We’re not a republic in crisis. We’re an empire in denial.



Forms of government are not laboratory specimens. You cannot line them up like competing scientific theories, test them under controlled conditions, and then apply the “correct” model to every nation on earth.

The United States learned that lesson the hard way in places like Afghanistan. The George W. Bush vision of exporting liberal democracy across the world was delusional because cultures differ and human beings are not blank slates. People must be governed in ways that align with their nature and customs.

If conservatives wish to make the United States a republic again, they must begin by admitting what America has become.

Government forms have limits. They are not universal ideologies that can fit any situation, and when nations ignore those limits, they fail. America keeps expanding beyond what a republic can bear and refuses to admit it, with predictable consequences.

In its classical form, a republic rests on a set of virtuous citizens capable of self-government through shared beliefs, values, and customs. Citizenship is limited and precious. It conveys as many responsibilities as rights. Citizens do not gain the vote simply because they reside inside a border. They earn it through constant engagement with the body politic. They are soldiers, business owners, family men, and stalwart church members. They have shown both a willingness to sacrifice for society and the capacity to contribute meaningfully to it.

The phrase “self-governing” can mislead because it suggests isolated, autonomous individuals. That is not what classical thinkers meant. A republic needs the lightest touch of any governmental form because the community reinforces itself. Citizens hold each other to account.

From Aristotle to Machiavelli to the American founders, the assumption was the same: A republic requires a virtuous people bound by thick ties of identity and shared moral expectations. Formal authority exists, but most of the real enforcement happens through custom and communal pressure, with the civil magistrate stepping in only when necessary. A republic works only when its people possess enough virtue and cohesion to govern themselves.

That is why republics are rare. They have a strict limitation: scale.

Most successful republics in history have been compact city-states with contained populations capable of maintaining identity and virtue. Once a republic expands, it must incorporate people who do not share its customs or worldview. In “The Prince,” Machiavelli warns rulers who wish to expand that they should only conquer nations sharing similar religion, language, and heritage. That common ground allows the conquered population to assimilate.

Ruling peoples with radically different cultures is far more difficult because the subjects cannot easily accept the rule of a leader whose assumptions differ so dramatically from their own.

A country that does not share culture, religion, tradition, or heritage cannot function as a republic because the people lack the common ground necessary for self-rule. The gaps are too wide to be bridged by normal political debate. A stronger form of authority becomes necessary to bind disparate groups together.

This is why kingdoms and empires are far more common throughout history. Most populations do not possess the cohesion or virtue required for republican government and must instead be ruled by a king. Empires are simply multicultural kingdoms, held together by an emperor who forces cooperation among groups that otherwise could not form a single polity.

Even classical empires understood the need to respect the character of their diverse subjects. Wise rulers did not attempt to make every people act the same. They allowed local custom to continue as long as taxes were paid and troops supplied. Local leaders were often retained. Sometimes a local king stayed on his throne but only if he showed deference to the emperor. The multicultural empire required a much stronger hand, though wise emperors used that power sparingly.

This historical reality explains much about the behavior of modern liberal democracies. Many citizens wonder why their leaders insist on importing large numbers of foreigners despite popular opposition. Cheap labor and imported voters are part of the answer, but in the end, it comes down to the pursuit of raw power.

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Large-scale immigration introduces deep cultural differences that destabilize the political order, and the only way to manage that instability is more centralized authority. A liberal democracy that becomes too diverse must govern in the manner of an empire. Its leaders must exercise the level of authority required to hold multiple nations together under one state.

The fact is, multicultural societies trend toward authoritarianism. They must. The differences are too great to manage through ordinary civic persuasion. This dynamic intensifies when the state attempts to integrate its various peoples rather than allowing them to exist separately. By transforming their democracies into multiethnic empires, Western leaders acquire imperial levels of power while maintaining the appearance of popular rule.

No republic can survive the level of diversity now celebrated as a civic virtue.

If conservatives wish to make the United States a republic again, they must begin by admitting what America has become. The country has been transformed into a multicultural empire and is governed accordingly. It grants immense power to its ruling elite in the hope that it can manage the instability produced by extreme diversity.

A republic cannot endure under these conditions. America must end immigration, scale back its foreign ambitions, and cultivate a shared, virtuous culture. Without these steps, talk of republican revival is performative. The structure of a republic cannot survive the substance of an empire.

If Americans will not reclaim the unity that makes self-government possible, then they will be ruled, not represented. Republics are earned. Empires are endured.

Virtue, not power, is the true aim of politics



The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: Politics is about what is good.

We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”— an unrivaled introduction to politics:

Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.

Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that many goods exist along with many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth.

Virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.

Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: If there exists some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good — if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless — this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.

