Angelo Codevilla on the Republic

Dr. Codevilla is one of the more insightful writers on the problems facing us today. I remember his first prominent article on these problems well, and wish it had been better heeded at the time.

Now he warns that we are already past the Republic. This is the unrecognized Empire.

Civics classes used to teach: “Congress makes the laws, the president carries them out, judges decide controversies, and we citizens may be penalized only by a jury of our peers.”

Nobody believes that anymore, because no part of it has been true for a long time. Barack Obama stopped pretending that it is. During the twentieth century’s second half, both parties and all branches of government made a mockery of the Constitution of 1789. Today’s effective constitution is: “The president can do whatever he wants so long as one-third of the Senate will sustain his vetoes and prevent his conviction upon impeachment.”

Obama has been our first emperor.

It's worth revisiting what he had to say in 2010, and comparing it with what he warns of today. Describing the environment that produced the TEA Party as a clash between the pro-American, pro-Christian "country class" and the "ruling class," he warned that what he called the "country class" was not well-positioned for politics.

Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.... Few Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side....

The name of the party that will represent America's country class is far less important than what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class. The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline, challenging it would seem to require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote is there to government by one party but government by another party? Yet this logic, though all too familiar to most of the world, has always been foreign to America and naturally leads further in the direction toward which the ruling class has led. Any country party would have to be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats' mirror image.

Six years on, the ruling class rules the Republican party as well.

America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.

This class's fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate.

What is interesting to me is that the voters have given the Republicans control of the elected branches throughout: in the vast majority of statehouses, in both houses of Congress, in governors' mansions, in every electable branch the Republican party predominates. Now, having raised them to the pinnacle of democratically-attainable power, the waves of voters are poised to seize the Presidency -- but not for a figure from the ruling class.

Codevilla's piece slams Trump from start to finish, and calls for a return to small-r republicanism and an end to the cycle of revenge against our cultural enemies. I've been calling for the same thing since 2004, without it being highly persuasive to anyone yet. Let us have the Tenth Amendment, and allow the states to diverge on moral and cultural matters. Let us strip the Supreme Court of its extraordinary power, and the Executive of its power to legislate through the bureaucracy.

Return to the Constitution, or dissolve the Union. Living under an Empire operating under the pretense of democratic legitimacy ought to terrify anyone who understands what that would mean. The cycle of cultural violence can only grow worse if we do not find a way to return to our Constitutional principles, and yet remain bound tightly to those who hate and despise us, who scorn and resent us. Power can only protect you for so long.