“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury,” goes the famous apocryphal warning. “From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits….” The result of this “is that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy.” This is then “always followed by a dictatorship.”
The warning also holds that the “average age of the world’s greatest civilizations” has historically “been about 200 years.” Given that the United States is now 250 years old and $39-trillion fiscally loose, what should be said about her?
Commentator and ex-State Department official Ron MacCammon has his answer. “Our republic is falling gradually,” he wrote earlier this week. “Total collapse will be sudden.”
.....MacCammon says that the United States’ problem is, essentially, “the tragedy of the commons.” That is, when “people pursue short-term interests at a shared resource’s expense, they eventually destroy it for everyone,” he explains. “Fisheries collapse this way. Pastures go barren. And right now, something similar is happening to the American republic.” For when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.
“What’s being depleted isn’t land or water,” MacCammon continues. “The constitutional ecosystem — the institutional integrity, fiscal discipline, and civic trust that make American self-governance possible — is what’s running dry.”
Put simply, people don’t feel obligated to do as much for strangers as for their family — or their national family.
A Substack writer named Kari Stark recounted a story, from her time in Minnesota, that well illustrated both immigration-related phenomena. It involved a conversation with a Somali “friend” — an exchange that moved her “to the right.” After mentioning to the individual that lying for political gain is short-sighted, he replied, “Why would I care about that? They’re not my tribe. Those are your rules, not ours.”
The bottom line is that profligate spending reflects a lack of virtue. Given this, something else John Adams expressed explains the problem. “Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private,” he wrote, “and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.”
It is not, though, the only foundation of failing ones.
