I am Dominique Montoya-Johnson, an ordinary citizen in an age of centralizing corruption, controlled platforms, greed and factional absolutism. In the civic republican tradition, independent citizen journalism is not a hobby. It is a necessary form of self-government. When citizens stop running their own operations and leave public judgment to parties, intelligence agencies, or credentialed gatekeepers, the republic loses its immune system. Free citizens must investigate, speak, and publish without institutional permission if the deeper hopes of the people, and their health, education and welfare are to remain the measure of the common good rather than the property of elites. This is the heart of the synthesized humanist-civic republican tradition and classical democratic legacy we inherited.
These ideas have been developed upon as a synthesis of my self-education and research since youth, and not as a politician or institutional voice, or someone that requires legitimacy or acceptance from said institutions of power to be taken seriously and professionally in these areas for these areas of study are for every citizen of every station in life. Our republic was meant to be a sacred trust to every citizen. American politicians and political culture have largely abandoned the old unifying republican cause as a divine-moral ideal (or mission) since the 18ᵗʰ and 19ᵗʰ century. By the 20ᵗʰ century, this erosion had given way to more pragmatic or partisan rhetoric.
Today, many Americans don’t even recognize the term “republicanism” outside of party politics. The old republican cause was the foundation of American political identity and cannot be rediscovered in new language. Many other radical traditions have sought to claim it or supersede it, while actually contributing to its displacement. Instead of a shared civic school of thought that unites us all, we got competing ideologies that fragmented the public sphere. The republican ideal was not meant to be endlessly reinterpreted — it was meant to be preserved as a living tradition. Once it is treated as just another “ism” to be updated, it loses its binding power. This is why thinkers like Lincoln spoke of the republic in almost biblical terms: something entrusted to the people, not to be reinvented but faithfully guarded. To abandon that continuity is to sever the thread that made American politics more than just interest-group bargaining. Leftist frameworks often begin from the premise that the system was inherently corrupt or oppressive, which blinds them to the republican inheritance. Instead of seeing the republic as a fragile but noble experiment requiring virtue and stewardship, they treat it as a mask for exploitation. That posture makes critique easy but reconstruction nearly impossible.
The republican tradition is fundamentally reconstructive. Its philosophy assumes corruption is always a danger, but not inevitable. By contrast, radical frameworks often collapse virtue into power analysis, seeing every institution as domination rather than as a trust. It is because of this that they rarely offer a coherent vision of how to rebuild a republic, except only to dismantle. The rightist frameworks often prove even more corrosive to the republican inheritance. Where the left tends to dismiss the system as inherently corrupt, the right frequently idolizes power itself or reduces republicanism to mere nationalism, stripping away its moral core. In rightist frameworks, its view on nationalism, its use of populism, its authoritarian conservatism and market absolutism constitutes a false reconstruction, which displaced republicanism by substituting power, identity, or efficiency for virtue. Both frameworks displaced republicanism and hollowed out the political field across the 20ᵗʰ century for the particular benefit of their factions.
People belonging to these frameworks are extremely resistant against what they will term, “both-siding” the argument, and think in absolutes, with single-party (one-party state) logic. Both sides resist “both‑siding” because their legitimacy depends on portraying themselves as the sole guardians of truth or justice. That mindset is profoundly anti‑republican. Both frameworks depend on moral monopoly and adopt one-party state logic. In the 20ᵗʰ century, these frameworks converged into a politics of absolutes. The historical development of this factional absolutism follows from Progressivism and World War I nationalist rhetoric (00s-20s) into New Deal liberalism and rightist authoritarianism (30s-40s) to Cold War Absolutism (50s-60s) into the Age of the Consumer and the Individual (70s-80s) through the Age of Factional Hyper-Polarization 90s-00s in the next century down to the Present. In the present, the result is a civic field emptied of republican stewardship and filled with competing absolutes.
