From Republic to Technocracy: The Costs of Sacralizing Democracy

The sacralization of “democracy” as the supreme and nearly unassailable name for legitimate government produced cascading institutional, intellectual, and cultural consequences that proved corrosive to the classical republican project of non-domination. Once the word was elevated from a contested regime type into a moral absolute, populists, ethno-nationalists, authoritarian strongmen, and socialists of every stripe could enter the citadel of free government under false colors. At the same time, the older language of republicanism — mixed constitution, civic virtue, rule of law, and tempered popular sovereignty — was emptied of prestige, narrowed to partisan usage, or actively demonized as elitist, outdated, or anti-popular. The result was not the perfection of self-government but the systematic weakening of the restraints that had once distinguished a free people from a mobilized mass.

INSTITUTIONAL EROSION AND THE COLLASPE OF MIXED GOVERNMENT

The most immediate consequence was the progressive dismantling of the mixed and balanced constitution that classical and Atlantic republicans regarded as the only durable barrier against arbitrary power. When democracy is sacralized, every institutional filter of representation, bicameralism, judicial review, federalism, independent civil service, or super-majority requirements can be portrayed as an undemocratic obstacle to the pure will of the people (Madison 1787; Manin 1997). Populist leaders on both left and right have repeatedly used this rhetoric to justify the packing of courts, the politicization of electoral administration, the centralization of emergency powers, and the subordination of intermediate bodies.

In the interwar period the same dynamic helped destroy the Weimar Republic and the Spanish Second Republic. Mass parties claimed to embody authentic democracy treated constitutional limits as bourgeois relics, opening the door first to polarization and then to authoritarian closure (Linz 2000). In the postwar “people’s democracies” of Eastern Europe, formal democratic institutions were retained as façades while real power was monopolized by the party; the sacralized word made it possible to brand any defense of genuine constitutionalism as reactionary or fascist (Arendt 1951). Contemporary populist experiments, whether left-wing Bolivarian regimes or right-wing illiberal democracies, repeat the pattern: democracy is invoked to legitimize the erosion of the very checks that prevent majority or leader domination (Müller 2016; Urbinati 2014).

INTELLECTUAL IMPOVERISHMENT AND THE LESS OF CRITICAL VOCABULARY

Sacralization produced a profound impoverishment of political language. Once “democracy” became synonymous with political goodness itself, criticism of democratic excesses, such as through demagoguery, short-termism, the tyranny of the majority, the corrosion of civic virtue, became nearly unsayable without inviting the charge of anti-democratic heresy (Tocqueville 1835-40; Pettit 1997). Republican categories that had once allowed precise diagnosis of these dangers were either absorbed into a flattened democratic idiom or dismissed as a remnant of aristocracy.

The result is a conceptual trap, because defenders of non-domination find themselves forced to argue on the terrain chosen by our opponents. Every appeal to institutional restraint must be framed as a higher or more authentic form of democracy rather than as a distinct republican good. This linguistic capture has been especially damaging in academic and journalistic discourse, where the republican tradition is routinely reduced to a historical curiosity or a partisan label, while “democratic” retains automatic moral capital (Skinner 1998; Pocock 1975). Mazzini’s own insistence that popular sovereignty must be disciplined by moral duty and national association became almost inaudible once the simpler cry of “democracy” dominated the field (Mazzini 1860).

CULTURAL AND MORAL CONSEQUENCES: THE DECLINE OF CIVIC VIRTUE

Because pure democracy elevates will over formation, the sacralization of the term accelerated the neglect of the formative institutions that republicans considered indispensable: civic education, local self-government, independent associations, and the cultivation of public spirit. When legitimacy is reduced to the counting of heads or the mobilization of identity blocs, the slower work of making citizens capable of self-rule appears secondary or even suspect (Viroli 2002).

