Four Score and Seven Years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, founded in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
-The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln is the Second Founder of America, the Marcus Furius Camillus to George Washington’s Romulus. He supervised the transformation of America from one Republic to another; he died as his task ended, as pagan ritual would command. His memorial is the most sacred place in the American civic religion.
The fact that this still sticks in the craw of Southrons and induces cringe in dissidents is irrelevant. The only thing that matters in politics is winning, and Lincoln won. Coming to power amid the greatest crisis the United States had ever known, he achieved all of his political goals, and permanently ended the division of half-slave and half-free.1 He remade America in his image. To recognize this is but to demonstrate historical awareness.
And that is not the only time that’s happened.
It is a commonplace among the dissident right that America 2024 is utterly unlike what America was intended to be. What is less well-understood is the manner in which this happened. Ideologies tend to posit negative outcomes as proceeding from the machinations of wicked conspiracies, which dramatizes and moralizes the political activity of classes and interest groups. History has consequences, and one of those consequences is change. No political entity remains static in the face of time’s march. A monarchy goes through many monarchs, and the monarchy grows stronger, or grows weaker, and this has consequences. And a republic changes, too, as it gains strength and territory, as it alters its wealth and population. All of this was observed by Aristotle and others long ago.
Thus, a macro-view of American political history will note several alterations to the original regime. To my view, there are three distinct periods, Three Republics:
The Federation
The Grand Republic
The Global American Empire
First American Republic: the Federation (1776-1861)
A short explanation of what The Federation was:
Merchant republic of former British Colonies, expanding into North American wilderness.
Low political centralization, with small standing military
Buy-in from yeoman class
Continental territorial expansion, driven by popular emigration, to which borders and institutions came later.
Regional socio-economic differences papered over, until crisis
This was the Republic George Washington and the rest of the Framers intended, what the Constitution specifies. It was patterned after ancient republican forms, especially Rome. It was designed to supersede state governments only in particular, mutual areas. This is the regime we pretend to live under.
It died long ago. What killed it wasn’t the Union Army, they simply applied the coup de grace. What killed it was expansion.
The American Republic expanded faster and more relentlessly during the Federation period than at any time in its history. Within 72 years of declaring Independence, 65 years of achieving independence, and 59 years of the inauguration of George Washington as President, the the present borders of the contiguous United States — and area equivalent to all of Europe excluding Russia — had been established, Sea to Shining Sea. The 13 states of 1776 were 34 by 1861.
As noted above, this expansion was not a product of specific policy on the part of the national government. Even in the case of Texas and the Mexican Cession, the Federal government was led by events rather than leading them. The American people dictated the expansion, without writ from the government, and often in contradiction to that government’s stated policy and treaty arrangements.
We have been trained to call this expansion “Manifest Destiny”, a phrase coined by a newspaper editor in 1845 who never went any further west than Manhattan. No one who actually crossed the Mississippi cared a damn for it. The mantra of the people who provoked the last international war on the North American continent wasn’t “Manifest Destiny” but “GTT” — Gone to Texas — a pre-internet meme left on abandoned farmsteads all through the Old South by people who wanted new vistas. They didn’t Go To Texas because of some religio-nationalist codswallop but because it was there, and if they could conquer it, they could make it theirs. And they did so, absolutely indifferent to what anybody in New York — then or now — thought of it.
When the Spanish Empire had moved ruthlessly north from Mexico City in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dominating, killing, and subjugating native tribes along the way, it had done so in an extremely organized, centrally controlled fashion. Military presidios and Catholic missions were built and staffed first; soldiers arrived; colonists followed and stayed close to mother’s skirts. The westward push of the Americans followed a radically different course. Its vanguard was not federal troops and federal forts but simple farmers imbued with a fierce Calivinist work ethic, steely optimism, and a cold-eyed aggressiveness that made them refuse to yield even in the face of extreme danger… Government in all its forms lagged behind such frontier folk, often showing up much later and often reluctantly.
