Ever since Donald Trump won the 2016 election, I have operated under the assumption that all Americans would understand the serious threat he posed to our constitutional order. When Joe Biden framed his presidential campaign in 2020 as one aimed at restoring the “Soul of America,” I shared the view that nothing less was at stake. The 2024 election thus felt like a very basic final exam on our commitment to democracy, and watching the country spectacularly fail that simple exam has been painful.

In the aftermath, Democrats have been given all manner of helpful lectures on the subject of why Kamala Harris lost. According to the wearisome Bret Stephens of The New York Times, it is because Democrats are a party of “prigs and pontificators.” According to our new Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Harris lost because Democrats think Americans are stupid when they are actually very smart.

I have my own views on why Harris lost the election. But I am not going to bore you with them because I have had it with trying to figure out why so many of my fellow Americans vote the way they do.

When over 73 million people cast their vote for a man who is an adjudicated felon, fraudster and alleged traitor instead of for a respected former prosecutor, senator and vice president, it strikes me as absurd to try and figure out the “why” of it all.

When over half the country values our democratic ideals so lightly as to throw them over because they are angry about post-pandemic inflation suffered across the world, you start to realize that the Greatest Generation we are not. Worse, you worry that America never had a soul to save in the first place.

And before you discard my opening toasts as just so many sour grapes, reflect that on his very first day in office, Trump used the awesome powers of the presidency to pardon or grant clemency to over 1,500 criminals — including violent felons who hurt cops and seditionists who attempted the overthrow of our government on Jan. 6, 2021.

So, with real regret, I have concluded that I have had enough. I held onto a glimmer of hope that 2016 was a fluke and that through force of will and a passion for our democratic system, our fellow Americans would see the genius of the American experiment and recommit themselves to it. This past election shows how fleeting that glimmer truly was.

A majority of Americans are either just not that committed to democracy or are unable to grasp the risks entailed in reelecting an avowed autocrat. I am honestly not sure which one is worse.

With Republicans in control of all three branches of government, most Democrats seem resigned to playing defense until the 2026 midterm election when, the theory goes, we will resume the regular give-and-take of national politics and win back the House. I am of the view that what is currently happening is sufficiently not normal and that it is time for us to radically reconsider our federal system.

After all, what so often gets lost in the noise is that the blue states are largely the ones footing the federal bill. In 2022, the non-partisan Rockefeller Institute undertook a study of which states were not pulling their weight when it came to funding the federal government. It started by calculating the origin of federal tax receipts by state.

It found that nine of the top ten contributors to federal tax revenues were blue states that voted for Biden. But when it came time to calculate who got the most back from the federal government … surprise! Eight of the top ten states that get the most back per dollar they paid were red states that voted for Trump in 2020.

I think we have reached the point where it is fair for citizens of blue states — like Illinois — to stop and ask the following question: Are we so enamored of our federal democracy that we want to keep paying more for it than the very red states that seem to hate it so much?

Is it important to you to fund federal healthcare in Mississippi and Alabama even as those states’ senators spend their every breath trying to eliminate or sharply curtail those same federal programs? Do you want to fund a federal government that does not protect women’s health? Do you want to fund a federal government that seems to want to increase climate change? And perhaps most importantly, do we want to keep funding a federal government that Trump has promised to weaponize against us?

This question is a timely one. Notwithstanding all the hand-wringing about all the working-class voters who went for Trump and what we Democrats did to “lose” them, the GOP has predictably made clear that its first order of business will be a tax cut that will disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

My argument to you: maybe reducing the federal government’s funding is not such a bad idea. Given the choice, I think I would rather keep my tax dollars here in Illinois where a strong majority of my fellow citizens actually share my values.

At a bare minimum, I do not see the wisdom in Democrats pushing to fund an operation run by Republicans who have demonstrated this level of malevolence toward democracy itself. Times have changed. It is time for us to reconsider whether this whole experiment works for us in any meaningful way, and more importantly, whether we should keep paying for it.

Stephen Hackney is a candidate for Evanston’s 1st Ward. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.