He asks: Would not an awareness of this highest good have great weight in a man’s life? Wouldn’t the art of attaining that good be the sovereign or master art encompassing all the ends or goods of the other arts? And isn’t this what we call the art of politics?

The good that the art of politics aims at, he says, is “the human good.” What name do people give to the human good that encompasses all others and lacks nothing? The Greek word, Aristotle says, is eudaimonia, which we usually translate as “happiness” in English. The art of politics is the art of happiness. But it gets even better.

The art of politics is a practical art. It aims not just at knowing what happiness is but at being happy. Thinking happiness through, Aristotle finds that it does not have primarily to do with the body. It is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — in fact, in accordance with complete virtue. You can’t be a happy man without being a good or virtuous man. And in this sense, virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Aristotle goes on to distinguish between virtues of character and virtues of intellect, or what we usually call moral and intellectual virtues. He argues that the specific virtue or excellence of the statesman — the political man par excellence — is the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom, what he would call “phronesis.” Phronesis is the only intellectual virtue that is inseparable from moral virtue. According to Aristotle, a man cannot possess phronesis without possessing all the moral virtues actively and in their fullness. He is a man in full.

I would tell students that to make progress in their study of politics — this practical art — they would have to make progress in virtue; they would have to make progress toward the human good; they would have to make progress toward happiness. This is what our semester would be about.

Happiness and politics go together?

If I were lucky, at least one hesitatingly confident realist among the students — they were still too young to be cynics — would be brave enough on this first day of class to raise a hand and say deferentially and politely something like: “What! Have you read a newspaper lately?” (They had newspapers back then.) “Every page is filled with violence, crime, corruption, and somebody grasping for power! To call someone a politician is an insult.”

And so the semester would be off and running.

I would admit that though Aristotle in his “Politics” defines man as a “political animal” because man is a “rational animal” — an animal possessing logos, or reason — he makes an empirical observation at the end of his “Ethics” that will be familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper: Rational creatures though they are, men sometimes do not listen to reason and are carried away by their passions.

Aristotle would agree with Alexander Hamilton, or rather Hamilton agreed with Aristotle, when he wrote in Federalist 15:

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” And with James Madison’s even more famous saying, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

In addition, working on our non-angelic human fallibility and culpability, bad education causes us to make mistakes about what is good. For these reasons, Aristotle argues that both education and coercion are central to the art of politics and, alas, that practicing the art of politics is not a leisurely activity. It is the burdensome art of inducing others to do what they ought to do for their own good and happiness, even when they don’t want to.

These days, our children learn in school and online that it is good to shoplift or try to change themselves from a boy to a girl or from a girl to a boy. A shockingly large percentage of them have learned that it is good to kill those who disagree with you.

From his first day in office in 2021, Joe Biden — our then-educator in chief — made it the central point of American politics that being trans was being good and questioning the goodness of being trans was evil. He thrust this bad education into the face of his country — marching trans heroes before the cameras to model the “goodness” that all Americans should admire and publicly praise if they wanted to avoid ostracism, public shaming and canceling, expulsion from school, losing their jobs, being put in jail, or being murdered in cold blood.

Politics requires goodness

Knowing what is good is not easy. A man in ancient Athens with the greatest reputation for wisdom knew only that he did not know what was good. To have what was good, to be good, was so crucial to Socrates — the one thing needful — that it made no sense to do anything else with his life than to try to find out what it was.

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Photo by Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

But we do not need to be philosophers to know that boys cannot become girls, that biological males should not be competing against biological females in sports or sharing their bathrooms, and that killing those who disagree with us is evil. Glenn Ellmers, Salvatori Research Fellow at the Claremont Institute and an old friend, published a short essay on the urgent need, in this increasingly deranged world, to hold on to our common sense.

Machiavelli — the infamous teacher of “realist” politics — seeing unflinchingly what we all could read in the newspaper, taught that in a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for those who would succeed in the art of politics to enter into evil. I would suggest an alternative lesson to students, one that I think is in the spirit of Aristotle: In a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for the good to be great.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

Our republic is sick. The Machiavelli of Mar-a-Lago has the cure.



A progressive friend said something insightful weeks ago: “Trump doesn’t feel like he’s in power unless someone is getting hurt.”

His observation came during the public “breakup” of Elon Musk and President Trump over Musk's criticism of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — but before Trump sent U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to help quell riots over immigration enforcement. And before Trump ordered airstrikes on Iranian nuclear targets. And before the right splintered over America’s role in Israel’s war.

Tucker Carlson’s ‘peace first’ politics will keep the moral high ground, but Trump’s exercise of power affirms his political legitimacy.

As a political science major, our friend owes some of his prescience to his undergraduate study of Niccolo Machiavelli.

In both “The Prince” and “Discourses,” Machiavelli grounded his theory of politics in his understanding of human nature. Because people are motivated by a capricious self-interest, he believed, people will fight with one another to realize their goals.