-S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, pg. 20
Thus, the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 was a conflict entirely forced on the American government by the American people, or rather, a subset of them who had immigrated to Mexico, refused to abide by the cultural and political standards of Mexico, rebelled, and created a new Republic only because the American government was reluctant to grant them statehood.2 The American government would have preferred to purchase the northern Mexican territories than to conquer them; they offered to buy them in the 1820’s, and even after the war was concluded, gave the Mexican government $15 million in gold as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
The Texas pattern was not a new one: it had been the way Americans had operated since Independence. Daniel Boone did not ask anyone’s permission to bring settlers through the Cumberland Gap and settle Kentucky. Population pressure had brought Englishmen to America: it brought Americans across the Appalachians, the Mississippi, and beyond. Nobody in Congress could do a thing about it, even if they had wanted to.
But each new state threatened the ancient balance between Yankee and Southron that had made the Federation work. The Federation was built upon compromise between North and South; everything from the Electoral College to the placement of our national capitol reflects the need to make Yankee and Southron share power. Relentless expansion made each coalition more and more powerful, until a quaint system of chattel slavery that had followed the labor pattern of the Conquistadors became a Cotton Kingdom with intercontinental trade power, prepared to challenge the industrial might of their northern neighbors. It made the North a playground for capitalists and smokestack barons of every stripe, ready to crisscross the continent in stock, rolling and otherwise.
Conflict was inevitable between two disparate ruling classes, especially as the cultural differences between them grew with each new state they collected. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis both agreed that the nation could not remain half-slave and half-free. They disagreed only on the solution.
Second American Republic: The Grand Republic (1861-1941)
The Great Republic was Winston Churchill’s title of his history of the United States. He was the British statesmen who saw said Republic transform into something else. The America he knew, the America his mother came from, was this:
Major Continental power
Able to control its near-abroad
Imperial designs on Pacific
Like Germany and Japan, a latecomer to empire building
Increasing centralization
Industrial social disruption
Able to engage on the world stage at its own discretion
There are several major shifts from the Federation to the Grand Republic, but the major one is the transition from popular expansion to imperial expansion. The vast western areas taken by 1848 were sufficient to meet remaining population pressure needs. In fact, we start seeing the beginnings of population shift away from wild open spaces and into the teeming industrial cities.
The main political consequence of the Northern industrial oligarchs casting down the Southern agrarian oligarchs is the shift in voting power from the rural freeholders to the urban proletariat. The workers, hungry, numerous, often recently arrived, could easily outvote the hinterlands, when motivated to do so. Thus, the Grand Republic is the great age of the Political Machine, of political bosses seizing control of city governments through electoral chicanery. Democracy in America has never been as honest as it pretends to be,3 but during this time the line between municipal government and organized crime was practically erased, before Prohibition made it obvious.
Prohibition was one of the reactionary fevers that gripped the Grand Republic, a moment of rural Protestant rage against the insidious cities. The National Grange and Populists movements were of a piece with this. They all failed. Rural America flexed its last in this era, and the Yeomanry of Thomas Jefferson’s dreams were chained to a cross of gold and left to die.
So expansion during this era was of an an entirely different character than the Federation period, driven not by population pressure but by commercial interest. The Grand Republic only acquired two future states: Alaska, which remains a cold frontier land, and Hawaii, which despite being incorporated is functionally a protectorate.
American conquests in this era were largely protectorates: The Phillipines, Cuba, Panama, Puerto Rico. Most of these were acquired in a war that marked a turning point in American history. The Spanish-American War did not gain new territory for Americans to move into, but imperial possessions, to be leveraged for resources, or to function as way stations for further interactions abroad. There was little gain for the people from the Spanish-American War, but everything for the plutocrats and military. That’s why it was a war that had to be sold, and by the selfsame yellow journalists who had made their bones leading internal calls for reform. The pictures were furnished, the war was furnished, the people followed the propaganda clarion like lemmings to the sea, as they have done ever since.
America was not seen by the major powers of the day as on their tier, but neither could they properly ignore her. Thanks to a steady policy of rapprochment with Great Britain beginning with the Grant Administration, the USA enjoyed increasingly friendly relations with her former overlord, and was treated as at least a secondary power by the rest. The USA had a delegation at the Berlin Conference of 1885, participated in the international campaign against the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, and brokered peace between Russia and Japan in 1905. The opinion of the Americans was not authoritative in the days of the Grand Republic, but it was heard.
