If Men Were Angels

Power, Democracy, and the Delusions That Are Killing Both

As I write this, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is seeking access to the IRS's most sensitive systems—databases containing detailed financial information about every American taxpayer, business, and nonprofit in the country. Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is considering granting these political appointees access to systems that can generate notices, adjust transaction data, and access personal identification numbers and bank information for every citizen.

Our response to this staggering breach reveals how thoroughly we've lost our grip on democratic reality. Congress, under the captaincy of a complacent Speaker Mike Johnson and his counterpart in the other chamber Senator John Thune, sit institutionally quiet. Congress should be holding emergency hearings and issuing subpoenas. Democratic Party leadership, supposedly tasked with defending democratic institutions, appears more concerned with procedural niceties than confronting an existential threat. When House Minority Leader Jeffries asks "What leverage do we have?"—as if the constitutional power of Congress were somehow insufficient—he reveals how thoroughly our political class has internalized a dangerous illusion: the belief that democracy will naturally right itself, that these are temporary deviations from an eternal democratic norm.

These are not abstract failures of leadership—they represent a fundamental misunderstanding of how democracy survives. Every time Johnson and Thune allow another democratic guardrail to fall, every moment Jeffries wastes wondering about leverage rather than exercising constitutional power, they demonstrate why democracy so rarely survives in human history. It persists only when those charged with its defense actually defend it.

The public, meanwhile, remains largely tuned out, distracted by daily crises and economic pressures. This comfortable fiction—that democracy is natural, inevitable, permanent—has infected not just our leadership but our collective consciousness. We're discovering too late what the architects of our Constitution understood: democracy isn't our default condition. It's an achievement that requires constant defense, like a garden that must be continuously tended lest it revert to wilderness.

Consider what it truly means that a private citizen, running multiple public companies while simultaneously serving as a government official, could gain access to every American's financial data. In a healthy democracy, such a shocking concentration of power would trigger immediate institutional resistance. Instead, we watch our democratic guardrails fail one by one, treating each breach as an isolated incident rather than part of a systematic dismantling. The cosmopolitan elite's baffled response to such power grabs reveals how thoroughly they've internalized the delusion of democratic permanence. They keep treating each violation of democratic norms as a temporary aberration, an unfortunate deviation that will naturally correct itself. This comfortable fiction prevents them from recognizing a deeper, more troubling truth: What we're witnessing isn't democracy's failure but rather human society's natural reversion to its more typical state of hierarchical rule—tyranny, if you will.

The demand for access to every American's financial data isn't just about government efficiency—it's about consolidating unprecedented power in the hands of political appointees who answer to private interests. When a tech executive can simultaneously control major corporations, shape public discourse through social media ownership, and potentially access the tax records of his competitors and critics, we're not seeing innovation or reform. We're watching the rebirth of something much older: the merger of private wealth and public power that America's Founders fought a revolution to prevent.

The historical record is unambiguous: democracy represents a rare and fragile achievement in human governance. For most of human history, in most places, people have lived under various forms of autocratic rule where public authority served private interests. The brief flowering of Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic's constitutional phase, the modern era's democratic experiments—these represent exceptional moments rather than the natural order. Yet we've convinced ourselves that humanity's overwhelming preference for hierarchical rule throughout history was the aberration, and our brief modern democratic moment represents the natural state.

The Founders understood this precarity intimately. When they wrote explicit powers of taxation and commercial regulation into the Constitution, they weren't adding controversial innovations—they were responding to clear lessons from history. The example of the British East India Company—whose monopolistic power helped spark the American Revolution—demonstrated how unchecked economic power could strangle political liberty. They built elaborate systems of checks and balances, carefully separated powers, and created mechanisms specifically to prevent the concentration of authority precisely because they knew democracy requires constant defense against humanity's natural tendency toward hierarchical rule.

The carefully constructed barriers between private and public power, between personal authority and institutional independence, are being systematically dismantled by those who never believed these barriers should exist in the first place. And they are doing this while we watch, distracted and disengaged, treating each violation as an isolated incident rather than recognizing the fundamental transformation underway.

Let us speak plainly: What we are witnessing is not reform or innovation. It is not efficiency or modernization. It is the resurrection of something far older and more dangerous—the merger of private wealth and public power into a single, unaccountable force. When a tech executive can control global discourse, shape government policy, and potentially access every citizen's financial information, we're not seeing the future. We're watching democracy's past try to reclaim its throne.

The question before us now is stark: Will we continue to pretend that democracy is our natural state, that these violations will somehow correct themselves? Or will we finally recognize what the Founders understood—that democracy survives only through active defense, that liberty requires eternal vigilance, that the price of freedom is never fully paid?

The weight of history bears down on this moment. Every generation that preserved democracy for us paid a price in blood and sacrifice. They did not die for abstract principles but for the concrete reality that humans can govern themselves through law rather than force. Their sacrifice demands something of us now—not just awareness, but action. Not just concern, but commitment.

If we fail to defend democracy now, while its institutions still exist to be defended, we may wake to find that our comfortable assumptions about democracy's permanence were the very thing that enabled its destruction. The time for comforting illusions has passed. Democracy isn't natural, inevitable, or permanent. It survives only if we fight for it.

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary... In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." — James Madison, Federalist No. 51