The cultural consequence has been a gradual replacement of the republican citizen by the democratic consumer, client, or identity. Both left-wing and right-wing populisms thrive on this substitution by promising empowerment through direct identification with a leader or a movement rather than through the demanding practices of self-restraint and mutual accountability. Over time the reservoir of civic capacity required to resist both oligarchic and demagogic domination is depleted (Rosanvallon 2008). The demonization of republican language compounds the damage. Anyone who insists on duties, virtue, or constitutional form risks being branded a defender of privilege or an enemy of the people.

THE AMERICAN PRESENT: PROCEDURAL DEMOCRACY AND THE TECHNOCRATIC REPUBLIC

Karp’s recent book and statements promote a “Technological Republic” in which tech elites (especially engineers) fulfill a moral duty to the nation by partnering with the state on hard power, AI, defense, and innovation.

Post-1960s suburban isolation, mass media, the administrative state, identity politics and the normalization of surveillance eroded interpersonal, pluralist civic life. The administrative state expanded dramatically, and expertise became a routine claim to legitimacy. “The will of the people” was frequently invoked to ratify decisions made by agencies, contractors, and credentialed networks that ordinary citizens cannot meaningfully check. When Palantir (or any comparable firm) contracts across administrations with little public friction, it is evidence that many voters treat the system as a service provider rather than a shared project of self-government.

Madison deliberately chose an extended republic because small, homogeneous, virtue-intensive republics were unstable or prone to their own factions. Classical republicanism worked best in small city-states. Scaling “virtue, local self-rule, common good” required adapting federalism, subsidiarity, and cultural renewal rather than nostalgia. Shared identity is hard when “E Pluribus Unum” competes with strong subgroup identities; and both left identity politics and right-wing ethno-nationalist fringes undermine it.

The modern political culture fits technocracy. This is procedural democracy, not republican self‑government. Alex Karp understands this, referring to his ideal as the “Technocratic Republic” because he observes, that while republican institutions still exist on paper, technocratic elites actually govern in practice. The U.S. is run by experts, bureaucrats, consultants, data analysts and administrative agencies. Karp’s argument, that no one cared when Palantir contracted with the Democratic Party just proves the point, and actual governing capacity has migrated toward technical, managerial, and data-heavy elites.

HISTORICAL CASE STUDIES

The 20ᵗʰ century supplies the most devastating empirical record. The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the subsequent construction of “soviet democracy” demonstrated how the sacralized term could legitimize the most thoroughgoing form of party dictatorship while retaining the external trappings of popular rule. Similar linguistic maneuvers justified the one-party states of the postwar Eastern bloc, the “democratic centralism” of Marxist-Leninist parties, and the various Third-World socialist republics that combined electoral rituals with systematic repression (Kolakowski 1978).

On the right, interwar fascist and authoritarian movements frequently claimed to be purifying or completing democracy against liberal and parliamentary corruption; the word’s prestige made resistance more difficult until the regimes had already concentrated power. In the late 20ᵗʰ and early 21^st centuries the same Trojan-horse dynamic reappeared in milder but still corrosive forms: left-populist governments in Latin America used democratic majorities to dismantle horizontal accountability, while right-populist governments in Europe and elsewhere invoked the people against “unelected” courts and bureaucracies (Mény and Surel 2002). In each case the sacralization of democracy lowered the defensive threshold of republican institutions.

DEMONIZATION OF REPUBLICANISM

As democracy rose, republicanism was eventually stripped of independent prestige. In the United States the term became almost exclusively identified with one political party, so that the broader philosophical tradition could be tainted by partisan association. In progressive and socialist historiography, classical and nineteenth-century republicanism was recast as an incomplete, property-centered, or racially exclusionary stage whose unfinished work only fuller democracy or socialism could complete. Defending mixed government or non-domination therefore risked being heard as nostalgia for hierarchy rather than as a coherent theory of freedom (Pettit 1997).

