Twilight of the Republic: Empire and Exceptionalism in the American Political Tradition

Introduction

IntroduCtIon What happens if a country’s worldview is radically changed? If the particular priorities and traditions that informed the life of a people are laid aside, something has to fill the void. New ones are taken up and a new worldview is formed. But what if the changes happen slowly and subtly? What if the changes, once in place, are no longer recognized as changes? The traditions, priorities, actions, and words that formerly characterized that country and that people will live on in documents and monuments, but not in the lives of citizens. In other words, the vital elements of the people’s self-conception will be all but lost. The now-changed state of things will be taken for granted. A new self-conception will be arrayed against the original one. This people will act differently but will still try to speak the same. The old, traditional words are spoken, but they are accompanied by new behaviors. Because the same words are used, the new worldview continues be shaped by the old one, but it will be as new wine in old wineskins. The new ways of acting and being will eventually burst the old wineskins and both the wine and the skins will be lost. The people will no longer be who they are and will have forgotten who they were. This is America today. From colonial times up to the turn of the twentieth century, the country’s particular way of acting both domestically and in foreign affairs was fairly circumscribed and inwardly focused. It was a robust, lived political tradition. But over the same period, new self-conceptions and ways of acting entered into American political life, and these gradually changed the meaning of the principal words and symbols used to articulate , interpret, and understand the American political tradition. The words that formerly led Americans to think of themselves in one way now lead them to think and act in thoroughly different ways. The same words from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and seminal colonial documents have come to mean things very different from before. What is more, most citizens today cannot see the change as a change because they are unaware of the tradition as it previously existed. The result has been a great confusion about what constitutes the American political tradition and 1 2 Twilight of the Republic a consequently decreasing coherence in debates on the role of America in the world and the role of the government in Americans’ lives at home. We are at odds with ourselves and we do not know why. Today America is highly assertive in foreign affairs and highly centralized in its domestic life. American domestic politics is increasingly characterized by populist appeals for solutions from the center—Washington —and it takes only a passing familiarity with the ideals of the framers of the Constitution to realize how far we have fallen from their republican aspirations. A change has happened, yet some think this change justified. Perhaps, so goes the argument, today’s geopolitical situation demands a political theory and self-understanding that go beyond the scope of republicanism . Republicanism and an older style of representative government may not meet the challenges we face today. Perhaps the world cannot long remain stable without America’s ubiquity in commercial, political, and military affairs. Perhaps a retrenchment into the more circumscribed mode of American politics would mean that today’s American way of life—relatively dominant and powerful abroad, relatively affluent and peaceful at home— would end. Political problems today are Big Problems. We cannot go back or become more naïve, it might be said. Adopting this view is tempting, but it should by no means be our final word. The persistent principles of American politics have a long and rich history, born of centuries of self-government and reflection. Mere expediency should not overshadow these principles. Who are we as a people? What does it mean to be an American? What is the particularly American understanding of politics? These questions and answers are given by the symbols and myths of our tradition, fashioned out of materials inherited from Western civilization. But today these symbols are unfamiliar to many. If we are currently at odds with ourselves, if we currently lack a coherent account of politics, and if we wish to see with fresh eyes the nature of the American political tradition, a reassessment of those symbols is in order. In studying the foundations of the American...