This Q&A addresses popular far-left, socialist, and Marxist arguments that treat America’s inequalities, cultural “bourgeois” remnants, or institutional failures as proof that the system is a scam requiring revolutionary upheaval, which tends to romanticize Communist cultural revolutions. It summarizes our articles thus far on the violent Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (the October seizure of power under Lenin, dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Red Terror, and establishment of one-party dictatorship) and the Chinese Communist Revolution that brought Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to power in 1949 (protracted civil war, violent land reform, and the founding of the People’s Republic of China as a party dictatorship, later extended through the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution). These historical models are often romanticized or adapted in popular far-left, socialist, and Marxist thinking that seeks a radical American upheaval. It is the popular rhetoric and imagery that also often accompanies modern references to revolution.
The long history of republican revolutions, from classical mixed constitutions through the American Revolution of 1776, the Haitian Revolution, the European revolutions of 1848, and Mazzini’s Italian republicanism, has been systematically diluted and badly adapted into the International Left narrative. In that narrative, these are reduced to incomplete “bourgeois” stages that progressive history must supersede through proletarian or communist revolution. This is actually a fundamental distortion: the republican tradition is a distinct moral-political anthropology of liberty as non-domination, civic virtue, mixed institutions, and citizen formation. It was not a temporary waypoint. The Bolshevik and Chinese Communist revolutions did not “complete” it. They displaced and destroyed republican forms, replacing them with vanguard party dictatorships that produced new arbitrary power, mass violence, and the liquidation of independent civic life.
Q: DOESN’T SYSTEMIC RACISM, RACIAL INEQUALITY, AND “RACIAL CAPITALISM” PROVE THE AMERICAN REPUBLICAN ORDER IS CONSTITUTIVELY OPPRESSIVE AND REQUIRES REVOLUTIONARY CULTURAL AND INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION?
A: No. Our civic republican tradition locates the primary sources of oppression in concentrated, unchecked power and in faction (majority or minority), not in the founding principles themselves. Citizenship is a status of equal moral and political standing under law. Citizens are expected to practice self-restraint, public-spiritedness, and deliberative reason so that private passions and group interests do not destroy the common good (res publica).
Racism and racial hierarchy are treated as moral and cultural failures that violate the tradition’s own standard of equal citizenship, not as its hidden essence. The tradition supplies internal critical resources: the Declaration’s universal principles, constitutional amendment, legislation, judicial enforcement of equal protection, civic education, and moral reform. Historical self-correction from abolition through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the civil-rights statutes shows that principles can be pressed against practices. Treating the gap between ideal and practice as culturally almost inevitable, or as proof the project was a fraud from the start, replaces the republican hope of civic friendship with permanent group conflict.
Socialist and democratic-socialist diagnoses often reverse this. They treat the classical-liberal republican synthesis (property rights, markets, federalism, constitutional restraints) as the originating source of racial hierarchy and material inequality, and a project of “racial capitalism” or settler domination. The remedy then becomes replacement or radical subordination via collective ownership, group-based equity of outcome, and politics organized around class/racial axes. This is a fundamental break: institutions of the republic are designed to disperse power and force deliberation across differences; socialism typically locates injustice primarily in private ownership and market allocation, expecting the superstructure of racism to wither once the economic base is transformed. History of regimes that pursued the latter path shows transfer of hierarchy to new managers, not its elimination, often accompanied by new ethnic persecutions and repression.
Persistent refusal by many Americans (across racial lines) to subordinate racial identity to shared civic status is real and bipartisan. It elevates faction over the res publica. That failure does not dissolve the ideal or prove the model unviable; but it means the work of equal citizenship remains unfinished. Soft racial essentialism, treating attitudes as almost inescapable cultural products of “Western society” or entire groups, undermines individual moral agency and the possibility of genuine civic friendship.
Q: BUT THE AMERICAN REPUBLICAN ORDER SEEMS INCOMPLETE OR A “SCAM” AS A SLAVEHOLDING ENTERPRISE. THIS MAKES A NEW REVOLUTION REQUIRED OF US?