The linguistic gap has widened to the brink of totality. “Democratic” confers automatic legitimacy, while “republican” (outside narrow party usage) sounds formal, conservative, elitist or anti-popular. Republicanism is at its core, anti-elite and morally rigorous. The asymmetry has practical effects, becoming easier for populists and authoritarians of every orientation to claim the sacred mantle while those who insist on constitutional form are placed on the defensive. The long-term consequence is the closure of the conceptual space in which a genuine republican alternative, neither pure majoritarianism nor administrative or party domination, could again become politically thinkable.

The cumulative damage is therefore not merely theoretical. It is measured in the repeated collapse or hollowing-out of constitutional orders, the rise of new forms of arbitrary power wearing democratic masks, the erosion of the civic capacities required for self-government, and the near-impossibility of articulating a principled alternative without being immediately recoded as anti-democratic.

REPUBLICANISM AS LIVED CIVIC PHILOSOPHY

France uses the word “républicain” because the French state, French identity, and French political culture are explicitly built on republican principles. Since 1870, the French Republic has not existed as just a government, but as a national identity. Americans do not have this and have lost this. The United States avoids the word “republican” because the word became associated with the GOP. Elites replaced republican citizenship with technocracy, “democracy” became the national moral slogan, and Americans lost the institutions and associations that taught republican virtue.

France still has a republican culture. However, Italian, French, Irish and English republicanism differ from American REPUBLICANISM. French republicanism has its own centralized, top-down, and sometimes coercive character. American REPUBLICANISM is supported by a decentralized federal system. The U.S. is a federal republic, a union of states with complex histories, cultures and tensions. Those among us that understand the depths of this history, cultures and tensions will have the hearts of the People.

Americans must care for, nurture and carry the legacy and inheritance of REPUBLICANISM and DEMOCRACY as one. You don’t need a centralized state to maintain the foundations of government. In the American decentralized federal system, it is ultimately up to the people to keep it alive and teach it, and practice it as an embodied lived civic philosophy, not from top-down centralized authority. In our case, the state (or “the system”) did not fail; we failed the system, because we do not practice it. Republicanism is a civic practice, not state doctrine.

A republic, in the American founding sense and in the older tradition, is not just majority procedures plus elections. It presupposes a civic culture: citizens capable of self-restraint, local association, judgment independent of fashion or expert decree, and a willingness to govern rather than merely be administered. Procedural democracy can run on passive voters, emotional mobilization, identity blocs, and elite messaging. A large republic cannot.

NO GOLDEN AGE

Republican and democratic elements have always coexisted uneasily in the American system. Pre-1975 America included slavery, Jim Crow (textbook factional domination and minority subjugation), machine politics, Gilded Age corruption, and low civic knowledge among many. The “world that produced republican citizens” was already eroding due to industrialization, urbanization, mass immigration, and national crises long before 1975. Tocqueville himself worried about democratic materialism and individualism in the 1830s.

There was a profound cultural and institutional drift, but “Democracy” language did not primarily cause the technocratic shift, and the pre-1975 world was no golden age. There is really no period in which “republicanism” existed in a “pure form.” Post-WWII/Cold War usage of “democracy” as a moral trump card and procedural ideal accelerated a shift. By the late 20ᵗʰ century, the language often served to legitimize expansions of rights, administrative power, and identity-based claims rather than cultivating the disciplined, pluralistic, duty-oriented citizen Madison or Tocqueville envisioned. The administrative state grew dramatically after the New Deal and especially the 1960s-1970s regulatory explosion. Expertise, consultants, data analysts, and agencies increasingly shape policy with attenuated electoral accountability. “Democracy” rhetoric can mask this: “We are implementing the will of the people” becomes a technocrat’s justification for surveillance architectures, regulatory power, or curated outcomes. Classical republicanism was designed to prevent any single interest (including expert and administrative) from dominating. Procedural majoritarianism and identity fragmentation makes active self-government harder than elite-managed systems.

