“The safety of the people shall be their highest law.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Legibus 3.3.8.
“The commonwealth is the property of the people,
an assemblage of a multitude united in agreement
about right and in the sharing of advantage.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica 1.39.
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AMERICANS, AND ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO HAVE CAST THEIR VOTES for the party that still carries the name “Republican,” the midterm results have closed one season of political calculation and opened another. The count is finished. The maps are drawn, and many have lost their jobs to re-enter the economy created by the party they supported. What remains is the older question that the name itself continues to pose, a question the republican tradition has never permitted any faction to answer on its own terms. The tradition is not the party. The party is not the tradition. The reduction of the long civic lineage to a single modern faction, or to the later narrative of a party switch, has always been a form of subordination. The only durable recovery of the party that bears the name lies in the name itself. Republican names the res publica, the public thing, the partnership of citizens associated by agreement on justice and by common utility, not by descent, station, private interest, or the seating arrangements of any later assembly. To look closely at that name is to recover the grammar that has always diagnosed the poisons that gather inside every camp.
That lineage is continuous and eclectic. The continuity and eclecticism of the tradition do not amount to an open door for every subsequent doctrine that claims the language of the common good or the critique of concentrated wealth. Eclecticism has always operated within limits set by the requirement that liberty remain non-domination secured through mixed and balanced institutions, that the res publica stay the property of the people rather than of a class, party, or administrative monopoly, and that civic virtue and independent judgment not be subordinated to a single historical agent or end. Developed socialism, from Marx’s subordination of political forms to the mode of production through Lenin’s dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in favor of soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, treats the commonwealth as an instrument to be captured or abolished rather than balanced; and replaces the perpetual contest of interests under publicity and rotation with the claim that one organized force already embodies the general will, as Lenin demonstrated in 1917.
The Democratic Party’s pluralist accommodation or temporary appeasement of socialist currents does not dissolve this difference but merely defers the contest while leaving the older institutional and ethical resources un-recovered. The party that addresses this as a highly viable alternative, based in instructive wisdom about our foundations, not as ideas to force unto others, will set itself on a firmer footing than any period has thus far presented Post Civil-Rights. That others deploy “socialism” and “communism” as indiscriminate epithets changes nothing about the distinct diagnosis the tradition has always offered: arbitrary power reappears whenever private interest, faction, or a vanguard is permitted to stand in for the common good. Alternatives to the present popularity of socialism therefore remain internal to the lineage itself, in the unfinished work of disciplining commercial society by non-domination, equal standing, and the return to first principles, rather than in the substitution of one concentrated power for another.
Greek inquiry examined the mixed constitution and the moral formation of citizens capable of ruling and being ruled in turn, wary of pure democracy’s tendency toward faction. Polybius observed Rome’s balance of consuls, Senate, and popular assemblies as a practical check against the cycle of decay he called anacyclosis, in which every pure form degenerates into its corrupt counterpart: kingship into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, democracy into ochlocracy (Polybius, Histories 6.3-10). Cicero refined the definition of the res publica as the property of the people and insisted that the best men rule by virtue rather than by riches, names, or birth; when the richest are accounted the best, the state is already depraved (Cicero, De Re Publica 1.51-52). The mixed and evenly balanced constitution offers both equality free men can hardly do without and the stability that pure forms lack, provided the governing class does not itself fail. (Cicero, De Re Publica 1.69) Livy and Sallust recorded how liberty depends on the character of citizens no less than on formal institutions.
The Renaissance recovery, most powerfully in Machiavelli’s Discourses, treated the Roman model as a living resource against princely tyranny and faction. Republics require conflict as well as consensus, citizen armies, and a civic ethos that disciplines private interest for the public good. Institutions must presuppose that all men are bad and will use their malignity when opportunity arises; time, the father of every truth, will discover what is hidden (Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 1.3). The common good, not private gain, makes cities great, and that common good is observed only in republics. (Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 2.2). From Italy the tradition moved into the Dutch Republic, the English Commonwealth, Harrington’s Oceana, Sidney, Milton, and the Atlantic reconstruction that produced the extended American republic, designed to correct the pure democracies of antiquity and the turbulent city-states of Italy while embedding classical concerns for virtue, balance, and the prevention of arbitrary power.
That grammar has always named the internal threats. Faction is the organized pursuit of partial interest at the expense of the whole. Oligarchy is the rule of the few by wealth rather than by virtue. Hierarchy that is not earned by public service but claimed by birth, race, or station contradicts the equal moral standing of citizens under law. Corporate capture is the modern form of court corruption: concentrated wealth that bends administration, legislation, and public opinion to private advantage. Ethnonationalism and racism reduce the civitas to descent and thereby reintroduce the domination the tradition exists to resist. Paleo-conservative residuals and the post-right that followed them recycle older counter-revolutionary logics of organic hierarchy and sacralized order, logics the republican lineage has repeatedly rejected in favor of mixed institutions, secular public reason, and the armament of ideas.