A: Inequality, oligarchic concentration, and institutional capture are real republican concerns. Commercial culture can erode civic virtue. But the republican diagnosis locates domination in arbitrary power (public or private) and in the failure of character and institutions, not in private property or markets as such. Correctives remain internal: dispersing power, protecting independence (including ordered property), civic education, moral reform, and associations. Historical self-correction of abolition, suffrage expansions and civil rights show that principles can be pressed against practices.
Materialist revolution externalizes responsibility onto “the system” and promises that rearranging ownership will produce free persons. Bolshevik and Maoist practice showed the opposite: new managers unconstrained by the old limits, destruction of independent associations, and moral collapse because character was treated as epiphenomenal. No structural seizure abolishes human tendencies toward corruption and domination. The American founding and the broader republican lineage already contain the resources against oligarchy; and they were not fraudulent stages awaiting communist completion.
Q: DOES THE CURRENT CORRUPTION NOT JUSTIFY ANOTHER RADICAL BREAK?
A. Reform within oneself is the most difficult. We had already won a republic, and we squandered it. Europe and the Americas already had its revolutions. It does not need Marx at the forefront. He cannot be ignored, and I do not suggest such a thing. He was a philosopher in his own right, but he is not everything. The republican tradition covers a very long lineage of political wisdom. Just as every older nation is capable of pulling from its well to assist it when it is required, the republican tradition offers far more than socialism and communism, and its history encompasses the globe. Marxist and related frameworks treat the American and earlier European republican revolutions as incomplete “bourgeois” stages. Political liberty and constitutional forms are seen as temporary, because real emancipation requires economic expropriation and the dictatorship of the proletariat (or its modern equivalents) that transcends the “old” republic.
This stage-theory is the core displacement of the republican cause. Marx and Engels dismissed figures like Giuseppe Mazzini as representing an obsolete middle-class idealism or “hotchpotch.” The tradition itself is an eclectic synthesis observing the failures and cycles of monarchy, aristocracy and oligarchy. Lenin treated parliamentary and constituent-assembly forms as inferior to soviet power and dissolved Russia’s Constituent Assembly when it did not submit. Later currents subordinated republican institutions as transitional masks for class rule.
The American Revolution and Constitution were a deliberate neo-classical reconstruction of the mixed constitution tradition (Polybius, Cicero, Renaissance humanists, Atlantic republicans). They aimed at non-domination through balanced powers, federalism, representation, and the cultivation of citizen virtue, not a temporary waypoint to materialist reorganization. Europe’s republican experiments (including Mazzini’s) likewise sought free national commonwealths grounded in duty and association. Treating them as mere stages erases the anthropology of freedom as moral agency under law. Historical results of “supersession” (Soviet dissolution of republican forms, Cultural Revolution upheaval) repeatedly replaced one form of arbitrary power with another rather than securing durable liberty.
The history gone over does not justify a new Cultural Revolution-style break. The tradition was never fully tried in its depth after initial revolutionary achievements; it was subordinated and abandoned. Recovery of its moral anthropology (freedom as character and non-domination under law) remains the coherent antidote. Supersession historically produced new arbitrary powers rather than durable free citizens.
Displacement occurred through intellectual capture, institutional inheritance, stage-theory subordination, and crisis exploitation, not solely by force. Marx, Engels, and related currents systematically dismissed Mazzinian and classical republicanism as obsolete middle-class idealism, “petty-bourgeois,” a “hotchpotch,” or a temporary bourgeois stage the proletariat must outgrow. Moral language of duty, virtue, and association across classes was reduced to empty rhetoric or theological authoritarianism; class struggle and material analysis were centered instead.
If nothing has stuck by this end of the questions, remember the history of hostility and the continuance of that logic, just as the counter-revolution current continues in the logic and arguments of modern conservatism. Later patterns included redefining “the people” from civic citizens of a nation to a class (or later identity) subject; using republican elections and institutions to expand administrative and economic power until constitutional limits hollowed out; moral inversion treating duty, patriotism, and independent property as ideological masks for exploitation; high international organization relative to looser republican associations; and exploiting wars, depressions, and elite failures. After World War I, socialists often staffed successor republics while communists treated them as transitional. Interwar polarization and post-1945 consolidation further eclipsed classical republican vocabulary of civic virtue and mixed government in favor of class, welfare-state, or command languages. Formal republican forms were merely retained as façades in some cases while real power centralized.
