of self-government, what exactly does a citizen owe the republic before being entrusted with a share of its government? Notice that I said owe. We have become very good at reciting what the government owes us, what society owes us, what our employer owes us, what previous generations owe us, and what some stranger with more money than we have supposedly owes us. We are not so enthusiastic about discussing what we owe everybody else, which is a pretty serious problem in a system in which everybody wants a hand on the steering wheel.
Citizenship cannot simply mean possessing a passport, showing up every few years, pulling a lever, and then going home to complain about the idiots everyone else elected. It has to mean taking some responsibility for the place in which you live. You should know how your government works before demanding that it work for you. You should know who you are voting for and what they actually propose to do. One issue: voters and people who turn politics into a team sport are a menace.
We should contribute something to our community, whether that means paying taxes, serving on a jury, coaching a Little League team, volunteering at a church, helping at a food bank, joining Rotary, sitting through a miserable town meeting, or simply knowing the name of the old woman who lives next door and checking on her when the lights go out. None of this is glamorous, which is precisely the point. Civilization is mostly built out of people doing boring things for one another without demanding applause.
And we desperately need to relearn another civic obligation: how to disagree without becoming assholes. Because we are all assholes now.
Your neighbor is not your enemy because he voted differently. Your sister is not a fascist because she thinks the tax rate should be lower, and your brother-in-law is not a communist because he thinks it should be higher. Losing an election is not oppression. Hearing an opinion you dislike is not violence. Being offended is not a constitutional crisis. Sometimes you are simply wrong, and sometimes the other guy is wrong, and sometimes both of you are full of shit. The genius of a republic is not that it eliminates those disagreements; it gives us a civilized way to live with them. That is the whole fucking point of living in a democracy. If you can’t do that, then you’ll be more comfortable in a fascist state.
That is what Tocqueville saw in those associations I keep coming back to. Americans did not learn democracy from a textbook. They learned it by having to sit across a table from people they did not particularly like and still get the roof fixed, the school built, the church funded, the road repaired, and the widow down the street fed. They learned that citizenship required showing up, keeping your word, paying your share, listening to somebody else, and occasionally shutting the hell up. Most importantly, they learned that the community did not exist merely to satisfy their appetites. They belonged to it, and belonging imposed obligations.
That is the part of the American experiment we are losing. We have turned politics into gimmie consumerism: What do I get? What will you give me? Who will punish the people I hate? Who will make somebody else pay for it? Politicians respond exactly as we should expect politicians to respond. They offer more, promise more, borrow more, demonize the other side, and send the invoice to our children. Then we stand around staring at a $2 trillion annual hole and wonder how we got here. We know. It’s on us.
These lightweights and mediocre politicians went where we sent them. The problem is us. We have confused freedom with the absence of obligation and citizenship with entitlement. We want honest politicians while rewarding people who lie to us. We want balanced budgets while voting for benefits we have no intention of paying for. We demand civility while treating anybody who disagrees with us as morally defective. We complain that nobody knows anything about government while tolerating schools and families that send young adults into the world without the faintest idea how their own country works.
Maybe the first reform is not another law, another commission, or another goddamned federal program. Maybe it is considerably harder than that because it requires us to change our own behavior. Learn something before you vote. Read the argument you disagree with instead of the meme that confirms what you already believe. Know what a trillion dollars is before demanding another one. Stop asking government to make your neighbor finance every desire you have. Join something. Help somebody. Pay attention to your town. Teach your children that freedom and responsibility are not enemies. And when you lose, shake the winner’s hand, go home, have a drink, and try again next time.
I am still willing to have the harder argument about whether voting should carry actual qualifications, because universal suffrage does not magically manufacture wisdom and Tocqueville was quite explicit about that. But before we design another test for somebody else to pass, perhaps we ought to start administering one to ourselves. Are we informed? Are we contributing? Are we behaving like citizens rather than customers? Are we capable of putting the common good ahead of our own appetite once in a while? And can we disagree with another American without deciding that he is evil and must be destroyed? Do we really need to impose a voting qualification on ourselves because we are too selfish to act responsibly? If so, I’m willing to do that.
In the end, a republic cannot be rescued by citizens who refuse to act like citizens, and no Constitution, however brilliant, can indefinitely protect a free people from their own selfishness, ignorance, and contempt for one another. The ballot is not a lottery ticket, and citizenship is not a Costco membership. They are responsibilities, and if we want this American experiment to continue, it is long past time we started acting like it. Otherwise, we all know where this will lead.
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This content originally appeared on ABSTRACTRUTH Substack.
