The Lost Meaning of Republicanism in Modern America

Americans often appear indifferent to “Republicanism” (meaning the classical republican tradition) because the word has been almost completely hijacked in everyday language by the Republican Party. When most people hear “republicanism” today, they think of the Grand Old Party, Trump, culture-war talking points, or at best vague slogans about “limited government.” The deeper philosophical tradition — civic humanism, mixed constitution, virtue, corruption, the common good, rotation in office, independence from domination, etc. has been crowded out.

Several historical and cultural reasons explain this disconnect when you investigate. These are: (i.) exceptionalism and liberalism dominant in the Founding narrative, (ii.) Cold War anti-statism, and (iii.) the racial captivity of the civic republican tradition. The tradition is not only lost, it has been buried. Tiny fragments exist in our political language and in our democratic institutions, but it is diluted. Americans don’t understand or seem to care about the roots of their political and the philosophical heritage. If we did, we would not be in the condition we are in. American civic education and popular history emphasize Locke, natural rights, individualism, and the Constitution as a liberal rights-protecting machine far more than they emphasize Machiavelli, Harrington, Sidney, Montesquieu, or the country-party opposition tradition. “Republicanism” gets reduced to “we’re not a direct democracy” rather than a rich tradition of thought about power, virtue, philosophy and non-domination.

After 1945, anything that smelled of “civic virtue,” communalism, public spiritedness, or the common good was easily labeled “collectivist” or “socialistic.” Classical republican language therefore retreated into the academy and was replaced by rights-based liberalism and market individualism.Many Southern defenders of slavery such as John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, and others explicitly used republican language (e.g., “republican slavery,” the Roman republic as a slaveholding model, etc.), and because the post-1960s Republican Party became the political home of White backlash, a large portion of the public now associates almost any use of the word “republican” with White Supremacy ideals. The fact that New Left historians in the 1960s–80s like Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock recovered civic humanism as a central Founding ideology paradoxically made it easier for critics to say “See, the Founders were really into Roman-style republicanism. . .and Rome had slavery. . .so the whole thing is tainted.”