“Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.” (“For knowledge itself is power.”)
FRANCIS BACON, MEDITATIONES SACRAE (1597)
A deep contradiction lies at the heart of much contemporary American political rhetoric: anti-republican and anti-Enlightenment intellectual structures, originally forged by Counter-Revolution thinkers, are routinely deployed to defend the Constitution, the Founders, and republican liberty itself.
“Counter-Enlightenment” is Isaiah Berlin’s term for the reaction against universal reason, progress, and social-contract thinking in favor of tradition, authority, particularism, and the irrational. This movement is associated with figures such as Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, Edmund Burke, Johann Georg Hamann, and Giambattista Vico, who rejected the rationalist, individualist, and republican premises of the 17ᵗʰ-18ᵗʰ century revolutions in favor of throne, altar, hierarchy, and mythic national spirit. De Maistre, for instance, argued in Considerations on France (1797) in his section “Can the French Republic Last,” that large republics must collapse because they vest too much authority in fallible human reason rather than in stable, hierarchical order. De Maistre’s argument that large republics are doomed to collapse because they give mankind too much authority instead of stable hierarchical or monarchical order that approximates divine rule has returned as an argument among the oligarchs.
This is not to claim that every conservative or populist intuition is Counter-Enlightenment in origin, nor that the republican tradition is without genuine vulnerabilities. It is meant to identify a recurring intellectual structure that operates across apparent ideological lines.
The history of the republican revolutions of the 17ᵗʰ-18ᵗʰ centuries are steeped in conspiracy and the action of “conspirators,” and understanding the root, structure and purpose of the use of instigation and the purpose of those both for and against the republican revolutionaries is unavoidable in studying its history. But the narrative of the Counter-Revolution and Counter-Enlightenment is the accepted and popular norm. These narratives of the 17ᵗʰ-18ᵗʰ century Counter‑Revolution and Counter‑Enlightenment seeped into modern American conspiracy thinking, even though those narratives were originally anti‑republican, anti‑democratic, and anti‑Enlightenment. It created a deep contradiction inside American political culture that is hardly ever articulated by those with influence.
Many of these thinkers which also included Francisco Suárez, Domingo de Soto, Thomas Cajetan, Bishop Stillingfleet and the Restoration Tories opposed Enlightenment republicanism, defended hierarchy, and resisted the spread of democratic, secular, and rational political ideas. Their work and beliefs that modernity itself is a conspiracy undermining tradition formed the intellectual backbone of Counter‑Revolutionary politics, Counter‑Enlightenment philosophy, anti‑republican religious movements and early conservative ideology. Burke and de Maistre, in particular, became foundational to modern conservatism. This is the origin of the paranoid political style, and it is not republican or American. It is Counter-Enlightenment.
Because Americans in particular seem to not know what the republican tradition is, or its history, they cannot detect and diagnose the poison effectively.
“The founders warned about secret cabals” is actually Counter‑Revolution rhetoric and modern revisionism. “The Enlightenment created corruption” is actually Counter‑Enlightenment rhetoric. “Reason is dangerous” was the argument of Hamann, Vico, and de Maistre. “Modernity is a conspiracy” against God or Order is a Counter‑Revolution worldview. Many Americans drift in patterns of thinking that conflict with Enlightenment and republican principles, often without realizing it, until the illusions accepted become more emotionally satisfying than the human responsibility and discipline demanded by republicanism.
Modern American conspiracy culture, especially populists, borrow or express those same anti‑Enlightenment, anti‑republican narratives to defend a political identity that claims to be patriotic, constitutional and the original intent of “the Founders” or conserving “order.” Some, in realizing this is not true — particularly when pertaining to “the Founders” — due to its revisionism, psychologically move into denial from which ideas like Post-Constitutionalism emerge.
When citizens realize this contradiction, their denial kicks in and takes the form of doubling down on conspiracy narratives, rejecting Enlightenment principles, rejecting constitutional norms, rejecting republican institutions, rejecting reason and evidence and embracing mythic1 or apocalyptic narratives.
