Civic Philosophy as way of life (Pierre Hadot) and discipline, how the critique against aging politicians have backfired, oligarchic and elite capture, and observable consequences from cumulative damage and erosion of the republican tradition foundations.
CIVIC PHILOSOPHY AS WAY OF LIFE
WHEN WE WRITE ABOUT THE REPUBLICAN-STYLE and even of reconciliatory radical republicanism (e.g., socialist-oriented republicanism, not Marxist-Leninism), we are speaking of a long eclectic lineage of political-philosophical wisdom, a style of government, an ancient struggle of the soul, city & for humanity, the ancient civic school of ordered liberty, a dynamic philosophy of will, and philosophy as a way of life, not some vague placeholder. I indirectly invoke Hadot here in general on philosophy; and because the history itself proves Hadot correct. We are establishing canon and atlases, but much action can be done in this project beyond words, even in my own city, but the power of independent publication, even in this period, must not be treated as without value. I place caution on the reconciliatory radical republican tradition, due to several contemporary developments under the umbrella of “democratic socialism,” and some may not understand the context if they do not keep tabs on the conventions and forums of Democratic operatives and the DSA. I am not making conservative arguments. Just note, that reconciliatory radical republicanism entails a focus on national unity and civic solidarity, aiming to bridge class divisions, and drawing on Irish republican socialism, civic republicanism, and democratic socialism. The patterns of hostility and displacement, and the conflicting anthropology in key areas remains important to consider.
In What Form of Government is the United States Today, here, I am primarily insisting that the classical civic republican tradition remains a living, recoverable, and uniquely continuous force against arbitrary power, including oligarchic forms, rather than a substantially transformed or diluted historical inheritance. The reinvigoration of that tradition (non-domination, civic virtue, ordered liberty) is neither conservative, libertarian, or liberal recovery, but strictly what it is and by what it is meant to do; and that is as the practical strategy for fortifying democratic institutions, civic literacy, and human ingenuity, in contrast to a more diagnostic view of irreversible adaptation under modern scale, mass democracy, and administrative growth. This idea returns power back to the people of the state, and not to the rule of so-called technical specialists, high wealthy class and other “elites,” leaving the poor and battered on the streets unheard and weltering.
GERONTOCRACY AND MALE ANXIETIES SHAPING POWER IN MODERN POLITICS
CONGRESSIONAL MEDIAN AGES HAVE RISEN FOR DECADES, the Senate is especially old, and recent presidents have been among the oldest in history. Career paths favor longevity, fundraising networks, and committee seniority. This produces gerontocratic effects by slower adaptation, risk aversion, and incumbency advantages, without constituting formal rule by the elderly as a class. Comparable patterns appear in other advanced democracies with professionalized politics. While women have gained substantial representation and institutional influence (higher education, certain bureaucracies, professional associations, parts of the nonprofit and media sectors), voting patterns show persistent gender gaps, contradicting deep male anxieties of young and adult men in the U.S. influenced by manosphere culture and online ecosystem, that continue to shape modern politics. The data shows, that none of this equals systemic female rule or a matriarchal override of male-dominated domains (executive leadership, military command, most large-scale finance and technology, the higher judiciary until recently). Power remains distributed by network, capital, credentials, and institutional position more than by sex, and treating institutional feminization in specific sectors as evidence of overall “gynocracy” collapses descriptive trends into a monocausal narrative. This is one of many competing theories that is diluting the field of diagnosing power, and theories and beliefs on what is wrong with the country and who is the cause determines the vote.
“Gerontocrats” as some despairingly and wittily call them for clever journalism, have been able to mount a defense against their critics, by showing they are atleast still functioning at any capacity mentally to govern, as no laws restrain them from office, and by indirectly putting the middle-finger up to the younger generation, and telling us that the younger generation are too conditioned by Marxism, and can govern a social media account, but not cities, states and financial institutions.
