The “bread” offered to Indiantown is the promise of jobs, tax base expansion, infrastructure investment, and—most visibly—recreational amenities that families can see and touch. Officials and applicants repeatedly invoke the same set of material benefits.
Rome’s citizens did not wake up one morning and decide to abandon the Republic. The transfer of power was gradual, lubricated by reliable distributions and spectacular games. By the time the diagnosis was clear, the constitutional forms remained while the substance of popular sovereignty had already departed.