Tuesday, February 27, 2007

The Future is Imperium; The Future is Now; Who Will Be Master Of This Destiny?

Insights from "Revolution from the Middle" by Samuel Francis
After The Republic

Just because it looks like a Republic and quacks like a Republic doesn't mean it's really a Republic. In ancient Rome, after Julius and Augustus Caesar got through with the civil wars, proscriptions, and purges that spelled the death of the old Roman nobility, the state still looked and quacked like the Republic it had been in the days of Cincinnatus and Cato the Elder.

But everyone knew it wasn't so, that a century of demagogues and dictators had ruptured the republican duck, that the Caesars had finally polished off the reality of republican government and set up their own sweet little autocracy. "Despotism, enthroned at Rome," wrote historian Ronald Syme in The Roman Revolution, "was arrayed in robes torn from the corpse of the Republic."

So it is today in the United States. The Constitution still exists and remains a standing topic of Fourth of July oratory. We still have elections and even the vestiges of that aristocratic balance wheel, the electoral college. We still have republican (but, even today, not really democratic) representation in the Senate.

But despite the persistence of these republican forms, the reality is quite different -- a mass democracy in which elected officials are more and more irrelevant and corrupt as their powers and duties are usurped by bureaucratic elites that cannot be removed. Despotism, masked in republican costume, is not yet enthroned, but already it whispers in the ears of those who sit in the consular chairs of the leviathan state.

Why did the American Republic die, and why can't it be restored? The generation of Americans at the time the Constitution was written was immersed in republican thought and principles, and the Framers consistantly tried to establish a republic that could avoid the anarchy, demagoguery, and tyranny to which most previous republics -- in Greece, Rome, Renaissance Italy, Holland, and England -- had succumbed. But, if the republic they established is in fact moribund, either they made a mistake or else something has happened in the last 200 years that they never anticipated.

Writing on the different schools of republican thought that permeated the United States in its infancy, historian Forrest McDonald notes that virtually all of them shared a common set of beliefs. "The vital -- that is life-giving -- principle of republics was public virtue," a term that rang rather differently from its resonance in modern ears.

Not coincidentally, public, like virtue, derives from Latin roots signifying manhood: "the public" included only independent adult males. Public virtue entailed firmness, courage, endurance, industry, frugal living, strength, and above all, unremitting devotion to the weal of the public's corporate self, the community of virtuous men. It was at once individualistic and communal: individualistic in that no member of the public could be dependent upon any other and still be reckoned a member of the public; communal in that every man gave himself totally to the good of the public as a whole. If public virtue declined, the republic declined, and if it declined too far, the republic died.


...by the end of the nineteenth century, the American Republic remained intact, as did the social independence and public virtue on which it rested. Prior to World War I, writes Robert Nisbet, main contact most Americans had with the federal government was at the Post Office, and until the bonds of industrial and technological conglomeration were forged, Americans -- or at least the middle-class core of American civilization -- retained the social, economic, cultural, and political independence that made a republic possible.

Today this is not the case. Twentieth-century technology and organization -- in Big Government, Big Business, and Big Culture -- have increased far beyond the compact scale on which republican independence is possible and much further than even the dynastic states of the ancien regime could comprehend. The American middle class today is dependent on corporations, unions, universities, and the national state itself for its income, and it is income -- not an ethic or culture such as the nineteenth century bourgeois middle class possessed -- that defines the contemporary middle class.

The mega-state and its tentacles touch and twist at every joint of our lives, and their operations are directed by permanent and largely invisible bureaucratic and managerial elites, not primarily by officeholders or independent property owners. Those who hold office spend much of their time trying to shovel federal fodder into their constituents' troughs. Mass media and mass cultural organizations in education and religion bind virtually all Americans into the same vast audience, poked and prodded by the same images, ideas, information, and misinformation to emit the same mental and emotional responses.

At the end of the twentieth century, Americans have been absorbed within and become dependent on massive organizations and techonologies that are far too large, too complex, and too distant for most of us to control or even to influence. Under that kind of dependency, the social and moral disciplines that make personal and republican self-government possible wither away.

Hence, the rise of mass organizations and the elites that run them and our own dependence on them have paralleled the explosion of social breakdowns -- crime, suicides, drug use, sexual excess and deviation, the brutalization of women and children, the collapse of families and communities, the pursuit of hedonism and immediate gratification, the glorification of the sick, the weak, and the weird.

Mass society breeds dependency; dependency breeds corruption; and corruption breeds slavery. When indpendence and public virtue decline too far, the republic dies, even though despots may robe themselves in its garments.

Once the sociology of liberty is destroyed, it cannot be restored. Once the institutions and habits of independent discipline have withered, they do not naturally blossom again. Most Americans today are content with the mega-state, the cult of consumption that bureaucratized economy encourages, and the titillations, fantasies, and diversions of the mass media. The only discontent most of us have with the mega-state is when we have to pay for somebody else to get more from it -- in welfare, services, subsidies, tax breaks -- than we get.

Democratic politics in the leviathan state is never about dismantling or reducing leviathan but always about forcing somebody else to pay for what we want from it. A mass democracy of interest groups, lobbies, ideological movements, and opinion clusters replaces the "unremitting devotion to the weal of the public's corporate self" that animated classical republicans, and the engorgement of leviathan is accelerated by the twin engines of a bureaucratic elite intent on enlarging its own power and the mass voting blocs it feeds, just as eighteenth-century demagogues fed their mobs. Unlike a republic, mass democracy doesn't restrain power; democracy unleashes power.

Except for a few right-wing eggheads, no one seriously contemplates restoring the republic; no one seriously wants to because no one has any material interest in it. Hence the republic will not be restored.

Those few who remain attached to republicanism thus find themselves in the position of republican theorists like the Roman historian Tacitus and Nicolo Machiavelli, both of whom had seen their republics gurgle down the drain-pipes of history. Both of them understood that republican liberty is not something you get by just wishing for it or believing in it, that in the absence of the public virtue on which repubilcanism is grounded, you cannot have liberty.

...Machiavelli, who was imprisoned and tortured by the gangsters who took over Florence after the fall of its republic... had a more immediate grasp of what happens when a republic is corrupt and dying.

At that point, he wrote, "it becomes necessary to resort to extraordinary measures, such as violence and arms, and above all things to make one's self the absolute master of the state, so as to be able to dispose of it at will." Machiavelli understood that this kind of authoritarian rule was not a real solution or a restoration of liberty but simply the natural consequence of corruption; "for men whose turbulence could not be controlled by the simple force of law can be controlled in a measure by an almost regal power."

The consolidation of political, economic, and cultural power on just such a regal scale has in fact largely occurred in the United States already. The question that the dying Republic yields, therefore, is not whether the Republic will be restored but rather how those Middle Americans who were the nucleus of the American Republic, who retain the vestiges of public virtue, and who now find themselves the victims of the new imperium can displace the elite that now prevails. The issue, in other words, is: Who, in the wrecked vessel of the American Republic, is to be master? [Article written by Samuel Francis first published in Chronicles magazine -- August, 1991; Republished among a collection of articles written by Samuel Francis in the book Revolution From The Middle, publisher Middle American Press, 1997]