This emptied field is also being filled by ideological vultures. Socialists argue that republicanism was always a mask for exploitation, offering socialism as the “true” alternative. But their frameworks often dismantle civic virtue without reconstructing a viable republican order. Marxists frame history as class struggle, treating republican ideals as bourgeois illusions. This reduces politics to domination rather than stewardship. Western Sinophiles claim we are living in the “Age of Chinese Socialism” presenting China’s model as proof that socialism works while the American system cannot. This narrative appeals to those disillusioned with factional absolutism at home. These frameworks exploit the hollowed field by offering absolutist alternatives. They thrive on the idea that republicanism is dead, and that only their ideology can fill the void. But in doing so, they perpetuate the same displacement. The irony is that republicanism already contained the tools for critique and vigilance. It warned against corruption, concentrated power, and factional domination. But once abandoned, the field became open to ideologies that thrive on absolutism, whether leftist, rightist, or foreign.
The danger isn’t just that socialism or Sinophile narratives gain traction. It’s that Americans forget the republic was never meant to be perfect but was meant to be preserved through virtue and vigilance. Once that inheritance is lost, any ideology has attempted to swoop and claim legitimacy, feeding on disillusionment and lack of knowledge.
In today’s hollowed field, legitimacy is treated as something bestowed by parties, bureaucracies, or ideological elites. Anyone who challenges that monopoly is ignored, dismissed, or even hated. This resistance is itself proof of how far the republic has been displaced. In a healthy civic order, the insistence on shared duty would resonate. In a hollowed field, it is treated as illegitimate because it threatens factional control. The factions are so absorbed into people’s sense of identity, further complicating the issue. I am speaking the language, but Americans have internalized factional absolutism and cannot hear it. This is why I say, that the challenge is to embody the inheritance.
I cannot embody it alone though. That is the problem. I need association, financial assistance, etc. I have not seen any support. Just lurking. Someone even called me selfish for locking content behind a paywall. People have been trained to expect someone to randomly emerge with millions of dollars, posting top-notch high-definition content in a thousand-acre farm barn or vineyard like a nepo baby. The culture paradoxically mocks “nepo babies,” yet still listens only to those with money and institutional backing as legitimate. And when something is backed by elites, or even emerges organically, they immediately suspect it’s a psyop, a conspiracy, or an operation of the intelligence agencies. I have been repeatedly suspected of being an intelligence agency operative.
I say that this is an independent operation, because it literally is. It is just me, and my supportive and loving wife’s encouragement. It is an operation, a mission entrusted to me as it is to every free citizen.
I have been effectively marginalized by this displacement, and I feel it and see the historical tragedy of ideas when traversing history.
Even as a youth, when I sought to share my curiosities, and learning about the history and thinking of our great Black thinkers, I was treated with the exact same dismissal. It is boggling. The hypocrisy is boggling. I was suspected and assumed to not like my own race, because I idolized a different age of Black thinkers, standards and grew up in a household with aunts, uncles, a grandmother and mother with a much different inclination to life that seemed different from that which occupied the thoughts of my peers. I grew up in a family run by grandparents of just a different thinking and maturity — a household, that bitterly watched since the 50s, the decline of our Black communities, the decline of standards and development of consequential habits of thinking that emerged and repeated itself into our age. What I was assumed to not like, many of my peers only learned later on to appreciate. I never boasted my knowledge. I presented it out of obligation or genuine inteigue. Why, I always asked, had I been automatically judged so much. I was just born here. I always had my pride and understanding. It was of a different note. I had different experiences and reflected differently.
I learned that people claim to honor heritage, yet they dismiss those who engage with it seriously unless it comes packaged in the “approved” form. They claim to despise elites yet only recognize legitimacy when it comes from elite institutions. They claim to value authenticity yet suspect anyone who doesn’t conform to the prevailing factional script. I was not being a contrarian. There was something different about certain knowledge to me, and those reflections since a child about the world and environment and habits of thinking around me blossomed into something that I think is powerful and important.