“This is to be asserted in general of men,” Machiavelli wrote, “that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous,” and compete incessantly for power, resources, and more. The regime whose primary goal is to placate rivals, whether internal dissidents or foreign enemies, will descend into chaos, Machiavelli believed. To prevent collapse, the strong leader must exert force — force that suppresses, punishes, or destroys the weak, force that he uses not occasionally or whenever a problem materializes, but constantly.

This is Machiavelli’s central paradigm: Politics is battle — not a battle between good and evil or right and wrong. Just a battle, ongoing and continuous, to defend the principles on which the regime operates, if not the ones upon which it was built. In “Machiavelli on Modern Leadership,” the late historian Michael Ledeen wrote that according to Machiavelli, a leader “has no other objective or thought or takes anything for his craft, except war.” Democratic and Republican presidents alike abide by this rule, both internationally and domestically. President Lyndon Johnson waged a war on poverty. Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Joe Biden spoke of the war on COVID-19.

Trump uses force because conflict — not consensus-building, cooperation, or governance for the common good — is the nature of political leadership.

This is a reality that pundits and commentators passionately decry, especially when their preferred party isn’t in power. It is a notion that shocks progressives still in thrall to the mellifluous voice of President Barack Obama, who promised that politics was not a battle but a journey toward a more perfect union. His musings about “bringing a gun to a knife fight” are all but forgotten. Obama the pacifist is the living memory.

“I did not set out to be a politician, but a community organizer,” he wrote in “A Promised Land.” “And what I learned in those years, and what I still believe, is that politics, at its best, is a pilgrimage — a steady, sometimes halting, often frustrating march toward greater justice and equality.” His rhetoric called for solidarity. His tone was messianic. He promised that our shared moral striving would lead to a drastically improved future, that the long pilgrimage of America would arrive someday at a profound and sacred destination.

Ironically, that destination was Trump.

From the very beginning of his campaign for president, Trump openly embraced the battle metaphors that embarrassed Obama. We are fighting against the corrupt establishment, he would say. We are fighting to win the battle against illegal immigration. We are in a battle for the soul of our country.

“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more,” Trump said on January 6, 2021. In the game of politics, Trump embraced conflict and was determined to win on all counts — for himself and for the country.

His foreign policy supports this point.

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Speaking after the military strike on ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in late 2019, Trump was unequivocal in his statement of victory. “Last night was a great night for the United States and for the world,” Trump said. “He will never again harm another innocent man, woman, or child. He died like a dog. He died like a coward. The world is now a safer place. God bless America.”

Both hawks and doves celebrated the win. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called it a “game-changer.” Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson counted Baghdadi’s death a “victory for civilization itself.” A few months later, a fault line appeared on the right when a drone fired missiles at Qasem Soleimani, killing the Iranian Quds Force commander. Carlson criticized Trump for goading Iran into a military conflict that would weaken America.

“There are an awful lot of bad people in this world,” Carlson said on his television program in early 2020. “You can’t kill them all.”

This month, the fault line widened. As Trump prepared to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, Carlson cried out for more public decision-making. He spoke about the “real divide” on the right, a line that separates people like Carlson and Steve Bannon from the interventionists and neoconservatives in the modern conservative movement. “The real divide is between those who casually encourage violence, and those who seek to prevent it – between warmongers and peacemakers,” Carlson posted on X.

Carlson warned against foreign entanglements as distractions from the problems at home, but the violence itself seemed to offend him. In one conversation with Bannon, Carlson paraphrased a story found in all four Gospels, where the apostle Peter draws his sword against the arresting party in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus scolds Peter, saying: "Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52). Carlson interpreted that passage as meaning people who espouse violence will suffer in the end.

But one biblical reference always calls to mind another.

In the Gospel of Luke, a passage about the Last Supper contains a comment from Jesus to the disciples that “the one who has no sword [should] sell his cloak and buy one” (Luke 22:36). Looking about, the disciples take an inventory and tell him, “Look, Lord, here are two swords.” Jesus offers a cryptic response: “It is enough” (Luke 22:38). Perhaps Jesus is chiding them for taking him too literally, as if to say, “That’s enough of this talk.” But equally possible is that Jesus was saying that two swords are enough, that physical conflict is necessary but should serve the interests of defense rather than conquest.

Though the U.S. strikes on Iran resulted in a ceasefire and perhaps negotiation of a peace deal, this outcome will not be permanent on the larger international scene. There will be more attacks, more violence, more opportunities for political leaders to practice their craft with strength and foresight. Carlson’s “peace first” politics will keep the moral high ground, but Trump’s exercise of power affirms his political legitimacy.

As Machiavelli famously wrote: “It is better to be feared than loved.”

Right now, Donald Trump is both.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearWorld and made available via RealClearWire.

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