In 1787 when asked by Elizabeth Willing Powel "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Benjamin Franklin famously replied “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

That was now nearly 250 years ago, and the United States of America has operated as a republic for longer than any other nation in the world. Many crises have been encountered and overcome during this time period, including most of all a horrifying civil war, exactly the kind of event that has resulted in autocratic government, for example through military coups, in many other parts of the world. 

There is a frequent confusion about what it means to be a republic. In particular there are those who like to assert about the United States that “we’re a republic, but not a democracy.” They often tend to mistakenly appeal to James Madison to support this view.  This is at best a lazy and at worst an intentionally wrong reading of Madison, who uses the term “democracy” to describe a straw man system of direct government in which “a small number of citizens [...] assemble and administer the government in person” (Federalist No. 10). 

Madison goes on to argue that such systems have been unstable, short-lived and tended towards violence. Madison turned out to be ultimately wrong here on the merits, although he couldn’t have known that at the time, as Switzerland has had a version of direct democracy since 1848. Madison’s key thrust though in promoting what he called a republic was a representative democracy. In his own words “the delegation of the government [...] to a small number of citizens elected by the rest” (Federalist No. 10). There can be no doubt that for Madison and the other Founding Fathers the crucial contrast was between monarchy (or other forms of autocracy) and a democratic "government of the people, by the people, for the people" (in Lincoln’s later phrasing). 

So back to Franklin’s original response. Can we keep our republic, our democracy, in the face of profound challenges and exceptional opportunities? The acceleration of global warming, the exploding capabilities of AI, and the rapid realignment of international power all require disruptive instead of incremental changes in policy. Each on its own can topple much of how we have organized society and they are interacting to strengthen each other’s impact (e.g. warfare rapidly shifting to the use of attritable autonomous systems). Each represents incredible opportunities for progress as well, such as dramatically lower cost of energy, extraordinary gains in productivity, and new multilateral agreements. All of these require decisive and bold action with changes on par to those of prior major transitions for humanity, such as the shift from the agrarian to the industrial age.

And just at this moment of great challenges and opportunities we are finding ourselves with a frustratingly weak democracy in the United States. The weakness has been building for decades. We are the heirs of a great fortune who don’t understand the source of their wealth and proceed to squander it. We are doing a terrible job at keeping the republic.

We go to vote every couple of years in districts that have been gerrymandered into absurd shapes to cement the power of incumbent politicians. In many parts of the country people have rightly come to conclude that their vote in the general elections is irrelevant. This learned apathy in return has shifted the locus of power to primary elections and to party machines. Both of these have discouraged sensible people from seeking office, because who wants to have to suck up either to party elders who have lost the plot or to the extreme elements that dominate the primaries.

Bills are being written by lobbyists and are so long and obtuse that nobody can understand them. Even the representatives voting on the bills haven’t read them. Their staff relies heavily on outsiders, many of whom have direct financial incentives tied to the bills. Instead of the substance of what should be accomplished, representatives instead focus on what’s in it for their specific constituents that they can point to for re-election. As a result, important bills only pass when they are stuffed with pork. The naming of the “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA) is Orwellian in light of the massive expenses it commits the government to. And of course bills just keep piling up on top of each other without anything ever being retired or fixed. Again, the IRA is a case in point. It’s full of new subsidies for renewable energies because it has been impossible to find a majority for removing existing subsidies for the oil and gas industry. The same goes for many other parts of law, with tax law being another prime example. The tax code has become impenetrable and is full of loopholes giving rise to an industry advising the wealthy and corporations on how to pay dramatically less in taxes.

Government spending is out of control resulting in ever growing debt. Agencies are incapable of carrying out their stated purpose wasting taxpayer dollars at unimaginable scale. This lack of state capacity results from a combination of excessive outsourcing and weaponized litigation. All of this is true not just at the federal level but also at the state and sometimes even the local level. Billions are sent on projects that only enrich consultants and a few vendors without delivering anything of value. In the meantime government debt has ballooned to completely unsustainable levels with the interest service alone accounting for x% of GDP. The impact of all of this on citizens has been mitigated by the US Dollars position as the global reserve currency, which is not guaranteed. Citizens understand where all of this will wind up eventually and it hasn’t mattered which party is in power, the debt has simply grown.

So it does not come as a surprise to see populism on the rise. Right populists, such as Trump, promise a return to a glorious past of individual freedom. Left populists, such as Mamdani, promise an affordable future provided by the state. Both want to bend the system to their will and build their appeal on explicit divisiveness which fuels attention. Populism is how we lose the republic. Trump has been rather open about his desire to rule as a modern day King. Mamdani explicitly calls for more equality of outcomes and the only way to achieve that is with ever more state power. To be clear, right now Trump is the President of the United States, while Mamdani hasn't even been elected to office yet (and is running for mayor of New York City). My point in bringing Mamdani up is simply that the right doesn't have a monopoly on populism.

Alexander Hamilton already knew in 1787 that populism paves the path to tyranny. In Federalist 1, he wrote “History will teach us [...] that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” What an incredible definition of populism that covers both the left and right versions of it “an obsequious court to the people.” This is why we must resist these tendencies. History since Hamilton’s writing has taught us the modern price of populism turned into dictatorships: wars, revolutions, and failed economic experiments, with tens of millions of lives sacrificed.

Resisting populism doesn’t mean resigning ourselves to living in a dysfunctional democracy. The opposite. It is a clarion call to reinvent our democracy. A challenge that’s even harder than the one faced by the Founders. This time, the enemy is not a foreign king, but instead political lobbyists, and bureaucratic inertia, and vested interests. The enemy is ourselves. Turnarounds are notoriously difficult, with outsized venture returns usually accruing to new upstarts. And certainly this could be the case here as well, which is why Balaji’s network state project is worthwhile. But so is the attempt to reinvent and reboot democracy.

What might this look like? I will explore this in future posts on topics such as the need for new parties, the importance of free and fair elections, and the potential for assemblies and conventions based on sortition.

Happy 4th of July.