At the sixth annual conference of The Property and Freedom Society in 2011, Paul Gottfried’s observation named the containment that a full recovery of republicanism has to break. If the Left is the ideology that still sets the questions, the vocabulary, and the moral horizon of Western politics, then “left vs. right,” “markets vs. redistribution,” and “progress vs. tradition” are already Left-shaped coordinates. A tradition whose primary axis is civic independence versus arbitrary power (non-domination, mixed government, civic virtue, the common good) cannot be recovered by taking a position inside those coordinates. That is why I think we should treat the modern axis as limited; however, we must also refuse both a libertarian reduction and a merely reactive conservatism.
“…the Left has become in a sense, the only ideology—the dominant ideology. (…) There is really nothing else except the Left which frames and shapes the political debate, not only in the United States, but I think throughout most of the Western World.”
PAUL GOTTFRIED
WHAT GOTTFRIED IS DIAGNOSING
In the talk, Gottfried described a historical absorption, where over decades the Left moved from one institutional and cultural victory to the next, while the respectable Right (esp. neoconservatism) adapted to the new moral language rather than supplying an independent frame. The result is that debate itself on what counts as a problem, what counts as “far right,” what counts as justice is conducted on Left terms. His views often make the same point about the post-Marxist, cultural Left as no longer primarily a class project, although still occupying the commanding heights of media, administration, universities, and corporate HR. The “Right” that remains is often reactive, managerial, or culture-war tactical. It does not restore an older grammar of liberty.
If there is “really nothing else except the Left which frames and shapes the political debate,” then recovering Cicero, Machiavelli, Harrington, the Atlantic Founding, Mazzini and even early Black republicanism as a living tradition cannot mean becoming a better conservative or a more consistent libertarian on the existing spectrum. It means refusing the spectrum as the primary map.
THE MODERN AXIS CANNOT CARRY THE TRADITION
Classical and early modern republicanism organizes politics around a different question: Do free persons govern themselves under law, or do they live at the mercy of unaccountable wills (monarch, oligarch, faction, party, administrative apparatus, platform, concentrated capital)? LIBERTY remember is non-domination, not mere non-interference. That requires civic virtue, mixed constitutions, intermediate institutions, and a common good that is not just aggregated preference. Economic and cultural issues matter, but they are diagnosed through domination and corruption, not as the master categories.
The left-right axis compresses this to such a degree, that (a) one pole treats the core problem as class exploitation or identity or systemic oppression and treats freedom as emancipation from those structures; and (b) the other pole treats the core problem as state size or cultural decay and often answers with market liberty or traditional hierarchy.
Both can intersect republican concerns (anti-oligarchy on one side, fear of soft despotism on the other). Neither is the tradition. Progressive expansions of state capacity can deepen clientelistic dependence even while claiming equality. Market liberalization can recreate private governments and oligarchic vetoes even while expanding formal choice. Partisan capture, administrative rule-making without genuine popular authorization, and platform power cut across the usual alignments. A framework whose first question is “who gets what” or “which values win” cannot see those forms of arbitrary power clearly. Republican analysis can.
That is the point of emphasizing the limits of the modern axis. The axis is not neutral geography. Under Left hegemony it becomes the only authorized map. Recovery in fullness therefore has to treat the map itself as the problem.
REPUBLICANISM IN THE PRE-LIBERAL AND FOUNDING-LIBERAL SENSE
Libertarianism and much contemporary classical liberalism inherits the modern liberal emphasis on non-interference, individual rights, and markets. Republicanism in the pre-liberal and Founding-liberal sense is older and thicker: independence from arbitrary will, formation of character, duty, mixed government, suspicion of both concentrated wealth and concentrated administrative power, and a civic religion of the common good. Reducing the tradition to limited government and property rights detaches the civic-virtue half of the older synthesis. We should not be concerned with rehabilitating socialism, channeling recovery into one party, nor collapsing republicanism into anti-statism — this is a controlled game. Oligarchy is opposed insofar as it produces domination, but the remedy is institutional design plus moral formation of citizens across classes, not class war and not a night-watchman state as the whole of politics.
The cultural and political argument between the Left and reactionary conservatism leaves a vacuum with one claiming anti-oligarchy and the common good while relocating freedom from character to structure; while the other uses “socialism” as a mobilizing epithet without teaching the republican anthropology that once made the critique coherent. Neither recovers the citizen as someone who must be formed for self-government. It is distorted from this pure function. Gottfried’s “only ideology” claim explains why this vacuum persists. If the Left still writes the questions, the Right’s answers stay inside Left categories, even when they sound oppositional.
THE PUBLIC LANGUAGE OF POLITICS IS CAPTURED
“Pre-liberal” and “liberal” here means the long civic-republican line: Greco-Roman sources, Renaissance and Atlantic republicanism, the American Founding at its strongest (roughly Revolution through the early republic), Mazzini and related European currents, and early Black republicanism (Wheatley, Walker, Douglass, Haitian republican practice) before Leninism and the Comintern captured the language of liberation. That line itself is historically eclectic and synthetic, not as a museum piece and not as a brand for the Republican Party. Later Marxist and identity frameworks are, in my view, rivals that displaced republican anthropology rather than as the authentic radical inheritance. I have no interest in the development of prior reconciliations.
Gottfried’s diagnosis was not an invitation to join the paleoconservative Right. It is evidence that the public language of politics has been captured. A tradition whose first loyalty is to non-domination and civic membership cannot be recovered by winning the next round of a debate whose terms the Left already set. It has to change the atlas: different primary axis, different anthropology of the citizen, different diagnosis of new oligarchies and new dependencies. Gottfried’s statement reflects my critique of the modern axis rather than with ordinary left-right scorekeeping, as we move into a more “Post-Right” era, which still, at the moment, carries conservative assumptions and the limitations of right‑wing critique even as some trying to escape the axis claim to transcend the Left-Right axis. I do not entirely refer to the developing current of “Post‑Right” academically-speaking, which is a reframing of right‑wing populism in structural terms that borrows paleocon skepticism, rejects alt‑right racialism, but still operates within conservative grammar, essentially redressing right-wing critique. It is also for others a way to get the stench of the alt-right off. However, I can understand why these ideas may influence a “post-right” thinker, but it is simply important that we critique the dominant political culture and the inherent biases in liberalism that carries over in the patterns of thinking of those who assume that is (interestingly) the natural (or most rational) order. That is from principally an opposition against our society’s general superficial political thinking.