Q: ISN’T PRIVATE PROPERTY THE ROOT OF DOMINATION AND INEQUALITY THAT MUST BE ABOLISHED OR RADICALLY SOCIALIZED?
A: Property, properly ordered, is a condition of independence and moral personality, not the root of domination. The ancient thinkers have long feared domination through concentrated wealth and dependency as much as through the state. Inequality of condition is expected under liberty because of differences in talent, effort, luck, and choice. Correctives focus on dispersing power, protecting rights (including property as a basis of independence), civic education, and associations that form independent citizens, not pure leveling.
The broader republican tradition held that property is legitimate when it serves personality and labor. Pure economic leveling dissolves the moral personality. Structural equality of property was historically a means to protect independence, not an end that automatically produces virtue. Domination arises from internal human tendencies (ambition, vanity, corruption, dependency, loss of self-mastery) as much as from external structures. No rearrangement of property relations abolishes those tendencies.
Socialism relocates the source of domination from the soul to the structure. Transform ownership of the means of production, and virtue or freedom is expected to follow. Practice shows the opposite sequence: thorough structural transformations (abolition or near-abolition of private productive ownership, central planning) repeatedly left internal problems intact or intensified, producing new hierarchies under party or bureaucratic managers, often with greater coercion when the “New Socialist Man” failed to appear. The res publica starts from the realistic premise that human failings are permanent and must be managed through character formation, independence, and institutional checks. It does not promise virtue will automatically follow from correct property relations.
Q: ISN’T CAPITALISM FUNDAMENTALLY A SCAM? RICH PEOPLE PROFIT WHILE OTHERS STRUGGLE — DOESN’T THAT PROVE REVOLUTION IS THE ONLY SOLUTION?
A: Inequality of condition is real and oligarchic concentration of wealth can create dependency and capture of institutions—classic republican concerns. Commercial society can foster selfishness and erode civic virtue. The tradition has always feared domination through concentrated private power as much as through the state.
As stated previously, domination is not located solely in private ownership or markets. It is the exposure to arbitrary will. Inequality of outcome is expected under liberty because of differences in talent, effort, luck, and choice. Correctives are internal to the republican framework: dispersing power, protecting rights (including property as a basis of independence), civic education, moral reform, constitutional mechanisms, and associations that form independent citizens. History shows self-correction is possible (abolition, expansions of suffrage and civil rights) when principles are pressed against practices.
Materialist revolution relocates the source of domination from the soul (ambition, corruption, loss of virtue) to structure alone. It promises that rearranging property will produce free persons. Practice shows the opposite: new managers unconstrained by the old limits, liquidation of independent associations, and moral collapse because character was treated as secondary. No external rearrangement abolishes the human tendencies that corrupt power.
Q: WHY DO FAR-LEFT VOICES INVOKE OR SEEK AMERICAN ANALOGUES OF THE COMMUNIST CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS?
A: They treat concentrated wealth, institutional capture, inequality, or residual “bourgeois” culture as proof that the existing order is constitutively oppressive and cannot be reformed. The solution becomes a violent or dual-power seizure that smashes residual institutions, concentrates power in a vanguard or “the people” redefined by class (or later identity), and inaugurates continuous struggle. The Bolshevik model supplies dual power (soviets versus provisional government), the claim that soviet and party forms are a “higher democracy,” and the dissolution of elected republican bodies. The Chinese model under Mao supplies protracted people’s war, “New Democracy” as a combined stage, violent rural transformation, and later cultural purification against the “Four Olds.”
