The Democracy Papers: Paper Nine
The Death Spiral of a Broken Republic
Alexander Hamilton isn't here to witness our modern chaos, but damn, was that man prescient. In Federalist No. 9, he warned that without a strong, unified government, republics fall into factionalism, insurrection, and an endless cycle of collapse. He looked at the city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy—where, like an ouroboros, democracy continually ate itself alive—and saw a cautionary tale for America. His solution? A system strong enough to keep the republic from cannibalizing itself.
Yet here we are anyway.
January 6, 2021, wasn’t a “day of love” or a bunch of “tourists” at the Capitol. It was a flashing neon sign that the walls of democracy are crumbling. A sitting president incited an armed mob to overturn an election. Extremist factions, once lurking in the fringes, stormed the Capitol, hunting lawmakers and pledging loyalty to a wannabe dictator. It was the exact kind of breakdown Hamilton feared: a government unable to protect itself from domestic threats, institutions too paralyzed to act, and a citizenry on the edge of losing faith in the system entirely.
And we are dangerously close to proving Hamilton right.
The Cycle of Collapse
Hamilton understood that republics don’t just die, they violently implode. Without unity, they spiral into chaos as factions claw for power, undermining every institution meant to hold them together. And once that cycle begins, it’s a bitch to stop.
We’ve seen this movie before. The Roman Republic fell when political violence became the norm. The French Revolution turned into a bloodbath when factions devoured one another. The Weimar Republic collapsed when extremists infiltrated the government and dismantled democracy from the inside.
Sound familiar? Because it should. The events of J6 weren’t just a fluke. They were a test run. The people who orchestrated it, who funded it, who spread the lies that fueled it, who opened the doors and let it happen, those people are still here, still in power and are now planning their next move. And if history tells us anything, it’s this: when a republic starts normalizing insurrection, it’s already one (or two or three) feet in the grave.
The Threat of Modern Factions
Hamilton warned against factions tearing the country apart, but he couldn’t have predicted this level of organized and well-funded sabotage. The modern Republican Party isn’t just an opposition party, it’s a faction openly waging war on democracy. They aren’t running on policy. They’re running on election denial, fear and the promise of minority rule.
The worst part? It’s working.
Election officials are being harassed out of their jobs. State legislatures are passing laws to overturn results they don’t like. Extremist groups are stockpiling weapons, waiting for the next call to action. Meanwhile, the people who tried to overthrow the government are being pardoned, glorified, and handed microphones to plot their next steps.
This isn’t a debate. It’s not even a slow-moving coup anymore. It's fascism, blazing forward at the speed of light. And if we don't act now, there will be no catching up.
A Republic, If We Can Keep It
Hamilton knew the answer to all this wasn’t less government, it was better government. A strong, centralized system that could absorb division without letting it spiral into destruction. The Constitution was designed to be flexible, to evolve, to meet challenges like this head-on. But that only works if we use it.
Republics fall when people become complacent. They survive when people refuse to be cowed and rise up as one. This country is being held together by people willing to throw their bodies in front of the gears of tyranny. By journalists still exposing the truth. By election workers who refuse to be intimidated. By citizens who vote in every damn election like their lives depend on it.
Because they do.
The factions trying to dismantle democracy are counting on us to give up. To get exhausted. To decide it’s too broken to fix.
So let’s prove them wrong.
That means enforcing the laws that hold traitors accountable.
That means protecting the right to vote like democracy depends on it—because it does.
That means confronting extremism at every level, not just when it storms the Capitol.
And above all, it means remembering that democracy isn’t a spectator sport. It’s something you fucking fight for.