Despite this, I have lived with vigilance and honed my learning, corrected my learning and moved knowing that legitimacy does not come from mass or “popular” recognition, wealth or “respectable” institutions. When I was asked repeatedly by College Republicans, that I must know the works of Thomas Sowell, I did not. All I knew was that my views were unorthodox, and that Sowell seems to be the only Black political philosopher they know. He is a philosopher of American conservatism. I am not a conservative. However, even though our ideas differ, we both wrestled with the same reality: trying to articulate ideas and certain truths that don’t fit neatly into the dominant frameworks, and facing dismissal or suspicion because of it. The idea that legitimacy belongs to every citizen is a republican argument; and is a republican duty to inform (or instruct) fellow citizens, but in this culture and age of factional absolutism, this is sidelined. Few want to hear it or be told.
Modern man today hates talk of “virtue,” and will do anything not to be told of virtue, duty, responsibility and accountability. We have no well-spoken thinkers enough in our day who can speak fluently and truthfully to a wretched species. Whenever “the gods,” or angels come to earth in their myths, it doesn’t signal a time to party. Judgement is imparted. One thing the modern man fears is judgement of actions. The way we’re living in this world today, of all classes, is not permanent and neither is it sustainable. There will come times of great cataclysms and historic events that must and will force us to face reality outside of ourselves, but also judgement and consequences for all of our actions. The modern man is petrified of judgement and fears those with wisdom to judge. The modern man says, “don’t judge me. Only God can judge me,” but what he really means is “I refuse accountability.” There is no sense of weight to anything. The modern man tries with all their might to resist being judged, weighed on the scale and accounted for.
The irony is that republican philosophy itself was built on the idea of judgement — citizens weighing corruption, holding leaders accountable, guarding liberty with vigilance. To fear judgement is to abandon the very mechanism by which the republic survives. We want to restore the weight, and that weight requires maturity and the endurance of Atlas to uphold.
Jefferson believed citizens must be instructed in republican philosophy because liberty depends on vigilance and virtue; and therefore, we must be trained to guard it. But in the modern age, that duty is treated as “preachy.” Without instruction, simply, the republic cannot endure. We have many foreign adversaries that benefit from our civic ignorance. A people unwilling to hear what is necessary cannot defend themselves and have no one to blame but themselves.
As a historian, I recognize therefore with pain, that ideas that fail to compete at scale can vanish, and history moves in a different direction. The republican inheritance was once the dominant civic faith and philosophy, but when it was displaced, other ideologies (socialism, Marxism, nationalism, technocracy) rushed in to fill the void. Because they had institutional or financial backing, they could scale. The republican cause, by contrast, was left to individuals and small voices, which could not compete on the mass level required to shape history. Gordon S. Wood died believing that this kind of task I put myself up to is a lost cause. But, studying not only this history of the republican cause before the American founding, I learned that this history is also full of examples where forgotten ideals were revived by small associations, not elites. The republican cause itself began as a minority voice against empire, nurtured by pamphleteers and local assemblies before it became a national faith. This, atleast, gives me hope.
I had a dream some years ago, where in my great old age during a time near the end of a great calamitous war, I drew my last breath next to a life-long loving wife, with me in a wheelchair surrounded by a small association of brothers and sisters bound together in a broken world — a band of veterans, outlaws, colleagues, reconciled in liberty. We had banded together, and a few from elsewhere joined for one last meeting in some old and shattered isolated church-like structure somewhere in France. I had spoken a brief word of encouragement, before shedding one tear while smiling as I looked across the room at every face, knowing I did not die a dumb fool whose words did not matter to anyone. Content, then, I drew my last breath. I had lived in that dream, that apocalyptic-like world, as if it was a lifetime. It was one of the most memorable dreams I had ever had, because it was and is the fulfilled life I hope to find in carrying on these ideas as a sacred inheritance, and in the creation of a community that carries the inheritance forward.
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║⚔║ Liberty • Equality • Fraternity ║⚔║