Civic republicanism replies that this misreads both history and human nature. Domination arises from arbitrary power and from perennial human tendencies (ambition, corruption, dependency). The Bolshevik Revolution did not liberate Russia into free self-government. After the February 1917 opening toward a constituent assembly and parliamentary republic, Lenin’s dual-power strategy systematically undermined it, the October seizure transferred power to the Bolsheviks, and the January 1918 dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (which the Socialist Revolutionaries had won) replaced republican aspiration with one-party dictatorship justified as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Chinese Revolution of 1949 similarly ended in CCP monopoly under Mao, not a mixed republican commonwealth of free citizens. Mass violence, Red Terror, land-reform killings, famine under the Great Leap, and Cultural Revolution chaos followed because character formation and institutional checks were treated as secondary to structural seizure.
Q: HOW HAS THE INTERNATIONAL LEFT DILUTED THE LONG HISTORY OF REPUBLICAN REVOLUTIONS INTO A MATERIALIST STAGE THEORY?
A: Marxist and related frameworks treat the American Revolution, Mazzinian republicanism, 1848 movements, and similar events as progressive but limited “bourgeois” stages. Political liberty, constitutional forms, mixed government, and moral language of duty and virtue are temporary; real emancipation requires economic expropriation and class dictatorship that “supersedes” them. Marx and Engels dismissed Mazzini’s republicanism as obsolete middle-class idealism, a “hotchpotch,” or petty-bourgeois. Lenin argued that a “republic of Soviets is a higher form of democracy than the usual bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly.” Later historiography and popular left narratives adapt the language of “revolution” and “liberation” while emptying it of republican content — civic virtue, non-domination through balanced institutions, association across classes, and the formation of free persons.
This is dilution, not completion. After 1917 the global meaning of “revolution” was successfully seized by Leninist currents: civic republicanism was crowded out by a better-organized international movement that claimed the moral territory of liberation while subordinating or liquidating independent civic institutions. The American founding was a deliberate neo-classical reconstruction of the mixed constitution (Polybius, Cicero, Renaissance and Atlantic republicans) aimed at durable non-domination, not a temporary clearing of the ground for the earlier philosophy of capital and the division of labor to be later overturned. Mazzini’s project, e.g., sought free national commonwealths grounded in duty and association. Treating these as mere stages erases their distinct anthropology and justifies the very tactics (dual power, dissolution of assemblies, vanguard monopoly) that historically produced new hierarchies rather than free citizens.
Q: HOW DID MARXIST AND LENINIST CURRENTS HISTORICALLY ATTACK THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION ITSELF?
A: Systematically. Marx and Engels reduced Mazzini’s duty-based, associationist republicanism to empty idealism or middle-class obsolescence. Lenin treated parliamentary and constituent-assembly forms as inferior to soviet/party power and dissolved the Russian example when it did not submit. Later currents subordinated republican institutions as transitional masks for class rule. Post-1917, the language of revolution was monopolized: civic republicanism was crowded out rather than defeated in open combat. The same pattern appears in the subordination of Black republican critics, who used the language of non-domination and civic virtue, to later materialist or identity frameworks.
The displacement is why popular far-left thinking can call for “revolution” while remaining largely silent on, or hostile to, the actual content of the republican revolutions it claims to inherit or complete.
Q: WHAT SPECIFICALLY DID THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION DO TO REPUBLICAN INSTITUTIONS, AND WHY IS THAT DECISIVE?
A: The February 1917 Revolution opened the possibility of a constituent assembly and parliamentary republic. Lenin’s theory on the State and Revolution rejected spontaneous democratic or trade-union consciousness as bourgeois and insisted the old state machine must be smashed. Dual power was the tactical innovation: strengthen soviets as a rival power while discrediting the Provisional Government. After the October seizure, the Bolsheviks held elections to the Constituent Assembly (Socialist Revolutionaries won a majority). When it refused to rubber-stamp Bolshevik decrees, Lenin declared soviet power superior and dissolved it after one day. Opposition parties were banned, independent soviets suppressed, and one-party rule established under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This was not an accidental deviation; it followed from the claim that republican parliamentary forms are inherently limited and must be superseded. The result was not higher democracy but party dictatorship, civil war, Red Terror, and the long trajectory of Soviet totalitarianism. Republics require citizens willing to maintain institutional forms even when imperfect, to deliberate under law, and to practice self-mastery. Bolshevik practice treated those forms as obstacles to be liquidated once the vanguard held power.