The saying that orders conservatism before one is a republican inverts the proper sequence and subordinates the tradition to a later disposition. Republican commitment comes first because it is defined by the requirements of the res publica. Conservatism, understood as the priority of preserving received order, organic hierarchy, or customary authority against change, is a subsequent and partial attitude; and when placed first it converts the tradition into a defense of whatever presently stands, including the very poisons (oligarchic capture, sacralized rank, ethnonational residual, or court-like influence) diagnosed as the decay of republics into their corrupt counterparts. The American founders republicanized earlier Country critiques precisely by refusing to let preservation of any particular social form precede the principles of equal standing under law and balanced government. To reverse the order is to reintroduce the reduction of the name to a camp, leaving the party that bears it without the internal resources for recovery and the republic without a competitor disciplined by its own title rather than by the impulse to conserve.
If this change is not implemented within the next four years, at a cultural and organizational level, then the party can no longer be considered a serious party, and your weaknesses are costly to the nation as a whole when you put representatives before citizens that practice and exhibit the very poisons, just as the citizens have grown suspicious and vigilant against you, as you will surely fail within the decade to excise those poisons, or heed these warnings.
Since the fifties and sixties, the Republican Party captured religion through the decades, to propel you in elections, but this has changed, as numerous historians have noted throughout the years, not just evidenced by Talarico’s midterm victory in Texas. Religion, when it seeks to govern the public thing by private revelation or by the authority of a church, becomes another form of arbitrary power. The republican tradition does not deny private conscience or voluntary association. It refuses to let either become the solvent of equal citizenship or the instrument of faction. These diagnoses are not later inventions. They are internal to the lineage from Polybius through Machiavelli to the American founders who constructed an extended republic precisely so that multiplicity of interests and separation of powers would control the effects of faction without concentrating corrective power in one person or one organized party (see the analysis of Madison’s Federalist 10 and the republicanized Country diagnosis First Principles: Of Faction, Party, and Political Association).
The unfinished work of the republican economy appears most clearly at the point where demographic change meets the failure of both camps to furnish an exemplar. Any measurable influx of immigration arrives into a public conversation already divided between the claim that a population’s numbers and standing are under threat and the counter-claim that such anxiety must be accepted, or even welcomed, as moral progress. Neither side has shown itself capable of more than occasional niceties. Neither has demonstrated, in ordinary life, a culture ordered by the older requirements of equal standing under law, the subordination of private interest to the common good, and the discipline of hierarchy that is not earned by public service. What arrives instead is a field in which citizens and newcomers alike are drawn into the tearing of one another over class, race, and wealth, with the whole contest routinely charged to “capitalism” as if the diagnosis itself supplied a remedy.
The republican lineage has long taught that inequality of condition, when it hardens into durable domination, corrupts the capacity for self-government. Aristotle observed that extreme disparity between the few and the many renders the mixed constitution unstable, because the rich pursue oligarchy and the poor pursue democracy in its degraded form (Aristotle, Politics 4.11).
Cicero insisted that the commonwealth remains the property of the people only so long as justice and shared advantage bind them; when riches are accounted the measure of the best, the state is already depraved (Cicero, De Re Publica 1.51). Machiavelli noted that where equality of condition is absent, a republic cannot be established or long maintained, and that private gain, rather than the common good, is what enervates cities (Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 1.55, 2.2). James Harrington later recovered the same insight in the requirement of an agrarian balance: property widely enough distributed that no single interest can dominate the public thing. These are not arguments for the abolition of private ownership or for the equalization of outcomes by administrative command. They are arguments that the material conditions of citizenship must not be permitted to reintroduce the arbitrary power the mixed constitution was designed to restrain.
Develop upon this, and you may find a program of policy that is capable of helping the people but also enabling you to instruct them from within the political tradition at the foundations of the country, which never needed socialism. The Democratic Party may do so as well, but that is a contest any party must deal with.
The contemporary habit of blaming the entire contest on capitalism has only mislocated the problem. Commercial society, as Adam Smith described it, can enlarge the sphere of mutual advantage and reduce certain older forms of personal dependence, yet it does not by itself secure non-domination when concentrated wealth captures legislation, administration, and public opinion, or when status is reorganized around credential, race, or inheritance rather than around contribution to the res publica. The wage relation itself can become a site of unaccountable power when the citizen lacks the standing, the associations, and the institutional checks that keep private interest from ruling. That is the unfinished character of the republican economy: the tradition supplied the critique of domination and the institutional remedies of mixed government, rotation, publicity, and civic association, yet the later commercial order was never fully disciplined by those remedies. The result is visible on both sides of the present axis. One side treats demographic change as an existential threat to be resisted by ethnonational or hierarchical means that the lineage has always rejected. The other side treats the same change as a moral test that newcomers and natives alike must pass by accepting managed inequality and the language of structural indictment, while offering no living model of equal citizenship practiced under law. In either case the immigrant, like the native, is inducted into a culture of mutual standing-over rather than into the partnership of justice and common utility.
