A republic that cannot account for its own forgotten citizens is not a republic in any serious sense of the word. It is a legal arrangement, a set of procedures, a flag over a courthouse. The founders understood, in their better moments, that self-government was a moral compact as much as a constitutional one, and that compact has always been tested most honestly not at the center but at the edges, not in the capital but in the places where the capital’s attention does not reach. Those edges are where I intend to plant this column and keep it planted.
Consider what a town actually is, in the old civic sense that the framers inherited and that we have largely squandered. A town is not a service-delivery zone. It is not a node in a supply chain. It is a community of mutual obligation, a place where people who did not choose each other are nonetheless answerable to each other, because they share a common fate under a common government. That answerability is the germ of self-government at its most honest. When a town forgets its most vulnerable residents, when it zones them out, prices them out, locks them up and stops counting, it has not merely failed administratively. It has broken the compact that gives it the right to call itself a community at all.
The political economy of abandonment did not happen overnight, and it did not happen without choices. Decisions were made at the federal level to hollow out certain revenue streams to localities. Decisions were made at the state level to consolidate services far from the people who needed them most. Decisions were made at the municipal level to pursue tax bases that attracted the comfortable and discouraged the marginal. Each decision had a rationale. Budgets had to balance. Growth had to be cultivated. None of these rationales was entirely without merit, and none of them was made with malice. But the cumulative effect was a political economy that systematically off-loaded its most expensive human problems onto the people least equipped to bear them, and then declined to look at what it had done.
What a town owes its forgotten is not charity. Charity is voluntary, episodic, and conditional on the mood of the giver. What a town owes is obligation, the kind that flows from shared citizenship and shared taxation and shared residence under a common law. The forgotten man who sleeps in a doorway on Main Street is not a problem to be managed away. He is a stakeholder in the same constitutional order that protects the property owner across the street, and he is owed the same seriousness of consideration when the town draws its budgets and writes its ordinances and elects its officers. This is not sentimentalism. It is a reading of what republican government actually requires when you press on it hard enough.
The states have a particular responsibility here that they have been too comfortable ignoring. The Constitution reserves to the states an enormous sphere of authority over the daily conditions of life, over education and housing and the administration of justice and the structure of local government itself. That authority is not only a privilege. It is a trust, and the terms of that trust include the citizens who benefit least visibly from its exercise. A governor who can tell you the unemployment rate to two decimal places but cannot tell you how many citizens in his state have no fixed address, no consistent medical care, and no realistic path back into the wage economy, is not governing. He is administering the comfortable and ignoring the rest. The states were designed to be laboratories of democracy, but a laboratory that only runs experiments on the healthy half of its population is not producing knowledge. It is producing flattery.
Elections, too, bear on this in ways that are rarely discussed honestly. The forgotten do not vote in the proportions that the comfortable do. This is well documented and well known, and political campaigns have rational incentives to design themselves around the electorate that shows up rather than the one that does not. That rationality produces governments that are structurally biased toward the represented and structurally indifferent to the unrepresented, not because anyone woke up deciding to be cruel, but because the incentive architecture of democratic competition makes neglect the path of least resistance. Reforming that architecture, through automatic registration, through serious civic investment in the poorest precincts, through campaign structures that force candidates into the rooms where the forgotten actually live, is not a partisan project. It is a constitutional imperative if self-government is to mean what it claims to mean.
I will write in this space for as long as the editors will have me, and I will write about government and law and elections and money and the states, because those are the instruments through which a republic keeps or breaks its word to the people it governs. I will try to keep my eye on the man the system is likeliest to forget, because he is the truest measure of whether the system is working. Not the median voter. Not the investor. Not the constituent who gets returned phone calls. The one who does not get returned phone calls. The one who does not have a phone. He is who this republic is for, if it is for anyone at all, and I will not let this column look away from him, because the moment a republic stops looking at its own forgotten, it has already begun to fail them a second time.