Q: WHAT ABOUT THE CHINESE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION UNDER MAO, AND HOW DOES IT PARALLEL OR EXTEND THE BOLSHEVIK PATTERN?
A: The CCP’s victory in 1949 after decades of civil war (interrupted by the war against Japan) established the People’s Republic under Mao’s leadership as a one-party state. Mao’s “New Democracy” theory claimed to combine bourgeois-democratic and socialist stages under communist leadership, dispensing with the classical Marxist sequence while still subordinating republican or liberal forms. Violent land reform, campaigns against “counter-revolutionaries,” and the consolidation of party control followed. Later phases such as the Great Leap Forward (catastrophic famine) and the Cultural Revolution (mass mobilization against residual “olds,” factional violence, persecution of officials and intellectuals), continued the logic of continuous revolutionary struggle against any residual independent or “bourgeois” elements.
Estimates of unnatural deaths under Mao’s rule run into the tens of millions. The outcome was not a self-governing commonwealth of free citizens practicing non-domination, but party-state monopoly, cultural destruction, and eventual pragmatic reversal toward market elements under continued CCP rule. Like the Bolshevik case, the revolution claimed to advance beyond earlier republican or nationalist forms (including Sun Yat-sen’s) while producing new arbitrary power. The International Left narrative often softens this into a necessary anti-imperialist or peasant liberation while downplaying the liquidation of independent institutions and the body count.
Q: DON’T NORDIC OR OTHER SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC MODELS SHOW THAT SOCIALISM AND “DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM” CAN DELIVER NON-DOMINATION AND EQUALITY WITHIN DEMOCRATIC FORMS WITHOUT CULTURAL REVOLUTION EXCESSES?
A: These models operate largely within constitutional-republican or constitutional-monarchical shells that retain private property, markets, rule of law, independent civil society, and national self-determination. These are the elements the deeper materialist tradition treats as transitional or obstacles. They expanded social supports and administrative capacity while preserving many republican restraints. When the framework treats structural economic transformation as primary and sufficient and redefines the people in class or identity terms while hollowing constitutional limits, it recreates the risk of arbitrary domination that republics were founded to prevent. Welfare or social supports can be compatible with non-domination if they preserve independence and civic agency rather than clientelist dependency. Softer versions still retain the logic of supersession rather than regeneration of the full republican tradition of virtue, mixed government, and moral formation.
Q: DON’T SOFTER “DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST” VERSIONS AVOID THE VIOLENCE OF 1917 AND 1949 THOUGH?
A: They still retain the materialist priority and the stage-theory logic while expanding administrative and economic power through existing institutions until constitutional limits become hollow. If one has power, it is manageable, but again, that popularity grows within the void of an eroded republican structure. “The people” is redefined in class or identity terms, while duty, independent property, and cross-class association are treated as masks for exploitation. At this point, it is very difficult to steer many non-White Americans to not think of these as masks of exploitation. Even gradualist versions risk recreating arbitrary domination by concentrating economic power in the state or party-linked structures. The Bolshevik and Chinese cases are extreme expressions of the same underlying claim that republican forms must be superseded rather than regenerated. However, the history shows that once the logic of continuous struggle against residual “bourgeois” elements is accepted, the path to dual power, purification, and monopoly remains open.
Q: WHAT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE IN ANTHROPOLOGY?
A: Republicanism is a moral anthropology. Freedom is first a matter of character in self-mastery, civic virtue, the capacity to rule and be ruled as equals under law, independence from arbitrary will. Institutions channel ambition and corruption but cannot eliminate the need for citizens who put the common good above private interest. Property and association support personality when properly ordered.