A problem has indeed occurred, and may continue a cycle, in that those of my generation, like N.Y. City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have not been timely and successfully initiated into their civic roles by the gatekeepers because they are too busy doing corrupt things. So, we have not stepped into the fray to compete against our elders and taken our roles in seats of power and influence to the degree needed, and moreover, the older distrust the younger generation with power. The younger generation will age, and like the previous, having had little time to exert their visions in the time they should have, once they are forced to step into their civilizational roles and run offices, will likely also hog political power like the current political generation who are holding on and resisting retirement.
The verdict still is no good for the careers and propounding damages caused by many politicians, who are indeed past their prime.
Classical republicanism prized mixed constitutions, institutional jealousy among branches and orders, cultivation of civic virtue, and wariness of pure democracy’s tendency toward faction, demagoguery, and short-term majoritarianism.
Noticeably, key shifts have moved the U.S. system away from that model:
- Progressive-era and New Deal expansions of national administrative capacity reduced the practical force of enumerated powers and federalism.
- Democratizing amendments and practices (17ᵗʰ Amendment, primary systems, campaign-finance regimes that favor organized money and media) increased direct popular input while weakening intermediate filters.
- Cultural and educational changes reduced the shared republican vocabulary of virtue, restraint, and constitutional limits; polarization and identity politics intensified factional dynamics Madison warned against.
- Scale itself matters, because it is thought that a continental commercial republic of more than 340 million cannot operate like a small classical republic or even the early United States, but it is not everything; and it certainly cannot operate like a small classical republic, if you think of its tradition in a limited sense. Representation becomes more remote; and interest-group bargaining and bureaucratic mediation fill the gap.
These are cumulative adaptations and erosions, not a single collapse. I mapped this in The Stages of the Collapse of American Republicanism, Civic Associations and Community. The formal structure still channels conflict, still produces alternation in office, and still constrains the most extreme outcomes more effectively than many peer systems. At the same time, the distance between the Founders’ design and current practice is large, and many of the original republican safeguards against concentrated factional or administrative power have weakened.
It remains an open and unsettled question whether a continental commercial republic of more than 340 million people is inherently incapable of sustaining the practices of a small classical republic or even the early United States. Scale matters, but it alone does not render the outcome certain. Classical theorists and some American founders worried that vast size, commercial interests, and factional diversity would dilute the civic virtues of vigilance, public-spiritedness, and constitutional restraint that smaller polities could more readily cultivate. Yet the early United States itself already exceeded the scale of ancient city-states while still operating under republican forms, and modern communications, mobility, and institutional design have since altered the practical constraints of distance and information.
What is far clearer is that the republican tradition has been actively eroded and weakened, not primarily by demography or geography, but by the long-term neglect of the knowledge and habits required to practice it. This position is most unpopular, for not solely blaming those in power, but we live in an age where the citizen has become fitted to feudal-technocratic rule, in a role in society as spectators and pawns, not citizens informed in the philosophy of SELF-RULE and moderation. The government officials that emerge from among you then raise and employ others to rank are your spouses, relatives and neighbors. They too are voters and citizens, and partake in the same order.
Many people who often adopt Marxist and socialist rhetoric, not all, tend to flatten the workings of a market economy and the philosophy surrounding a system of exchange and division of labor into a simplified contest of extraction and domination, treating prices, incentives, and voluntary exchange as mere veils over class power rather than mechanisms that allocate scarce resources under uncertainty. This leaves many people adopting the logic chronically poor at diagnosing actual concentrations of power, which in practice often arise as much from state privilege, regulatory capture, public-sector monopolies, and ideological coordination as from private ownership of capital. Although Marxists present their analysis as a rigorous science of history and a dialectical method that reveals hidden structures, the framework routinely collapses complex institutional feedbacks into predetermined stages of contradiction and crisis, so that evidence of entrepreneurial adaptation, rising living standards, or dispersed decision-making is discounted as epiphenomenal. Their rhetoric almost invariably locates responsibility in “the system” and an us-versus-them logic that absolves the majority of ongoing agency, yet in a republic the constitutional order is sustained by the association of the people as a whole. The greater resources of the wealthy class neither cancel the duties of ordinary citizens to maintain laws, norms, and intermediate institutions nor convert every disparity of means into proof that only systemic overthrow can restore justice.
