[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

The Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill managed to squeak by the typical legislative partisan road-blocks and sand traps. Like all legislation in democracies, the bill is not perfect, nor does it satisfy everyone. But just extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax reform no doubt pleases most voters and taxpayers who dodged a $4 trillion tax increase next year. The Dems, of course, have been flogging their usual suspect clichés about “gutting Medicaid” and other social welfare programs just to keep the “rich” from “paying their fair share,” even though the U.S. already has the most progressive income tax among developed economies.

This doesn’t mean, however, that many problems–– for example, with our metastasizing debt, deficits, and expansionary Rube Goldberg redistribution machines––don’t exist. On all counts we are facing, sooner than most voters realize, a reckoning that economist Veronique de Rugy recently catalogued, and which will require painful sacrifices. Unfortunately, as The Wall Street Journal describes this “crisis of the welfare state,” is “fiscally unaffordable but politically unreformable.”

But these problems are not just caused by office-seekers doling out goodies to voters in exchange for their votes or campaign donations. Rather, ever since democracy was born 2500 years ago, it has reflected the novel but problematic structures necessary for empowering the ordinary, free citizens to participate in holding offices and speaking publicly. Both freedoms are hostage to the eternal, tragic flaws of human nature and its passions and interests.

Indeed, these bad habits and dysfunctions of democracy provided much of the antidemocratic arguments that started in Athens and persisted down through the ages to influence the debates over the Constitution and beyond. One charge was the inability of the enfranchised masses to acquire the wisdom and knowledge required for governing, what the poet Pindar called “the splendor running in the blood” of aristocrats who fancied themselves born leaders. The other disqualifying feature of the masses was their lack of philosophical training, which Socrates and Plato claimed provided the wisdom, virtues, and technical knowledge necessary for controlling the government and the masses.

Since the Progressive era and its technocratic rule of credentialed “experts” housed in federal agencies, we have endorsed those antidemocratic qualifications, perpetuated by the tendency for the university trained and credentialed affluent to marry within their class and share its political ideologies and prejudices. Hence the anti-populist and snobbish disdain that have characterized the Dems’ attacks on Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

These technocratic pretensions, moreover, have marginalized practical wisdom, tradition, and common sense, and subordinated them to pseudo-scientific ideas and theoretical policies that end up wasting billions of dollars, while often compromising our rights and freedoms. Just in the last few decades we’ve experienced this malign dynamic with questionable and destructive regulations and policies on Covid mitigation; transgenderism with its medieval treatments and violations of women’s Constitutional rights; and expensive, economy-busting global-warming zero-carbon subsidies for “green energy” production, for which the transmission lines and storage infrastructure remain decades from viability.

Another feature of democracies that makes addressing the threats to our national economy is the bad habit of our citizens and politicians to put off needed reforms and leave them for the future citizens––including those not yet born–– to deal with. Again, this feature of democracy goes back to its beginning, and since then has been particularly dangerous during times of conflict and war, when often butter triumphs guns.

In the 4^th century B.C., for example, Athens was threatened by the ambitions of the Macedonian King Phillip II, father of Alexander. At that time Athens redistributed public funds to citizens for inter alia attending the religious festivals where tragedies and comedies were performed. The great statesman and orator Demosthenes tried in vain to get the people to use those funds to prepare for the looming war with Macedon. Demosthenes pointed out the “habits of mind” that follow from getting something for nothing, a “serious matter” for it created the moral hazard that citizens grow accustomed to getting public money, while ignoring their military duties in the face of aggression.

Demosthenes’ near contemporary, the historian Theopompus, confirmed Demosthenes’s warnings. Commenting on Athens’ short-sighted folly of transferring surplus revenue into the welfare fund rather than the military one, he wrote that this policy made the Athenians “less courageous and more lax,” spending “more on public festivals and sacrifices,” occasions for free food and entertainment, “than on the management of the war.” Sound familiar?

Also foreshadowing our own times, Demosthenes blamed elected and appointed politicians: “The politicians hold the purse-strings and manage everything” ––in a direct democracy ruled by the citizens––“while you, the people are robbed of nerves and sinew.”

More than two millennia later, Alexis de Tocqueville warned about this phenomenon from another dimension: the habit of democracies to put off difficult decisions that left unsettled, can lead to dangerous crises. De Tocquville, like today’s technocrats, blamed a “lack of learning” among the people, “whose conclusions are hastily formed from the superficial inspection of the more prominent features of a question.” Thus, the “difficulty that a democracy finds in conquering the passions and subduing the desires of the moment with a view to the future.”

Moreover, the people are “surrounded by flatterers,” the politicians, and “find great difficulty in surmounting their inclination; whenever they are required to undergo privation or any inconvenience, even to attain an end sanctioned by their own rational conviction, they almost always refuse at first to comply.”

Finally, one of democracy’s greatest defenders, Winston Churchill, attributed the outbreak of World War II in part to these flaws of democracy. In The Gathering Storm he identified “the structures and habits of democratic states,” with their regularly schedules elections, open processes of decision-making and deliberation to which citizens can contribute, the power of citizens to hold politicians accountable for their actions, and public media that report on the progress or setbacks of battles.

All these contribute to what Churchill calls a lack of “those elements of persistence and conviction which alone can give security to the humble masses”; and to the failure of following through on a policy, “even in matters of self-preservation.”

So, what’s to be done about our relentlessly metastasizing fiscal dysfunctions? Or more realistic, what is politically possible, given our divided and balanced power of government that makes every election a duel between mutually exclusive political factions, and policies that reflect a complex diverse and equally free citizenry with mutually exclusive passions and interests?

As denizens of a technocratic, science-based culture, we tend to believe that all such problems have a solution, if only the greedy rich and the freeloading poor, along with their tribunes, would listen to the “experts” and solve these problems to everybody’s satisfaction, which means everybody who agrees with the “experts.” However, our Constitution wasn’t created to “solve problems,” but to keep us equally free to manage and shape our lives, the purpose of our divided and balanced powers.

The price of this protection, however, is the possibility that some problems will remain unsolvable, given the flaws of human nature with its self-serving priorities and tendency to procrastinate and “lose the name of action.” The passionate contentions created by slavery in the end had to be solved with a bloody civil war, and even then, it took a century for the last vestiges of human bondage to be eradicated––though malign illiberal, if not racist, ideologies like DEI and “systemic racism” still live on as political leverage for aspiring tyrants

Solving all the dysfunctions of our management of the economy is unlikely to lead to civil war. We’re too rich, comfortable, and well-fed for that. But other serious crises that severely degrade our standard of living and security are possible, and could wake us from our partisan dogmatic slumbers. After all, the worst economic crisis in our history, the Great Depression, was ended by the aggression of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, which concentrated our minds wonderfully.

So, let’s hope that if such a time should ever come, we are able to put aside childish things and self-interests, and once more show the patriotic mettle of the Greatest Generation. Meanwhile, all we can do is hold our politicians to account with our votes––just as we did last November. But much work remains to be done, and hard decisions to be made.