Washington ExaminerMay 11, 20264 min read

Our republic is falling gradually. Total collapse will be sudden

The article employs a centrist institutional critique that diagnoses systemic dysfunction while implicitly defending the constitutional order itself. Language is measured and analytical (invoking 'tragedy of the commons,' Madison's Federalist) rather than polemical, and the piece blames both parties symmetrically for abandoning norms and compromise—characteristic of establishment media concerned with institutional decay.

Primary voices: academic or expert, elected official

This article does not address structural incentives or campaign finance mechanisms that may drive the obstruction and partisan incentive structures it identifies.
This article does not examine whether institutional dysfunction reflects deeper policy disagreements on fundamental values rather than merely a loss of norms.
This article does not present counterarguments from those who believe Congress's reduced productivity reflects principled constitutional limits on federal power.

The article's framing of institutional collapse as gradual but culminating in sudden failure may shift if a specific constitutional or electoral crisis occurs that tests its predictive model.

Establishment framingStatus-quo framingReform-oriented

Economists call it the “tragedy of the commons” — when people pursue short-term interests at a shared resource’s expense, they eventually destroy it for everyone. Fisheries collapse this way. Pastures go barren. And right now, something similar is happening to the American republic.

What’s being depleted isn’t land or water. The constitutional ecosystem — the institutional integrity, fiscal discipline, and civic trust that make American self-governance possible — is what’s running dry. Unlike an overgrazed pasture, there’s no growing season that brings it back.

The most visible overgrazing is in the nation’s finances. A stable currency and manageable debt are the ground a private economy grows from. For decades, though, Washington has treated the federal treasury as a never-ending prairie.

The incentives are clear. Politicians deliver immediate benefits to voters today, while the costs are pushed onto a future that cannot vote. Between fiscal 1998 and 2025, Congress enacted 134 interim continuing resolutions, an average of five per year. Scheduling failure doesn’t begin to cover it. What Congress has abandoned is stewardship.

Abandoning the regular appropriations process lets leaders dodge the hard trade-offs that keep the whole arrangement solvent. Debt expands. Short-term fixes compound. The fiscal commons get grazed a little thinner each year.

Congress has stopped functioning as a legislature

The founders designed Congress as a forum where competing regional interests would be hammered into national law through deliberation and compromise. The design promised politicians would eventually have to solve problems to survive electorally. That no longer holds.

A member who reaches across the aisle on immigration or entitlement reform faces an immediate primary challenge. Performing outrage for the cameras, on the other hand, brings attention and fundraising. Safe districts, gerrymandering, and a 24-hour media cycle all push in the same direction: obstruction pays better than compromise.

The executive has filled the vacuum

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does Washington. As Congress has retreated from essential lawmaking, presidents have increasingly turned to executive orders and agency action to achieve policy goals. From student-loan policy to immigration enforcement, core areas of national policy now swing with each administration.

Executive actions lack the durability of statute — they are reversed or reinterpreted as soon as political control changes hands. Businesses can’t plan around policies that may vanish in 18 months. Local governments can’t adapt to whipsawing enforcement priorities. The country lurches.

The deepest damage is to trust itself

Harder to measure than any of this, and probably more consequential, is the erosion of what might be called the behavioral commons. A functioning republic depends on the shared belief that institutions are legitimate, that elections are binding, and that courts are referees, not partisans.

When leaders refuse election outcomes or frame the Supreme Court as illegitimate when it rules against them, they’re doing more than venting. They’re corroding the foundation that makes political disagreement manageable at all.

The reward is a mobilized base. The price is a republic where more citizens come to believe the government works only for the other side.

A system built for ambition — now strained by it

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary this July, the durability of its constitutional design is being tested in ways the founders had clearly anticipated. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The Constitution was designed to channel ambition, not eliminate it, forcing competing interests to check one another within a respected and accepted framework.

That framework only holds as long as the elected representatives are willing to work within it. When everyone optimizes instead for short-term advantage — political, financial, or ideological, the shared resource starts to give way.

The tragedy of the commons isn’t a law of nature. But it tends to play out when the incentives to exploit outrun the incentives to preserve.

The loss of governability

In The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Republics rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. They exhaust themselves, gradually, then irreversibly. The warning signs are already visible: a lurching Congress that cannot govern, a debt that grows unaddressed, and institutions that command less trust with each cycle.

We are still in the “gradually” phase. But as any herdsman knows, a pasture does not die when the last blade of grass disappears — it dies when the roots are pulled up.

Ron MacCammon is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer and former State Department official. He writes on governance, institutional reform, and gray-zone conflicts. His work draws on field experience in Latin America, Afghanistan, Asia, and Africa.