Is the United States government considered a republic?

Paul Rahe thinks so – and asserts, “The modern nation state is an attempt to capture what the ancient Greeks and Romans had.”

Our federal government has gone through a massive shift in the last six decades, leaving us with less public discourse and more control at the federal level – which Paul Rahe argues has left Americans feeling anxious with no way to influence the government.

In our most recent episode, Paul Rahe, Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, compares the US government to the ancient republics and explores how this applies to our current place in history.

The US Constitution has been co-opted to shield government agencies from the public. As a result, we now have a consolidated government with far too much control over private institutions. The recent developments in the EPA and the new regulations set up for ObamaCare are just a few easy examples of the extreme federal overreach coming out of the Obama Administration.

What’s the good news? Rahe argues that the administrative entitlement state is coming to an end.

To hear more about the past, present, and future role of the federal government, watch the full interview below.

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Occupy Wall Street has often been compared to the Tea Party; I think it’s usually meant as an insult. By comparing the grass roots protest of the Tea Party to the amalgam of radicals at Occupy, they can diminish  the Tea Party’s success and make all protests distasteful to the general public.

There is little similarity. While the Tea Parties were neat and orderly, the Occupy protests are noisy, juvenile, and stinky. The Tea Parties were friendly while the Occupy movement is violent, angry, and crime ridden; they have the same problem with lawlessness that plagues most Democrat-controlled cities.

#OccupyBastille

This explains why there is such a vast difference between the two. The Occupy movement is not only mostly Democrat; it is also democratic. Likewise, the Tea Parties are both a republic and Republican. They are microcosms of the political philosophies they each represent.

Tea parties are controlled by the rule of law and are planned in advance. They acquire proper permits, rent PA systems, Porti-Potties, and Tents. When they’re over, people pick up the trash and go home.

Occupy is famous for creepy chanting after every speaker finishes a sentence and a guy relieving himself against the side of a police car.  Some of the Occupy residents have, ironically, used the facilities of McDonalds and Starbucks and even took ironic shelter from the rain in a Bank of America ATM kiosk (I’m sure the irony is lost on them, though).  They loudly proclaim that “this is what Democracy looks like!”

Constitutional author James Madison would agree. In Federalist # 10 he wrote: “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.“ (more…)

Greece, the cradle of democracy, is experiencing chaotic violence at the hands of Socialists and anarchists. That country’s Socialist government has come to a moment in time – like most Socialist and Marxist enterprises – when the system has failed. The promises of the Nanny State and prefectorial centralized government have come up empty and “the people” are angry as a result. Of course, “the people,” the ones who, today, are refusing to realize that you can’t bleed a turnip, are exactly the ones who are to blame for the situation they are in. If the citizenry of the United States of America isn’t careful and willing to make some painful adjustments, economically, we may be starring this future directly in the eye.

Today, We the People – we Americans, stand at a moment in time when a very hard decision needs to be made; honestly, the fate of the nation rides upon it. We can either follow the path of the Socialist Greeks; the path that has led them to national bankruptcy, debt and that nation’s unenviable position as the fuse for a global economic chain reaction, or we can feel a good deal of pain in the form of sacrifice so that our country might continue to exist for future generations.

At this crossroads, We the People find ourselves confronted by some very uncomfortable questions. Are we willing to push ourselves back from the “feed trough” of government dependence? Are we willing to embrace self-imposed personal responsibility, charity and self-reliance? Or are we too uncaring of our nation’s well-being that greed is somehow justified; too narcissistic to abstain from the too easy to attain government entitlement; too self-absorbed and addicted to the “I’ve got mine, to Hell with you” machinations of the Progressive “Me Generation”?

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“The middle class is still treading water, while those aspiring to reach the middle class are doing everything they can to keep from drowning.”

—President Barack Obama, 8 September 2010

Bad metaphors bring bad policies. During the Great Depression Americans were told that “the pump” had to be “primed.” Despite twelve years of pump-priming, F. D. R. did not bring America out of the Depression. Bipartisan tax cuts targeted against Truman’s “Fair Deal” did.

