The revolution of bread and butter
The American Revolution itself was driven as much by material concerns as by high ideals. Colonists resisted taxes and trade monopolies because they threatened their livelihoods. Washington’s greatest challenge was not the battlefield at Yorktown but the daily struggle to clothe, arm, and feed his ragged troops. For Thomas Paine and Jefferson, republicanism was meaningless if common people struggled under perpetual debt while elites prospered.
The framers therefore placed the power of taxation and commerce in Congress, where it is closest to the people. Hamilton’s bank and Jefferson’s vision of widespread opportunity differed, but both believed that economic security was essential to civic stability.
Inequality as a peril
Economic exclusion, then as now, weakens the republic. In the early going, suffrage often depended on property. Today, rising inequality and concentrated wealth threaten to corrode civic trust. When ordinary citizens feel locked out, when prosperity is hoarded by the few, ballots lose meaning. And democracy is hollowed out.
Rome collapsed not because it was invaded but because its broad middle class lost prosperity and power to concentrated patrician wealth. Our republic faces no less a danger.
Civic duty, fiscal prudence
Franklin’s warning was more than just about tyranny; it was also about insolvency. As a republic cannot live on corruption and debt, it also cannot thrive if citizens withdraw from civic life. Budgets, taxation, and fiscal choices are not abstractions. They determine whether citizens trust their institutions, whether opportunity appears open or closed, and whether liberty is tangible.
Here the constitutional debate between originalism and the living document reemerges. One vision holds that fiscal discipline and civic liberty are best preserved by sticking to the framers’ narrow meanings. The other insists that to “keep” the republic means adapting constitutional principles to new crises—economic globalization, skyrocketing inequality, digital commerce, and a runaway national debt. These interpretive battles are not academic—they shape who participates in prosperity and in the political process.
Can we still keep it?
The framers did not hand us a finished republic to live by. They handed us a scaffolding. Civil war, emancipation, suffrage expansions, industrialization, and globalization have all tested the republic. Fortunately, each era amended the “blueprint” in ways both legal and practical—rebalancing liberty, justice, and economic necessity.
The questions today echo the founding. Can our institutions bridge divisions of class, race, and ideology? Can we share prosperity broadly enough to maintain legitimacy? And can we govern inclusively in the face of inequality?