The right-populist movement invokes the old American republican tradition. But there are dangers in following this path.
The right-populist movement invokes the old American republican tradition. But there are dangers in following this path.
A n old idea is back in fashion on the American right: small-r republicanism. Its revival may be a healthy thing with deep American roots, but adopting it as a ruling ethos also presents dangers to important conservative values.
There are four basic pillars of the American way: Our system is democratic because the government answers to the people, republican because we have no king, liberal because we recognize civil and economic liberty, and constitutional because the rules are written down and bind the government. One can add to that list the three key and interrelated structural features of American governance: It is federal, dividing power vertically between different levels of government; it is separated, dividing power horizontally between different branches of government with distinct functions; and it is deliberative, because the vertical and horizontal divisions and the existence of a written constitution combine to make it difficult to produce abrupt and sweeping change.
Among all of these values, republicanism may sound the least relevant to today, when monarchy is out of fashion in most of the world, and scarcely anybody in the Western world still professes faith in the underlying assumption that governing power is divinely ordained to be handed down by hereditary birthright rather than earned through some form of popular sovereignty or proven merit. But to early Americans, republicanism as an ideological concept meant something broader than “no more kings.”
What it meant was an end to the entire mindset of formal and informal aristocratic privilege and social deference to the highborn. In a truly republican society, no man had a hereditary position, and no man needed to give way before his “betters.” All would never be equal in natural talents or inherited wealth, but everyone started with at least a theoretically equal position of opportunity for advancement and for earning the respect of his fellow man. This was distinct from republics of the past — the Roman republic, the Venetian republic — that had no king and some representative institutions, but were still run by an aristocratic or oligarchic elite.
America never had an aristocracy, but colonial America did have many of the social habits and hierarchies that were inherited from England. The American Revolution and its era changed that. The classical liberal political rhetoric of the Revolution, embodied most famously in the Declaration of Independence and its profession that “all men are created equal,” seeped into social and economic life as well, leading ordinary Americans to demand an equal place in society and reject the vestiges of privilege.
Republicanism had distinctly Protestant roots. The Catholic Church was, and remains, hierarchical and deferential to clerical authority. The low-church and evangelical Protestants in particular tended to stress the primary of the individual believer’s own reading of Scripture and personal relationship with God, unmediated by princes of the church. This had its drawbacks as theology — like any Catholic, I can offer you many reasons why — but it contributed much to republican political culture.
It was precisely this sentiment that led the first American political party to call itself the “Republicans.” The party of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison argued that Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and the policies of the Washington administration were too aristocratic in style, too cozy with the British monarchy, too hostile to French republicanism, and gave too much power to Wall Street. This was not, at the time, a populist argument as such; but it was a republican argument. Great emphasis in those days was made on the republican simplicity of the president, his title, his dress, and his home.
Republicanism in France was, from the beginning, more radical, because the entire ancien régime — not just the throne — was built around aristocratic and clerical privilege, such that it required a far more dramatic tearing of the social fabric. That led the French republicans to radical egalitarianism, early forms of socialism, and the Terror. It is what gave republicanism a bad name with Edmund Burke and his American devotees, and even with French liberals such as Alexis de Tocqueville, who admired republicanism and democracy in America but feared the republican impulse in his own country.
In time, the Republicans changed their name to “Democratic-Republican” and then “Democrat.” A republican resistance to entrenched privilege remained part of the party’s self-image as it fought the national bank and for universal white manhood suffrage in the era of Andrew Jackson. It created the “spoils system” to formalize the transfer of most federal offices after each intervening election, making the entire executive branch an instrument of the popular will. Yet Jackson’s sweeping powers and grant of offices to his supporters also triggered a republican reaction by critics who saw him as assuming kingly powers and took for their party the name of the monarchy-skeptical British Whigs. By the 1850s, the Democratic Party’s agenda and tone were dominated by the lords of slave plantations. The Slave Power defended entrenched privilege and enforced an aristocratic code of honor that brooked no criticism, symbolized by Preston Brooks of South Carolina beating Charles Sumner nearly to death over a speech on the Senate floor.
The 1854 formation of a new political party to oppose the Democrats and their pro-slavery agenda had multiple roots, the three main ones being the political classical liberalism of the American Founding, the Christian movement against slavery, and the economic drive for a system of free labor and free soil. Anti-slavery politics were in part driven by the extension of democratic, liberal, and republican ideals to black Americans as well as white ones. But also built deeply into the party’s early rhetoric was republican resentment of the Slave Power’s privilege, its aristocratic hauteur, and its seemingly unaccountable power and position. Alongside their classical liberalism, Christian moralism, American nationalism, and appeal to free markets, the early Republicans saw and sold their agenda in republican terms: to people the West with the homesteads of freeholding farmers and mechanics. This, they argued, would create an America more industrious, socially mobile, and virtuous than one with a permanent upper crust of plantations supported by their own captive workforce.
