NEW YORK — In a county in northern Virginia, a family’s electricity bill has doubled. A few miles away, a windowless building the size of a shopping mall hums through the night—yet another AI data center, consuming more power than the town it was built beside. The dispute will be conducted in the language of rate structures, zoning variances, and transmission corridors. But a non-technical political question drives it: Are the people who live in the county still needed by the people who constructed the building? The question is not just about AI. It concerns the bargain on which modern democracy rests. Democracy was never the gift of elites who discovered justice. Constitutions and elections are the visible machinery of limited government. But why did those with power accept limits at all? Rights were won by workers, women, soldiers, dissidents, and movements that made exclusion politically dangerous, and material dependence helped make those victories durable. When modern states needed armies of ordinary men rather than a warrior caste, they needed recruits, taxes, and sacrifice