Large segments of American political discourse (left, right, populist, nationalist) have absorbed the Counter‑Enlightenment (anti-republican) logic and narratives of de Maistre, Bonald, Hamann, Vico and others. People will often use anti‑republican, anti‑Enlightenment narratives to defend a political identity that claims to be republican and Enlightenment‑based. When confronted with this contradiction, they also move into denial and adopt anti‑American ideas under the guise of Americanism and patriotism. In this rationale, people think they are defending the Constitution, the founders, republicanism and liberty against conspiratorial realities or conserving a “traditional order” that is interpreted as the intent of the Founders and the Revolution, but the structure of their thinking is Counter‑Enlightenment.2 This is in-fact predictive, and is based on a number of factors, but both the modern left and right exhibit anti-republican logic and readings of the history.
Many political representatives in the Republican Party (one of the main U.S. political parties) express a psychological cognitive dissonance as a defense mechanism, as seen in Russell Vought’s advocacy (as White House OMB Director and through the Center for Renewing America) for radically subordinating the administrative state to presidential control and reinterpreting constitutional constraints in ways that prioritize executive energy over divided powers and procedural regularity — reflecting de Maistre’s claim in his Seventh Dialogue (St. Petersburg Dialogues, 1821) that the executioner, as the ultimate decisive authority, is what ultimately holds society together when republican forms grow too weak. Vought’s drive to dismantle bureaucratic independence and centralize authority in the presidency operationalizes the Counter-Enlightenment preference for personal, decisive will over impersonal rationalist administrative structures.3
President Trump and many other Americans’ fixation with competing against China and viewing China as a mirror has engaged them in a displacement mechanism, projecting onto China the ‘strong state’ model once praised by Counter-Revolution thinkers as superior to supposedly weak and corrupt republican forms, even while framing the competition as existential defense of the republic.
Modern political rhetoric, especially parts of the contemporary left often reframe political corruption as proof that the republican tradition is obsolete or inherently flawed4.
This tactic is structurally similar to Bolshevik and Leninist strategy, and it uses anti‑republican psychological mechanisms that resemble the same ones Lenin used to delegitimize republicanism, which is the same as Counter-Revolution logic. Lenin rejected Enlightenment republicanism the same way Counter‑Revolutionaries did. Lenin’s assault on liberal-republican institutions repurposed the same anti-rationalist, anti-procedural logic that the Counter-Revolution had used against republicanism itself, which destabilizes both progressive narratives of linear emancipation and conservative claims of unbroken constitutional fidelity.
The American will resist admitting this because it exposes a deep contradiction in their own political identity, which they stake the sole means to defeat their political adversary. However, the broader political corruption is not the flaw of the republican tradition. The corruption is a failure of civic virtue. Recognizing the borrowed architecture of our arguments is the first step toward rebuilding a republicanism that actually believes in its own premises.
FOOTNOTES
- The same cyclical, providential logic surfaces in narratives that cast the present as a decadent age of reflection from which only dramatic restoration can recover earlier, more authentic foundations in Giambattista Vico’s The New Science (Book V, 1744). ↩︎
- This mirrors de Maistre’s insistence in Considerations on France and St. Petersburg Dialogues (1821) that true authority rests on non-rational foundations that cannot be subjected to perpetual rational questioning without dissolving social order. (Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, 1797; English trans. Richard A. Lebrun, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974; also developed in St. Petersburg Dialogues, 1821) ↩︎
- See Russell Vought, section on the Executive Office of the President in Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, The Heritage Foundation, 2024; and search also for Vought’s public statements on unitary executive theory and “deconstructing the administrative state” between 2023-2025. ↩︎
- Hamann likewise critiqued that Enlightenment “pure reason” is a fiction detached from language, history, tradition, and faith, because reason cannot stand alone as an autonomous guide. Hamann attacked abstract reason as an empty idol that inevitably fails when severed from concrete tradition and faith (see Johann Georg Hamann, Metacritique on the Purism of Reason, 1784; in Writings on Philosophy and Language, ed. Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 205-218). ↩︎