Marxism (and its Leninist and Maoist developments) is a material anthropology. Freedom is primarily a matter of material conditions and class relations. Transform the economic base (or, in Mao’s adaptation, combine stages under party leadership) and virtue will follow. History is driven by modes of production and class conflict. Republican forms are transitional. The political subject is the class (or later identity group), not the citizen of a particular people. Duty, nation, and moral education across classes are dismissed as idealism. This is why the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions produced new hierarchies and mass suffering: they treated the formation of free persons as secondary.
Q: WHY DOES RECOVERING THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION, RATHER THAN SEEKING ANOTHER 1917 OR 1949 AGAINST THESE MODERN ROBBER-BARONS TO ADDRESS OLIGARCHY, INEQUALITY AND CULTURAL DECAY?
A: Because the pathologies are symptoms of republican decay, erosion of civic literacy, oligarchic capture, faction and the loss of virtue, not proof that the founding principles were fraudulent or incomplete stages. Recovery means educating in the classical, Renaissance, Atlantic, American, Mazzinian, Haitian, and Black republican sources; forming public-spirited associations; demanding balanced power and accountability; and cultivating personal and civic self-mastery. It rejects both oligarchic concentration and the materialist claim that only violent supersession works. The Bolshevik and Chinese experiments demonstrate that smashing republican forms in the name of higher liberation produces new domination on a vast scale. Continuous regeneration of the civis and civitas is harder than utopian seizure, but it is the only path consistent with non-domination.
Q: AREN’T CANCEL CULTURE, “DECOLONIZE” CAMPAIGNS, IDEOLOGICAL PURITY TESTS IN EDUCATION AND INSTITUTIONS, OR CONTINUOUS STRUGGLE AGAINST “BOUGEOUS” CULTURE JUST MILDER, NECESSARY VERSIONS OF CULTURAL REVOLUTION AGAINST RESIDUAL DOMINATION?
A: These function as soft forms of continuous purification against residual “olds” such as ideas, culture, customs, habits, or persons deemed contaminated by the prior order. Observe this very closely: they share the Cultural Revolution’s logic of mass mobilization for ideological rectification, destruction or subordination of independent cultural forms, and elevation of struggle over formation of free, deliberative citizens. The classical republican tradition, as well as our (US) own system which is a democratic-republican synthesis requires open inquiry, civic education in the tradition’s sources, and associations that cultivate virtue and public spirit. Ideological purity campaigns and cultural liquidation erode the conditions of non-domination by replacing deliberation with factional enforcement and by treating character formation as secondary to structural or identity struggle.
The republican answer is recovery of education in classical, Renaissance, Atlantic, and global republican sources; voluntary public-spirited associations; and perpetual but institutional struggle against corruption, not periodic cultural purge that historically generates terror, factionalism, and stronger centralized control.
Q: WHY REJECT CLASS STRUGGLE WHEN OLIGARCHIC CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH AND POWER IS A REAL THREAT?
A: Oligarchy and capture by concentrated wealth are classic republican concerns. The antidote is dispersing power, protecting independence (including through ordered property), civic education, moral reform, and associations, and not class war as the motor of history. Class struggle, for republicans, is a symptom of incomplete citizenship, not its solution. It is destructive of the national and human community and of the moral capacity for association across differences. Mazzini and the tradition explicitly rejected it in favor of universal moral education, duty, and association that form free persons. Historical Marxist practice subordinated or liquidated independent civic institutions and free association in the name of class conquest of power.
Q: DOESN’T THE HISTORY OF RACIAL EXCLUSION AND BLACK STRUGGLE DEMONSTRATE THAT THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION IS COMPROMISED OR “WHITE,” MAKING FAR-LEFT ALTERNATIVE NECESSARY?
A: The tradition contains built-in universal standards against which its own failures (slavery, exclusion, segregation) could be measured and corrected. The Black Atlantic republican lineage is part of the continuous tradition, not an external radical alternative. Classical sources themselves (Aristotle, Cicero, Stoicism) emphasize virtue, reason, and shared potential over biological hierarchies, providing resources against racial essentialism. Far-left displacement often erases or subordinates this Black republican stream in favor of materialist or identity frameworks that treat the constitutional order as constitutively fraudulent. Black leaders are instead absorbed into a socialist and communist narrative of liberation against the republican-style. The further left, the further the entrapment into the narrative.