A commercial society organized around consumption and spectacle readily supplies “bread and circuses” that divert attention from public affairs; but when the populace largely neither knows the history of the republican tradition nor possesses the conceptual tools to apply its virtues, those distractions become more potent. The result is not a deterministic failure of large-scale republicanism but a contingent one, in which the intellectual and moral preconditions for self-government have been allowed to atrophy.
This atrophy is tightly linked to the measurable decline in civic education, a decline that ought to rank as a first-order priority for thinkers and for interests with stakes in long-term stability, yet is routinely subordinated to other curricular and political goals and is in practice exploited. On the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 22 percent of eighth graders scored at or above proficient in civics and just 13 percent did so in U.S. history, the weakest results of any subject tested, with civics scores declining for the first time since the assessment began (Nation’s Report Card). The Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey finds that 35 percent of American adults cannot name the three branches of government, while only 9 percent can correctly identify all five First Amendment protections (Annenberg Public Policy Center, 2026). A U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation survey reports that 58 percent of adults fail a basic civics test even as most remain confident they understand how government works (U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation). Elementary classrooms devote roughly sixteen minutes a day to social studies against eighty-nine minutes for reading, and the federal government spends on the order of one-hundred times less per student on civics relative to STEM (Progressive Policy Institute). Meanwhile, only about half of Americans aged 18-29 agree that democracy is the best form of government (Gallup), and nearly two-thirds of adults fall into categories of civic spectators or outsiders with minimal engagement (Pew Research Center). This marks the absence of the shared historical knowledge and practical judgment that republican government presupposes, leaving commercial incentives and entertainment free to fill the resulting vacuum rather than being constrained by an informed (enlightened) citizenry.
OLIGARCHY AND ELITE CAPTURE
Oligarchic tendencies (money, organized interests, networks, credentials) are treated often as real and measurable features of the hybrid system without reducing the whole to closed oligarchy. Anti-oligarchic and anti-greed roots are central and continuous within the classical-to-modern republican tradition itself. In “Anti-Greed and Anti-Oligarchic Roots in the Classical-Modern Republican Tradition,” I argued how the opposition to oligarchy is intrinsic to the tradition rather than a secondary or empirical observation and does not require Marx to have existed or not to hold such position. It seems many people repeat Marx’s conclusions that critiques oligarchy as a structural pattern within capitalist systems, rather than re-engage with the long history of historical patterns and how oligarchy emerged, evolved and persisted across prior ages. The modern drift in the United States into elite influence is mainly the predictable result of sidelining the republican tradition, not merely an inevitable byproduct of scale or professionalized politics.
The prior analysis explained that classical republican safeguards have been diluted by mass democracy, administrative mediation, and cultural change, while formal republican structures still channel conflict and constrain extremes. However, this erosion is not irreversible. The tradition is not spent and conscious recovery through philosophy, education, civic practice, and culture is both possible and the preferred path. We are called to expand the tradition’s scope beyond a narrow Founders-Madisonian American frame to include all historical and related humanistic, even metaphysical currents. This broader genealogy challenges any account centered mainly on the early American republic’s design and subsequent democratic adaptations.
There is also the issue of modern democracy, socialism, and factionalism to strongly reiterate. The “sacralization of democracy,” the corruption of the American civic inheritance by partisans, and the false choice between socialism and reactionary conservatism perpetuate stalemate factionalism. There was a shift toward mass democracy and bureaucratic governance, but this is a dilution that displace republican ideals of non-domination and civic virtue.
As to citizen responsibility and civic virtue, the condition of the republic depends on every citizen of every class and is not an abstract institutional matter. This is classical republican anthropology advanced more programmatically than in a purely descriptive institutional analysis. The institutions require fortification by recovered republican philosophy against oligarchic, materialist, and factional pressures.
REFERENCE OF INTEREST
- Alan Cunningham, A Modern Day Sparta: The American Gerontocracy and the National Security Implications of Elderly Rule, Georgetown Security Studies Review, Georgetown University.