The remedy does not require a pivot to socialism. Socialism, in its developed forms, substitutes one mode of concentrated power for another and subordinates the citizen to the plan or the party. The republican resources remain internal: the insistence that liberty is freedom from arbitrary domination rather than the mere absence of interference; the requirement that property serve the capacity for independent judgment and public service rather than the creation of clients; the recovery of voluntary associations that train citizens in reciprocity instead of status competition; and the institutional checks that prevent any single interest, whether of capital, of race, or of administrative expertise, from capturing the public thing. These resources have always diagnosed the poisons that gather when hierarchy reasserts itself under new names. They also supply the standard by which a culture can be measured when it receives newcomers. A republic that cannot show its own members, and those who join them, a workable practice of equal standing, civic friendship, and the subordination of private wealth to the common good will continue to tear itself along the lines of class, race, and fortune. Both parties remain free to compete in vision and scope only if they recover these resources rather than merely manage the anxieties and the indictments. The safety of the people, the return to first principles through the example of citizens who refuse private gain as the measure of worth, and the maintenance of the commonwealth as the property of those associated by justice continue to name the work.
That work is unfinished.
It is also still available.
“A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.” (Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Book III, Chapter 1)
In consideration of these things, you who vote Republican, the midterms have shown that the present configuration of the party cannot rely on the inertia of recent years. The poisons listed above have not been expelled; they have been accommodated, sometimes under the language of tradition, sometimes under the language of strength. The republican tradition has always known that strength without virtue is the prelude to domination, and that a party that orients citizens toward “the right” while accepting anti-republican logic ceases to function as a republican body. Moderation, in that setting, becomes the defense of a corrupted status quo rather than the equilibrium of mixed institutions. The remedy is not a new slogan or a different seating arrangement on the modern axis. The remedy is the name. To recuperate the Republican Party is to require that its members, candidates, and voters recover the resources the name already contains: non-domination as the definition of liberty, the common good as the end of public action, civic virtue as the discipline of private passion, mixed institutions as the check against both majority tyranny and oligarchic capture, and the perpetual return to first principles when corruption advances. Machiavelli observed that such a return is sometimes produced by the simple virtue of one citizen whose example shames the wicked and draws the good into imitation. It is also produced by laws that keep the memory of founding principles alive. Both instruments are available. Neither requires the permission of any donor class or any residual hierarchy.
This recovery is not a demand that one party become the sole vessel of the tradition. Both parties must be healthy and devoted to the foundational republican philosophy if the republic is to remain competitive and the culture capable of self-correction. The Democratic Party carries its own forms of domination: the reduction of equal citizenship to managed populations, the substitution of credentialed status for public virtue, the conversion of past injury into permanent faction. Those errors are diagnosed elsewhere in the same lineage. The point here is narrower and more urgent. When the party that bears the republican name continues to tolerate ethnonationalism, racism, oligarchy, corporate control, factionalism, and the sacralization of private power, it ceases to offer a distinct and viable alternative in vision, style, and scope. Elections become less competitive. The culture fragments further. The union is weakened precisely where the tradition insists it must be strengthened. Liberty, equality, and fraternity (understood as civic solidarity) are not the exclusive property of any later revolution; they are the mottos that the republican lineage has repeatedly recovered against arbitrary power. In a maturing republic after the Trump era, they supply the standard by which both parties may be measured and by which citizens may hold one another to account.
The work is mutual.
Carry the older resources into your associations, your primary contests, your local offices, and your ordinary speech. Urge one another to distinguish the public thing from private interest, the citizen from the client of wealth or of race, the mixed constitution from the pure forms that decay. Nudge the party that still uses the name toward the grammar the name contains. The tradition has never been the exclusive property of any nation or any faction. It has been recovered, adapted, and radicalized across centuries precisely because its highest ideals remain citizen virtue, voluntary civic associations, moral perfectibility through education and participation, and the unrelenting opposition to arbitrary power in every form. The United States will be stronger, its elections more competitive, and its culture more capable of ordered liberty when the party that bears the republican name remembers what the name requires. The safety of the people remains the highest law. The return to first principles remains possible through the simple virtues of citizens who refuse to let the wicked set the example. The republic remains the property of the people. That is the counsel the lineage has always given. It is the counsel the name itself continues to offer.