Roosevelt had also used the metaphor of “war,” but that analogy was brought to perfection in L. B. J.’s “war on poverty.” The image is problematic. Marines going into a battle, for example, want to know, as they are locking and loading, who the “bad guys” are, that is, whom to shoot. Who were the bad guys in the “war on poverty”? The impoverished? The rich? When President Obama took office a year and a half ago, the universal call from the Democrats was to pass a stimulus package in order to “jump start” economy. Is the American economy really an old jalopy whose owner would not dare go out for a drive without taking his jumper cables? Yet that image was invoked countless times without a trace of irony as the government was moving in to take over parts of the auto industry.

If bad political metaphors are not exposed, bad policies invariably follow. That is why one of the most important moments in the debate over independence was when Thomas Paine required the American colonists to rethink the idea of Britain as the “mother country.” Does a mother send an army to attack her young? Do not children eventually grow up? In deciding to become a republic, Americans chose not to have a permanent parent overseeing their every move and aspiration.

Having failed to “jump start” the economy, President Obama and the Democrats are moving onto a new metaphor. The people are “drowning.” Now this is an indisputably powerful image. Who would not throw a “life line” to a person who is drowning? Only the most unfeeling capitalist on his mega yacht (about the size of John Kerry’s) would let someone go down in the treacherous waters of the present economy. When examined closely, though, the analogy reveals more than the president knows.

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As he prepared “Notes on Government” for publication in 1791, Congressman James Madison wrote a note to himself. “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part [of the people] instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers.” He drew a telling conclusion: “The Southern States of America,” very much including his native Virginia, “are on the same principle aristocracies.”

As an architect of the new Constitution, Madison knew that Article IV, Section 4 says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” He knew, therefore, that the American regime contained a self-contradiction. With most Americans of his generation, he hoped that the eventual removal of slavery would remove this potentially fatal flaw. In fact many states did abolish slavery in that first, founding generation. But his “Southern States” did not. It took civil war and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to continue the liberation that the founders had begun.

Lincoln came to the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg to say in public what Madison in prudence could not say some seventy years before. In declaring their independence, their self-government, in 1776, “our fathers,” the founders, “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Conceived, brought forth: this is the language of fertility, of childbirth. It is a paradoxical conception and childbirth—the work of fathers not of mothers. Somehow the signers of the Declaration of Independence were fathers and mothers, men who conceived and gave birth.

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In earlier posts – here and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least one of the reasons for his pre-eminence is still pertinent today. There are other such reasons, which I addressed at length in Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, and they, too, deserve consideration. I will discuss one such here.

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws is a large book, and it is difficult to know which elements within it are the most salient. There is, however, one passage in which Montesquieu tells us outright that what he is about to say is fundamental to everything else that he says. “I,” he writes near the end of the first of the work’s six parts, “shall be able to be understood only when the next four chapters have been read.” Then, in those four chapters, he argues that forms of government are closely related to the size of the territory that must be governed. Republics are well-suited to polities small in extent; monarchies, to polities of intermediate size; and despotisms to polities great in size.

The pertinence of this claim to the situation of the American Founding Fathers should be obvious. Especially in modern times, this would appear to mean that republicanism can only be viable in mountainous places such as Switzerland, where the geography virtually rules out the establishment of anything but tiny states. It is, then, in no way surprising that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists turned to a considerable extent upon the question whether it is somehow possible to establish a viable republic on an extended territory.

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To the People of the State of New York:

THE last paper having concluded the observations which were meant to introduce a candid survey of the plan of government reported by the convention, we now proceed to the execution of that part of our undertaking. The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican. It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government. If the plan of the convention, therefore, be found to depart from the republican character, its advocates must abandon it as no longer defensible.

What, then, are the distinctive characters of the republican form? Were an answer to this question to be sought, not by recurring to principles, but in the application of the term by political writers, to the constitution of different States, no satisfactory one would ever be found. Holland, in which no particle of the supreme authority is derived from the people, has passed almost universally under the denomination of a republic. The same title has been bestowed on Venice, where absolute power over the great body of the people is exercised, in the most absolute manner, by a small body of hereditary nobles. Poland, which is a mixture of aristocracy and of monarchy in their worst forms, has been dignified with the same appellation. The government of England, which has one republican branch only, combined with an hereditary aristocracy and monarchy, has, with equal impropriety, been frequently placed on the list of republics. These examples, which are nearly as dissimilar to each other as to a genuine republic, show the extreme inaccuracy with which the term has been used in political disquisitions.

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