In Episode 5 of Modern Age with Dan McCarthy, Dan looks beyond today’s headlines about the “big beautiful bill” and asks: what can history teach us about big, ambitious legislation?

To answer that, he turns to Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution, exploring how the French monarchy’s misguided policies—long before the Revolution—set the stage for collapse. Along the way, he draws a sharp contrast between Louis XIV’s centralized control and King William III’s England, where a shift toward national debt helped build a stronger, more adaptive state.

This episode is a deep dive into what makes a policy sustainable—and how political choices shape the future, for better or worse.