Welcome to the CIRCUS!
Through active reading and rereading for both pleasure and work, by early 2025, the Federalist Papers felt more contemporary than ever. Each essay addressed political shortcomings Americans now pretend are new. The arguments are/were so clear, so direct, that I found myself rereading passages to make sure I wasn’t missing something. There had to be a trick. There wasn’t.
Quick note: This paper has a more academic tone, since the seed for this was a lecture.
What struck me most was not what those writers said, but what is missing from today’s political discourse. Politics is no longer about ideas offering solutions. It is about ideology, money, and loyalty — not civic duty, but duty to the greenback. Americans argue endlessly over symbols while avoiding the more complex work of governance.
I ran for office in a special election in 2025 with no money and some illusions. The ideological hostility came from every direction — mainly from the right, but not exclusively. I expected it. As a historian, I have read about the Election of 1800 — at least my character wasn’t called hermaphroditical like John Adams’, which, 250 years from now, our discourse will sound just as hilariously absurd.
What surprised me was not the hostility itself, but how uninformed voters have become, even with all the technology in the world (“social” media, email, all new media) at their fingertips. But I suppose I already knew that. I have been a history professor for nearly a decade. But I am still optimistic about the future.
In earlier eras, people wrestled openly with ideas. Cicero. Plato. Socrates. Locke. Hobbes. Machiavelli. These were not perfect men, but they debated publicly and in writing, engaging in complex dialogue among themselves and within their being. Americans no longer have figures who command that level of intellectual seriousness. Americans barely receive a town hall, never a debate, and it seems voters’ minds are made up before they even hit the polls. No need to research. No need to question. I like the Roman form much better, the blues and the greens — look it up.
Even corruption in the nineteenth century had structure. Tammany Hall was rotten, but it demanded engagement. A debate was required. Where are the Lincoln–Douglas debates? Where is our Frederick Douglass? Where is anyone capable of persuading rather than posturing? There are a few, but no more than a few.
Why do you let them remain vague or opaque during their campaigns? — That is precisely how they will govern. No one should expect perfection, no, but somehow, participation in simple endeavors has been framed as optional, while the consequences of their action (or inaction) are unavoidable.
But citizens are told you don’t have time for that. Let our representatives worry about those issues. Are you convinced they know what is right for you? Rest assured, they are thinking of you, whether riding through the gates of Mar-a-Lago or Martha’s Vineyard — they are always thinking of you.
As our representatives do what they do, however, you have time to complain about high taxes. You have time to sit in traffic as toll lanes multiply. You have time to work overtime to afford groceries, housing, and taxes. You have time to do everything but hold your representatives accountable.
History is uncomfortable here. Even corrupt systems of the past produced results. People tolerated self-dealing because infrastructure was built, cities functioned, and public order existed. That tolerance was never permanent.
Tolerance becomes entitlement only when citizens disengage long enough for dysfunction to normalize. Societies always recalibrate. The only question is whether recalibration happens through civic renewal or institutional collapse. And even something more tragic. Everything is constantly born anew through intellectual or spiritual enlightenment or through death.
Civic ignorance is not a moral failure. It is the predictable outcome of a system that convinces citizens their duty ends at voting — or worse, that silence is harmless. In a republic, silence is consent. When citizens no longer believe they are bound by duty to stand, to speak, and to challenge power, they do not eliminate corruption. They yield to it.
There are non-negotiables in any functioning republic. The Constitution cannot be treated as optional. The government cannot act as though it owns the people rather than serves them. Taxation and regulation cannot become instruments of punishment or social engineering detached from consent.
The citizen must remain the central concern — not an abstraction, not a revenue source, not an obstacle to administrative convenience. The consequences of forgetting this are not theoretical. California has been allowed to drift toward managed decline while officials congratulate themselves on intentions rather than outcomes.
Public disorder is excused. Affordability is moralized rather than solved. Families adapt downward while leadership adapts rhetorically.
I saw it plainly with my own children, how simple the uncorrupted mind reasons in a way a government official should. Driving through San Francisco, my four-year-old pointed at a man urinating in the street and announced, loudly, that he was a “bad boy, he’s not going in the potty!” My reply was a soft, “Yes, you’re right, Jack.” There was, in fact, a public restroom less than ten feet away. Children understand boundaries instinctively.
Children understand order without justification of systemic inequities or all such jazz. Adults are the ones who rationalize the absence of boundaries and order with their virtue signaling. A kid will say, “You’re fat,” or “He’s short,” without a second thought — because it’s true, and you should always tell the truth — Santa is watching.
When I returned to the city of San Francisco some years later after that moment, the city my grandfather once described (his hometown) as the most beautiful in the world (to visit my brother), entire neighborhoods were altered — stores shuttered, guards posted, public norms abandoned. Dystopian. That change did not happen overnight, nor by accident. It happened through years of small evasions, justified as compassion and deferred as someone else’s problem. Silent consent.
If nothing changes, California in twenty years will not be progressive or compassionate: it will be bankrupt, and probably sooner than Californians all expect. Financially. Civically. Institutionally. Californians are heading toward a fiscal cliff, not because solutions are unavailable, but because the culture war has replaced governance and eaten our resources. Californians fight endlessly over identity while systems decay beneath our feet.
This is how republics fail, not all at once, but through exhaustion, disengagement, and the steady erosion of legitimacy. When institutions no longer command trust, authority rushes in to replace consent. Rights become conditional. Emergency becomes permanent. The Constitution remains, but only as paper.
You don’t have to listen, but if enough of us work toward “Good Gov’t“ Californians can make California…[insert any one of the catchy phrases].
This is not radical. It is a civic duty.
Bring your ideas. Debate them openly. Demand competence. Demand limits the government. Demand that the government remember who it serves. May the best ideas prevail.
P.S. If nobody ever reads this, let this stand as a primary source of the moment many Americans realized something fundamental was breaking, and that the choice to act still existed. And if the republic collapsed, I’m sorry, I tried. :’ (