Angelo Codevilla considers the likely state of the Dysunion
after the end of the Republic in a pensive Claremont article entitled "After the
Republic":
Over the past half
century, the Reagan years notwithstanding, our ruling class’s changing
preferences and habits have transformed public and private life in America. As
John Marini shows in his essay, “Donald Trump and the American Crisis,” this
has resulted in citizens morphing into either this class’s “stakeholders” or
its subjects. And, as Publius Decius Mus argues, “America and the West” now are
so firmly “on a trajectory toward something very bad” that it is no longer
reasonable to hope that “all human outcomes are still possible,” by which he
means restoration of the public and private practices that made the American
republic. In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’s transition
from that republic to some kind of empire.
Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will make a big difference in our lives....
Rather than talk about how to restrain or shrink government, Republican candidates talked about how to do more with government. The Wall Street Journal called that “having a positive agenda.” Hence, Republicans by and large joined the Democrats in relegating the U.S. Constitution to history’s dustbin.
Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: “fake constitutionalism.” Because such fakery is self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power.
The ruling class having chosen raw power over law and persuasion, the American people reasonably concluded that raw power is the only way to counter it, and looked for candidates who would do that.
Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will make a big difference in our lives....
Rather than talk about how to restrain or shrink government, Republican candidates talked about how to do more with government. The Wall Street Journal called that “having a positive agenda.” Hence, Republicans by and large joined the Democrats in relegating the U.S. Constitution to history’s dustbin.
Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: “fake constitutionalism.” Because such fakery is self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power.
The ruling class having chosen raw power over law and persuasion, the American people reasonably concluded that raw power is the only way to counter it, and looked for candidates who would do that.
While it is a polite
lament for the death of the US republic and an intellectual explanation for the
rise of Donald Trump, what it really amounts to is the powerful case for the
#Alt-Right. Constitutionalism is stone-dead. The proposition nation never
existed in the first place. Conservatism failed. The Rule of Law has been
trampled by the establishment. There is no more Union; the immigrants upon whom
Abraham Lincoln relied to save it with their arms ended up destroying it with their
votes only five-score-and-two years after the Gettysburg Address.
The former Republic of the United States of America is now the Post-Republican Empire of the Dysunited States of Many Nations.
What comes next? If history is any guide, ethnic strife, war, and the birth of multiple new homogeneous nations. It won't happen overnight, but then, it took fifty years for the Republic to die from its mortal wound.
The former Republic of the United States of America is now the Post-Republican Empire of the Dysunited States of Many Nations.
What comes next? If history is any guide, ethnic strife, war, and the birth of multiple new homogeneous nations. It won't happen overnight, but then, it took fifty years for the Republic to die from its mortal wound.
