Borrowing From the Future: The Short-Termism of American Politics

No generation in American history has spoken more reverently about the founders, or governed more differently from how they actually thought than this one. Their names are invoked constantly, their words cited across every ideological debate. What goes unexamined is the governing philosophy beneath those words: a disciplined, structural preoccupation with posterity. The founders did not build solely for their time. They built for generations they would never meet, and they made painful concessions to do it. That orientation is almost entirely absent from contemporary American political life.

The logic of the Constitutional Convention was how to define and establish durability under disagreement. Hamilton and Jefferson barely shared a political universe. The Great Compromise offended large states. The three-fifths clause was a moral catastrophe that several founders privately acknowledged as such and included anyway. These were not compromises in the idealistic sense, but rather choices on a harder principle that a flawed, unified nation was worth more than a fractured, righteous one. That calculus is almost entirely absent from contemporary politics, where the performance of principle has largely replaced the practice of it.

The question those men kept returning to was simple: What does this mean fifty years from now? It is the one question American governance has stopped asking.

Consider the national debt. It stood at roughly $19.9 trillion when Trump first took office in 2017. It is approaching $39 trillion today, nearly doubled in less than a decade across two administrations and both parties. Annual interest payments now exceed what the country spends on national defense, a threshold the United States had never crossed before 2024. Virtually all mainstream economists agree this trajectory is unsustainable. And yet each successive administration and Congress finds reasons to defer the reckoning. Tax cuts pass without offsetting reductions. Emergency spending becomes permanent and interest continues to compound.

Some economists argue that debt financing growth faster than interest accumulates is investment because a government borrowing to build infrastructure, fund research, or educate its workforce can produce returns that justify the cost. The question is whether that describes what the United States is actually doing. When the primary drivers of debt are entitlement spending and tax cuts rather than infrastructure or research, the analogy breaks down.

The political incentive to deliver benefits now while sending the bill to someone who cannot yet vote is nearly irresistible, and no one with power has resisted it for long. This is not a conservative failure or a liberal one. It is a structural failure with a structural cause: the people making decisions about the debt do not bear its consequences. Jefferson wrote about this directly. The founders understood the injustice of one generation borrowing against the futures of those who had no say. They could not solve it. But they named it as a problem. We have largely stopped doing even that.

Or consider the pardon power. The Constitution grants it for legitimate reasons: a check on prosecutorial overreach, a mechanism for mercy, a corrective for injustices the formal legal system fails to address. Presidents have used it expansively before. Ford's pardon of Nixon was unpopular and remains contested. The power has always carried some risk of abuse.

What is different about pardoning nearly 1,600 people convicted of or charged in connection with a violent attack on the Capitol, including those convicted of seditious conspiracy and assaulting police, is not that it is illegal. It is not. What is different is what it establishes for everyone who comes after. A future administration facing political crisis now has a template. A future crowd contemplating political violence now has a data point about consequences. The founders were students of historical precedent precisely because they knew future actors would use past behavior as justification for their own. Legal and precedent-setting are not the same thing. They understood this. The question is not whether any particular pardon was the right call in isolation. The question is what it means for the American of 2045 or 2065 who inherits a political system shaped by the decisions being made today. That American has no vote in this. The founders considered that a foundational injustice.

The same logic applies to institutional norms. Senate confirmation processes, the independence of federal agencies, the relationship between the executive branch and the press, the certification of election results, none of these were purely legal requirements. They were norms, maintained by political actors who understood that short-term advantages from breaking them were outweighed by long-term costs to a system that depends on shared trust in the rules.

Norms are extraordinarily difficult to restore once broken, because their value rested on the belief that they would be maintained. That belief, once lost, cannot be reinstated by declaration. Washington's decision not to seek a third term was not legally required. It was a norm, and he understood that how he left office would shape how every successor thought about leaving office. He was right. It held for 150 years. The norms under pressure today will shape political behavior long after the current moment has passed. The short-term gains from breaking them are immediate and visible. The costs are diffuse and fall on people not yet in a position to object.

What the United States is doing is optimizing for short-term returns at the expense of long-term value. A business that cuts research investment, defers maintenance, and pays out everything to current shareholders can look healthy for several quarters. Eventually the underlying asset degrades. By then, the people who made those decisions have moved on.

American governance increasingly resembles this kind of extractive management. The asset being depleted is the institutional infrastructure of a democratic republic: the credibility of elections, the predictability of norms, the solvency of the treasury, the trust of allies, the willingness of citizens to accept outcomes they did not prefer because they believed the process was legitimate. These are not resources that replenish easily. They were built slowly, by people who made difficult choices with future Americans in mind. Rebuilding them requires exactly the kind of long-term thinking most scarce in the current political environment.

It is important to state that the founders were not saints. They were flawed men operating within the limits of their time, many of whom held views we rightly condemn. But they possessed something genuinely rare in contemporary American politics: a governing orientation toward the future. They argued bitterly, maneuvered against each other's interests, and occasionally despised each other. And yet they kept returning to the question of what they were building and who it was for.

That question is worth recovering. Not the mythology of the founders, which has been used to justify too many incompatible things to be useful. Not their specific answers, many of which are wrong. The question itself. What are we building, and who is it for?

The answer, if we are honest, has become: what we can get, and for us, right now. The founders would have recognized that answer as the precondition for exactly the kind of republic they were trying to prevent. This is a generational failure wrapped in partisan disunity. And the generation that will pay for it most fully has not yet been born.