In the century and a half since the Civil War, there has been less call for republicanism. There have been other waves of popular and populist agitation of an egalitarian cast: arguments to expand voting rights to women and African Americans, enable more direct democracy in the election of senators and the use of referenda, bust trusts and enact workplace reforms and social-welfare programs in the name of economic populism, and lash back at overweening cultural liberalism. Individual campaigns have sometimes toppled family political dynasties, and the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements both fed on popular fury at government bailouts of the economic elite. But few major movements have really trained their fire on the notion of an incipient aristocracy.
Yet that is exactly what today’s republicans argue. Today’s revival of republicanism among Republicans is of a different cast than its predecessors. Today’s elites are not, in any formal sense, hereditary, although the intermarriage of the “knowledge elite” tends to reinforce their distance from the rest of the population. But the movement that has come into focus in the past several years has gradually assumed the character of a cohesive critique of American society.
In this telling, the progressive march through the institutions has created enclaves of self-reinforcing and self-reproducing power that are effectively permanent. That includes cultural progressives who have burrowed themselves into effective control of the news media, the entertainment industry, the universities, the public schools, the social-media platforms, the administrative state, the public-health establishment, the NGOs and foundations, Wall Street, the bar associations, and even formerly conservative bastions such as the corporate boardroom and the military brass. The menace they present to traditional American republicanism is not merely that they enjoy a privileged position envied by others, but that they seek to use it as a sword, rapidly disseminating new orthodoxies through society and acting in unison to impose them on a general population that is permitted no say in the matter through elections or willing market exchanges.
These institutions are insulated from all the hurly-burly mechanisms of accountability that are supposed to be the hallmarks of republican America: popular elections, competition, the creative destruction of the free market. The new elites can neither be voted out nor removed by market forces. This is partly due to what I’ve called “the Great Bundling”: They attached themselves to valuable institutions and products they did not create, but that have entrenched positions in society, such that a lot of extraneous destruction is required in order to disgorge them.
In the America of Abraham Lincoln’s day, there was an obvious solution. If you didn’t like the news, start your own paper. The New York Times was founded in 1851 by one of the founders of the Republican Party. If you didn’t like the universities, start your own. Leland Stanford, the first Republican governor of California, did that. But the old institutions are far more entrenched now: It would take a century or more to create a new Harvard. In the meantime, only the people on the inside get to determine who is hired, promoted, or otherwise heard within the institutions. It increasingly seems as difficult for culturally conservative perspectives to penetrate these institutions as it was for an 18th-century French peasant to become a duke.
The aim, therefore, of a new republicanism in cases where alternatives cannot viably be created is to find ways to subject the existing institutions to some form of popular oversight or market discipline. The mechanisms for doing this can be frustratingly elusive, which is why we see broad-brush solutions presented such as legislating against bad ideas in the schools or firing all the federal civil servants and re-creating the Jacksonian spoils system.
While Donald Trump embodied some of the inchoate yawp that presaged the new republicanism, it is figures such as Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin that have tried to give it form and direction in the political arena. They have taken the generalized complaints about an insular elite and its assaults on free expression, free conscience, and traditional families and values, and begun converting those complaints into a practical political program. The task is very visibly a work in progress. But if you listen to DeSantis, whenever he is proposing some new use of state power, it is almost always framed in these traditional republican terms: protecting the ordinary American household’s self-governing character.
There is much to be said for the new republicanism, but there are two major hazards to be avoided, and it is not at all clear how that will be accomplished without dissipating the forces behind the movement.
The first is that attacks on expert and intellectual elites can easily devolve into a populist orgy of anti-intellectual assaults on expertise and knowledge themselves. There is nothing anti-intellectual, or even anti-expertise or anti-elite, about republicanism. To the contrary, a genuinely republican society is one in which informed, independent citizens have a duty to do their own learning and inform themselves from the best experts and the best minds in society. But populist rage at experts who misuse their position and authority can easily break loose from its moorings.
The second hazard is the flip side of the first: that populism married to republicanism will lead only to tearing down institutions that have arrogated themselves too much neo-aristocratic privilege, while doing nothing to replace them. Properly understood, republicanism requires what Yuval Levin calls “civic republicanism”: the tending of institutions that instill civic virtue and informed citizenship in ordinary people, so that they can fill the void left by aristocratic elites and the noblesse oblige they are supposed to embody. If the few are unworthy to rule, their replacement by an equally unworthy many is not an improvement.
The roots of American republicanism run deep. The tradition is one worth recovering, if we intend to govern ourselves once again. But doing so reminds us why the fathers of conservatism saw the republicanism of their own day as a menace.