GOP WEAPONIZATION OF “CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC”

The idea that “We are a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy” weaponizes the phrase “constitutional republic.” The GOP uses “constitutional republic” rhetoric to defend a political order that is not republican in the classical sense, but to justify factional domination. The term “constitutional republic” is thus merely used to justify minoritarian power, elevate sectarian Christian nationalism, empower demagogues, defend Southern-belt elite and donor influence, delegitimize pluralism, and frame opponents as “demonic” or enemies of “the real America.” This is anti-republican, pure identity‑based nationalism and elite‑driven factionalism.

In our system, e.g., expanding democratic participation focuses on widening who gets to vote, speak, and influence policy (turnout, access, direct participation), while encouraging republican civic engagement focuses on how citizens sustain self‑government through long‑term stewardship, civic virtue, and institutional practices that prevent domination.

CONCLUSION

Take the case of the Southern political elites redistricting Black representatives out of power — the republican framework does not justify it and condemns it more forcefully than modern “democracy” rhetoric does. When a political elite redraws districts to entrench its power, that is exactly the kind of factional domination republicanism was designed to prevent.

Recent Southern Republican-led efforts (post-2020 census and Supreme Court rulings on Voting Rights Act Section 2) have involved redrawing maps to reduce or eliminate majority-Black districts in states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee, diluting minority influence to entrench partisan advantage. Republicanism (in its anti-domination, anti-faction sense) condemns this more consistently than pure “democracy” talk, which can devolve into “our majority gets to draw lines.” Both parties have gerrymandered historically; but the mechanism itself is anti-republican when used for permanent factional lock-in.

“Republicanism” as a term has been inverted or abandoned. It once connoted virtue, institutional literacy, and suspicion of concentrated power. Today it is often reduced to partisan branding or, on the left, a slur for elitism or worse. A consistent republican lens should be equally skeptical of administrative overreach and institutional sabotage or demagoguery from any quarter.

The American system has drifted from a republic that uses democratic mechanisms (elections, representation, accountability) to refine and channel popular will within constitutional guardrails, toward a procedural democracy increasingly administered by experts, donors, media, and activists, with citizens reduced to periodic voters or spectators in nationalized emotional contests. This makes elite management easier and republican self-government harder. “Democracy” used almost as an incantation provides moral cover for elites while civic formation atrophies.

This advocates returning to first principles: What kind of citizens does self-government require, and what structures best produce and sustain them? The Founders’ answer was republican, not purely democratic. We have drifted, and recovering the balance without descending into factional score-settling every election cycle or technocratic fatalism is the central political task.

REFERENCES TO CONSULT

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).
Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000).
James Madison, “Federalist No. 10,” in The Federalist Papers (1787).
Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man (London: Chapman & Hall, 1860).
Yves Mény and Yves Surel, eds., Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835–1840).
Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).

APPENDIX

The sacralization allows every ideological family to declare itself the authentic voice of “democracy.” Socialists and communists created “people’s democracies” and “democratic republics” whose constitutions retained elections, assemblies, and rights language while real power lay with the party and the security apparatus. “Democratic socialism” continues the same maneuver: it claims the moral prestige of democracy while treating constitutional restraints and independent economic bases as temporary or secondary. The sacralized word disarms critics; opposition is framed as opposition to the people rather than to a particular program of state power. Authoritarians of various stripes learned the same lesson. Twentieth-century dictatorships routinely called themselves democratic or popular democracies. Contemporary authoritarian populists invoke “the will of the people” to justify the weakening of courts, independent media, or federal structures, all while waving the democratic flag. Far-right and ethno-nationalist movements discovered that majoritarian democracy can be turned against liberal or republican constraints. If democracy means the unfiltered will of the authentic nation, then constitutionalism, minority rights, or cosmopolitan institutions can be denounced as elite plots against the demos. Populism in general (left, right, or neither) thrives on the sacralized term. By defining politics as a struggle between a homogeneous “people” and a corrupt “elite,” populists treat intermediary institutions, mixed government, and civic education as filters that dilute the pure popular will. The sacredness of democracy makes it difficult to reply that the republican tradition always feared precisely this unmediated popular sovereignty.