In Jonah Goldberg’s most recent Remnant podcast, he talks with AEI’s Tony Mills about the roles of liberalism and republicanism in the American traditionalism, and the two dwell for some time on the ascendance of liberalism and the relative decline of republicanism. This conversation was provoked by Mills’s recent article, “Liberalism Is Not Enough” in National Affairs. And if you will forgive the unsolicited nerdery, I have a thought about that.
Here is my theory: An organized political movement, such as the civil-rights movement in the United States, or a political tendency, such as republicanism, comes to its natural conclusion and begins to dissipate not when it has achieved its positive ends but when it has vanquished its main enemies — which are not the same thing.
Republicanism, as Mills notes, is a complex body of thought, but two of its great animating principles in the 17th and 18th centuries were anticlericalism and antimonarchism. The American Revolution and the Constitution made both of those nonissues in the United States, though this took some time to sink into practical politics. There was enough lively republican sentiment surviving the revolution that John Adams was famously pilloried for his desire to confer quasi-monarchical stylings on the presidency, while other offenses against republican sensibilities were met with similar derision and contempt. Republican disestablishmentarianism survived as long as the state churches did, with Massachusetts being the last to disestablish its church in 1833.
(The anticlericalism was often more intense and longer lived in the Catholic countries than in the Protestant Anglosphere, as evidenced not only in the French Revolution but also in the horrific repression of the Catholic Church in Mexico that lasted well into the 20th century.)
American republicans did not succeed in their long-term goal of establishing a durable model of republican citizenship and republican virtue in the United States (if you doubt this, look around you!) but they did succeed in vanquishing their most visible enemies. Patrick Henry’s political career was launched by a dispute with His Majesty’s clergy in Virginia, but by the end of his life there wasn’t even the shadow of a king to worry much about, while the First Amendment had prohibited an established church at the national level.
The same dynamic plays out in other movements:
The civil-rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. did not succeed in its goal of establishing a society in which the systemic disadvantages of African Americans had been eradicated, or even in putting the nation on a path toward such a goal; but the kind of active and politically engaged racism that one commonly saw among Democratic Party politicians of King’s era is no longer socially acceptable, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 marked the climactic political defeat of those who were committed to white supremacy as a legal and political goal. The civil-rights movement declined after vanquishing those enemies, eventually degenerating into a series of money-making schemes.
The fusionist model of American political conservatism championed by National Review did not long outlive the Soviet Union. With Muscovite communism defeated and with the triumph of Ronald Reagan signaling the end of ambitious, Great Society–style welfare expansionism, there was a sense that the 20th-century model of conservatism had run its course, even though it had not only failed to achieve its principal goal — undoing the New Deal — but in fact had abandoned that goal and achieved the apex of its political power and cultural prestige under the leadership of a charismatic president who described himself as a New Deal Democrat alienated from the party of FDR by the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The conservative movement that came into being in the middle of the 20th century in large part because Dwight Eisenhower did not want to undo Social Security eventually found its 21st-century hero in an East Coast welfare populist who vowed to not even consider reforming Social Security, much less abolishing it.
The National Rifle Association fell into decadence when it became clear that it had, at least for a time, beaten back its most visible foes in the political arena.
Etc.
To be sure, this is not the course followed by every movement. The labor movement has been fortunate in that the great mighty churn of capitalism throws up a new unifying enemy for it every few years — if you run out of robber barons, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk will do. You can drive GM into the ground, but there’s Walmart and Amazon and other potential host organisms. The environmental movement enjoys enormous prestige and influence at the commanding heights of government, business, and culture, but until we decide to go back to living in mud huts and digging up grubs, there will be energy companies and manufacturers and farmers to provide it with enemies sufficient for its purposes.
I suppose the best way to resurrect the cause of republican virtue would be to provide the right kind of enemy to rouse the dormant republican sensibility, maybe by threatening the nation with an established church. (I’d recommend the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or another of the many churches that can proudly label themselves “Made in the USA.” We’re all nationalists now, right?) That’s one idea.
But let’s not even toy with monarchy — I am afraid Americans in their current condition might be too easily seduced by the pomp.