Is the American Republic Dead?

We Americans must ask: Is the republic alive? Should we despair? Are things any better in A.D. 2022 than they were for Rome in 43 B.C.?

It’s been a rambunctious (or insert the descriptive of your choice) year and a half. We’ve endured—sometimes nobly and sometimes sordidly—COVID; lock downs; race riots; the tearing down of public statues; a tumultuous election; the loss of Afghanistan; twitter, facebook, and other media horrors; a president who seems to live on a different planet; a Speaker of the House who seems to live in her ice cream freezer; and the Yankees losing to the Red Sox.

We have become—to a large extent (so many extents, already)—Manicheans, religious and theological parties who divide into twos and yell at one another. Yet, without even the dignity of a Mani, we think there is the good god, and we think there is the evil god. One party screams for blood; the other for flesh. Each devours, and the middle ground is rendered obsolete.

In our division and our rage, I must ask, have we lost our sense of Americanness, our pride in our republic, our dignity in the face of the world, our very decorum as a people? Can we—even if we were so inclined—reclaim our nobility? To come to the fine point, what exactly are our Americans Ideals and our American Realities? Can one inform the other? Can one cancel out the other? Can one redeem the other?

At the moment, we seem to be the laughingstock of the world, especially after our retreat from Kabul. Imagine what Taipei or Tokyo or Seoul must be thinking right now.

It wasn’t always so. Once, we dared to be great. Yes, this is worth repeating. We once dared to be great. Before progressivism, before New Dealism, before Great Societism, before Nixon, Watergate, and Saigon, we dared to be great. After all, we were a republic—the first such republic since Cicero’s head and hands were mounted on the rostrum in front of the Roman Senate.

In his first inaugural, George Washington—the American Achilles, the American Aeneas, the American Cincinnatus—spoke beautifully about our destiny:

“I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire: since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

We were meant to be extraordinary.

As with all things republican, though, we would have to endure the Polybian cycles of birth, middle age, and death. No 1,000 year reich would be America. We were organic, imitating—through the natural law—the best of life and death. As a republic, we would accept the three parts of the soul (the head—the executive; the heart—the aristocracy; the stomach—the democracy), and we could acknowledge that no true republic lasts forever.

For how long, then? A generation? Two generations? Three? Twenty? In her magisterial three volume history of the American Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren challenged our very sense of self:

“Though the name of liberty delights the ear, and tickles the fond pride of man, it is a jewel much oftener the play-thing of his imagination, than a possession of real stability: it may be acquired to-day in all the triumph of independent feelings, but perhaps to-morrow the world may be convinced, that mankind know not how to make a proper use of the prize, generally bartered in a short time, as a useless bauble, to the first officious master that will take the burden from the mind, by laying another on the shoulders of ten-fold weight.”

And,

“If this should ever become the deplorable situation of the United States, let some unborn historian in a far distant day, detail the lapse, and hold up the contrast between a simple, virtuous, and free people, and a degenerate, servile race of beings, corrupted by wealth, effeminated by luxury, impoverished by licentiousness, and become the automatons of intoxicated ambition.”

Mercy, oh, Mercy. In this, as in so much, you emulate Livy.

To the following considerations, I wish every one seriously and earnestly to attend; by what kind of men, and by what sort of conduct, in peace and war, the empire has been both acquired and extended: then, as discipline gradually declined, let him follow in his thoughts the structure of ancient morals, at first, as it were, leaning aside, then sinking farther and farther, then beginning to fall precipitate, until he arrives at the present times, when our vices have attained to such a height of enormity, that we can no longer endure either the burden of them, or the sharpness of the necessary remedies.

So, did the American republic fall as the Roman republic once fell? And, if so, when? Can she be revived?

In its death throes, Cicero reminded us that Rome had once been great, but she had lost the men to defend her:

“Thus, before our own time, the customs of our ancestors produced excellent men, and eminent men preserved our ancient customs and the institutions of their forefathers. But, though the republic, when it came to us, was like a beautiful painting, whose colours, however, were already fading with age, our own time not only has neglected to freshen it by renewing the original colours, but has not even taken the trouble to preserve its configuration and, so to speak, its general outlines. For what is now left of the ‘ancient customs’ on which he said ‘the commonwealth of Rome’ was ‘founded firm.’? They have been, as we see, so completely buried in oblivion that they are not only no longer practiced, but are already unknown. And what shall I say of the men? For the loss of our customs is due to our lack of men, and for this great evil we must not only give an account, but must even defend ourselves in every way possible, as if we were accused of capital crime. For it through our own faults, not by any accident, that we retain only the form of the commonwealth, but have long since lost its substance.”

So, again, we Americans must ask: Is the republic alive? Should we despair? Are things any better in A.D. 2021 than they were for Rome in 43 B.C.?

The republic has been declared dead before. Once, there was even a war that raged for four years, and many—especially abroad—hoped that the republic had met her match. But, virtue arose, and it struck with purpose.

General Joshua Chamberlain of Bowdoin, an academic classicist and rhetorician, witnessing the surrender ceremonies on April 12, 1865, stated it best:

Honor answering honor. . . . [as men] of near blood born, made nearer by blood shed. . . . On our part not a sound or a trumpet more, nor roll of drum; nor a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glory, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead. . . . Brave men may become good friends.^[*]

A little over a century later—after the previously mentioned Nixon, Watergate, and Saigon debacles arose a warrior-president, the republic personified by a man, the fortieth president of the United States. Nearly forty years ago, he said to the graduating class of the University of Notre Dame:

The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism. It won’t bother to denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

William Faulkner, at a Nobel Prize ceremony some time back, said man “would not only [merely] endure: he will prevail” against the modern world because he will return to “the old verities and truths of the heart.” And then Faulkner said of man, “He is immortal because he alone among creatures . . . has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

One can’t say those words — compassion, sacrifice, and endurance — without thinking of the irony that one who so exemplifies them, Pope John Paul II, a man of peace and goodness, an inspiration to the world, would be struck by a bullet from a man towards whom he could only feel compassion and love. It was Pope John Paul II who warned in last year’s encyclical on mercy and justice against certain economic theories that use the rhetoric of class struggle to justify injustice. He said, “In the name of an alleged justice the neighbor is sometimes destroyed, killed, deprived of liberty or stripped of fundamental human rights.”

For the West, for America, the time has come to dare to show to the world that our civilized ideas, our traditions, our values, are not — like the ideology and war machine of totalitarian societies — just a facade of strength. It is time for the world to know our intellectual and spiritual values are rooted in the source of all strength, a belief in a Supreme Being, and a law higher than our own.

When it’s written, history of our time won’t dwell long on the hardships of the recent past. But history will ask — and our answer determine the fate of freedom for a thousand years — Did a nation borne of hope lose hope? Did a people forged by courage find courage wanting? Did a generation steeled by hard war and a harsh peace forsake honor at the moment of great climactic struggle for the human spirit?

Frankly, the struggle, as President Reagan understood, never really ends. When it comes down to it, I’m on the side of hope—regarding our American ideals and our American realities. To be clear, American has proven her endurance repeatedly. If we can survive Civil Wars, world wars, and Watergate, we can certainly survive COVID, the fall of Afghanistan, and the Manichaenism of social media. Let us be the sacred fire of republican liberty.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.

^[*]Quoted in Mark Nesbitt, ed., Through Blood and Fire: Selected Civil War Papers of Major General Joshua Chamberlain (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1996), 175-6.