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Much is made of America’s “social peace,” though you’d be hard-pressed to find any if you left the Whole Foods parking lot. The latest reminder came when Washington announced that, thanks to a government shutdown, November’s food stamp payments might not arrive. Cue the shrieking: 42 million souls, or at least their Twitter proxies, declared civilization itself imperiled because the Treasury might skip a month of swiping the national debit card.
This is what passes for drama in 2025: the EBT apocalypse. “You’re talking about millions and millions of vulnerable families!” wailed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, as if Armageddon could be measured in missing snack credits. Somewhere between “bread riots” and “trending hashtags,” the republic discovered that its definition of peace now depends on whether the barcode beeps at Walmart.
Let’s be clear about the terminology, since few in government can be. SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, supplemental being a word once understood to mean “extra,” not “existential.” EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) is simply the mechanism that dispenses the goodies. In short, SNAP is the trough, EBT the spigot. But over time, the spigot has become the shrine.
“We must recognize that we can’t negotiate preferences for peace anyway; there’s nobody across the table to deliver the goods.”
We are told this costs $100 billion a year, the price of national anesthesia. A hundred billion to purchase silence from those whom the modern state, having atomized the family and debased work, now pays to stay docile. Kipling, who had seen the imperial version of this bargain in India, called it Dane-geld. The term itself goes back to the ninth-century protection racket run by Viking entrepreneurs, when English and French towns, rather than fight, paid the Northmen to sail away, only to watch them return, invoice in hand. Eventually, the wiser burgs stopped paying and started fortifying. “When you pay the Dane-geld,” Kipling warned, “you never get rid of the Dane.” Years later in England, he recalled how the Raj sometimes bought peace on its frontiers by subsidizing the very tribes that raided it, a lesson in futility he turned into verse. You pay off the raiders to keep the peace, only to find they return for more, and this time the tribute arrives by direct deposit.
Naturally, the Democrats could reopen the government tomorrow. But they won’t, because the spectacle of “hungry families” is too useful. A good riot in the service of the administrative state is worth any number of hungry children. After all, nothing says compassion like holding the poor hostage for a budget increase.
The right, alas, isn’t much better. Libertarian purists chirp that charity is for suckers and that Atlas should shrug while the rabble starves. A generation after Ayn Rand preached the gospel of self-reliant übermenschen, Bill Gates was busy turning monopoly software into a monopoly morality, an economy where billionaires offshore the factories that made America great, then donate a tax-deductible sliver of the proceeds to “sustainable development.” Gates gives away the rope with which his class will hang us, and calls it virtue.
The result? A middle class that can’t afford groceries, an underclass that won’t buy them, and an overclass that doesn’t notice because Whole Foods delivers. America has perfected the economic trinity of late empire: socialism for the poor, capitalism for the rich, and existential dread for everyone in between.
The EBT serfs of the underclass aren’t doing their cause any favors. Social media now hosts a veritable Louvre of looting: TikToks planning “free” Thanksgiving dinners (funded by theft), Instagram sermons on how taxpayers “work for us,” and the inevitable Walmart brawl when reality crashes the entitlement fantasia. They no longer raid monasteries like the Norsemen; they pillage the self-checkout aisle and livestream the decline in real time.
According to the National Academies Press, 23.3 percent of black Americans receive food assistance, compared to just 2.7 percent of whites. A tenfold gap that progressives treat as proof of tenfold racism. (Suggest a cultural explanation and the diversity commissars will haul you off for reeducation.)
We must recognize that we can’t negotiate preferences for peace anyway; there’s nobody across the table to deliver the goods. Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago: These aren’t cities run by Mafia dons who can be bought off with a suitcase of cash in exchange for ending drive-bys or curbing the drug trade. If only it were that simple. One can almost picture Mayor Brandon Johnson being handed the tribute like some urban capo dei capi at City Hall. A cash-filled suitcase might actually work better than the billions Washington keeps pouring into civic collapse.
Thus the Danegeld grows bureaucratic appendages. What began as food stamps soon required a priesthood of diversity czars and equity consultants to justify the tribute. Every payment demands a rationale, every rationale a new office, and soon redistribution becomes a career path.
Affirmative action, once sold as a temporary expedient, became the managerial class’ favorite self-licking ice cream cone, a policy that feeds on its own failure. The Great Society promised to buy peace in the cities with preferences, quotas, and cash. Half a century later, the peace is gone, the preferences are permanent, and the cash—about $100 billion in SNAP alone—a standing tribute in the new Danegeld economy.
The bureaucracy built to enforce “equity” has become its own caste system: diversity commissars, community “liaisons,” grievance brokers, and NGOs devoted to the fine art of redistributing guilt. Tom Wolfe saw it coming in Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, his portrait of government mediators paid to absorb rage and hand out cash. The flak remains, but the catchers now run the place.
This is the genius of America’s ruling class: They’ve turned welfare into a form of hostage negotiation. Every month brings another deadline, another threat of chaos unless the tribute is paid. And everyone gets a cut—the bureaucrats, the “advocates,” the consultants, the grocery conglomerates, and the compliant voting blocs who keep the racket humming. It isn’t socialism; it’s extortion with branding.
Meanwhile, the real economy, the one that once made the country hum, has been dismantled. Industry is gone, replaced by delivery apps, diversity seminars, and fentanyl. The old slogan used to be “Give a man a fish.” Now it’s “Give a man an EBT card and hope he doesn’t film himself pistol-whipping the cashier when it declines.”
This is not sustainable, and everyone knows it. The moral rot of the system is that it reduces citizenship to consumption and governance to appeasement. The Danes, at least, had the decency to row home after taking their tribute. America’s raiders stay, breed, and vote, and the state keeps paying them not to riot.
What would a sane society do? Not Ayn Rand’s sociopathy, nor Gatesian benevolence—something duller, harder, and infinitely more adult: restore the dignity of work, rebuild the institutions of order, and stop mistaking bribery for justice. The SNAP card was meant to feed the poor; it has ended up feeding the illusion that the poor can be paid to behave.
But the government will keep paying, because it fears what happens when it doesn’t. And the raiders will keep raiding, because they’ve learned that peace is just another line item on the federal budget. The Vikings took gold and sailed away. The EBT class takes chips, soda, and democracy itself—and stays for dessert.
As with all great farces, it ends in tragedy.