Q: WHAT PRACTICAL STANCE FOLLOWS FOR CITIZENS FACING FAR-LEFT CALLS FOR REVOLUTIONARY UPHEAVAL MODELED ON THOSE REVOLUTIONS?
A: Refuse the dilution of republican history into a left stage narrative. Study the actual tactics of dual power, assembly dissolution, and party monopoly in 1917-1918 and the violent consolidation under Mao after 1949. Recognize that “revolution” was not originally a Marxist monopoly; republicanism itself was revolutionary in the name of free self-government under law. Defend and regenerate the institutions and virtues capable of sustaining liberty rather than importing frameworks that historically liquidated them. Every citizen remains the potential salvation of the republic. Seeking an American Bolshevik or Maoist-style rupture repeats the displacement that left the tradition vulnerable and replaces one form of arbitrary power with another.
The far-left adaptation of the Bolshevik and Chinese Communist Revolutions treats the long republican lineage as incomplete and supersedable. Civic republicanism demonstrates that those revolutions assaulted and replaced republican institutions, that the materialist anthropology failed to produce free citizens, and that the coherent answer is recovery of the tradition of non-domination, virtue, and mixed self-government, not another cycle of violent seizure and purification.
Q: WHAT IS THE PRACTICAL PATH FORWARD INSTEAD OF REVOLUTIONARY UPHEAVAL?
A: It seems customary to diagnose concentrated wealth, “whiteness,” “colonial” culture, capitalism, or institutional capture as systemic domination that cannot be reformed. The solution becomes continuous struggle to smash residual “bourgeois” elements (culture, history, hierarchies, private property relations) through mass mobilization, ideological purification, and transfer of power to a vanguard or “the people” redefined in class-identity terms.
Civic republicanism replies that this misdiagnoses the problem. Domination arises from arbitrary power (whether monarchical, oligarchic, majoritarian, or party-bureaucratic) and from the perennial human tendencies of ambition, vanity, corruption, and dependency. China’s Cultural Revolution did not produce free, non-dominated citizens; it produced chaos, new hierarchies under the Party, cultural destruction, and eventual pragmatic reversal. Mass destruction of tradition, and youth-led purification historically generate terror, factionalism, and stronger centralized control, not durable self-government.
Citizens must recover the tradition themselves. Educate in the classical, Renaissance, Atlantic, and global republican sources. Form and sustain public-spirited associations. Demand institutional accountability and balanced power. Cultivate personal and civic virtue, and self-mastery is non-negotiable. Resist both oligarchic capture and radical materialist displacement. The republican project is continuous regeneration, not one-time revolution or permanent cultural war. Every citizen is the potential salvation of the republic (salus reipublicae). Abandoning this for another Cultural Revolution-style experiment repeats the displacement that left the tradition vulnerable in the first place.
The conflicts I have studied the longest are the Indian Partition, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. These were bloody revolutions that sowed long hatred between neighbors and generations and required genocides and large-scale persecutions, just as in the case of our country’s early history, but for some reason, it does not hit as hard psychologically than the rewarding sensation from racial divisions. Americans hate each other that much, that they want that history to occur here? What is expected? There is some form of external and foreign pressures to destabilize the U.S.
There are far-leftists and Western Sinophiles that call for an American version of China’s Cultural Revolution. They treat a displaced tradition as bankrupt and seek to supersede it through materialist upheaval. This is revealed when you ask them, “then what system will you replace the current with?” Civic republicanism insists the tradition was never fully tried in its depth after its initial revolutionary achievements, that its moral anthropology remains indispensable, and that historical attempts at supersession produced new forms of domination rather than freedom from it. Recovery, not demolition, is the coherent answer.
To repeat it, the pathologies are symptoms of decay in republican character and institutions, not proof that the founding principles were fraudulent. The solution is deepening the tradition that already contains the resources against domination, rather than importing a materialist framework that historically liquidated independent civic life.