These international adventures were precisely that: adventures, voluntarily engaged in and voluntarily withdrawn from (at the Berlin Conference, The United States reserved the right to accept or reject any of the treaties stipulations), according to its own mood. America had little interest in the politics of the Old World and would have been entirely content to avoid participation in the First World War had the Germans not threatened international shipping and sent meddling messages to Mexico. At least, the American people would have, and probably most of Congress. But the armaments and shipping industries had a significant stake in the outcome, and that meant our friendship with Britain made us enemies of Germany, whether we wanted to be or not.
Woodrow Wilson cast our participation in WWI as a crusade for democracy, a radical reorientation of global politics. But we were not strong enough to create that yet. The American people did not see a purpose to it, and wanted nothing to do with the League of Nations. To fight the Germans was one thing, to police them afterwards, quite another. America wanted to return to dreaming to itself.
It was not to be. The same dynamic that made us not-quite-neutral to the Second Reich made us even-less-neutral to the Third. And the consequences of our Pacific expansion in the 1890’s pitted us against another rising empire, one committed to being the dominant power in Asia. We provoked the Japanese by economic sanctions, and then sat surprised when they followed the logic of our actions.4 At dawn we slept; at dusk we were at war with the world.
Third American Republic: The Global American Empire (1941-???)
The psychological consequences of Pearl Harbor to the American people cannot be overstated. Never before at any time in our history, had we been subject to a military attack from a global power, without being aware that such an attack was coming.5 For over a century Americans had believed that the oceans kept them safe from foreign attack. Pearl Harbor ended all of that. Now the people understood that the world must be made safe for democracy. Now the world must be pacified. The Holocaust was a foreign cruelty; it was Pearl Harbor of which Americans truly said “Never Again”.
And in order for this to be accomplished, the American Republic transformed into something George Washington would have found unrecognizable:
Global Economic Hegemon
Alliance-based Imperial System, similar to the Delian League of Ancient Athens
Dominance of political system by “Iron Triangle” of bureaucrats, interest groups, and politicians
Industrial production exported to neocolonial vassal states
Hellenistic dissolution of social order
Nietzschean replacement of religious communities with market-created identities.
In 1945 the United States stood over the world like a colossus. Not only had it built, almost from scratch, an army of millions, but it had come away from the war with its industrial base untouched and its population intact. And it had built the most terrifying weapon the world had ever seen, and used it to bring its enemy to its knees.
But that was only what was on the surface. The true dominance of America, the thing that makes the empire American pretends it doesn’t have work, was economic, and especially financial.
In July 1944 delegates from 44 countries met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to work out a postwar global financial system. John Maynard Keynes wanted to create a Central global bank, and a new currency for this, which he termed “the bancor”. Instead, the United States insisted on using the dollar as the worlds global reserve currency, backed by gold. Then, in 1971, when the cost of redeeming dollars for gold became untenable, President Richard Nixon announced unilaterally that the US government simply would not do so anymore. This was formally agreed to by the International Monetary Fund in the Jamaica accords in 1976. By this point, everyone was used to trading in dollars, and the American economy, while by no means as overpowering as in 1945, was still the most important. Dollars were safe, dollars were reliable.
Dollars were weapons. To trade in dollars was to need America, to need America was to submit to military, political, and financial terms to the Bretton Woods order. If you wanted to develop your nation, you needed the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations. At some point, you must get on friendly terms with the hegemon. All markets led to Washington.
And this created the circumstances under which the Cold War was truly fought. In 1947, just at the dawn of this Shadow Third World War, a diplomat named George Kennan wrote6 an article in Foreign Affairs, laying out the strategy the US would adopt for the next 45 years: Containment. In a nutshell, Kennan observed that Soviet Communism was untenable as a long-term system. The goal was not to destroy the Soviet Union directly, but to hold it in check until it collapsed of its own contradictions. The Communist Party, argued Kennan, survived because of iron discipline and intransigence; if it blinked once, its entire edifice would come crashing down.
Which is, in effect, what happened. Observing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, P.J. O’Rourke wrote the victory hymn of the Containment strategy:
And the best thing about our victory is the way we did it — not just with ICBM’s and Green Berets and aid to the contras. Those things were important, but in the end we beat them with Levis 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system with all its tanks and guns, gulag camps and secret police was brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes. They may have had the soldiers and the warheads and the fine-sounding ideology that suckered the college students and the nitwit Third-Worlders, but we had all the fun. Now they’re lunch, and we’re number one on the planet.
-P.J. O’Rourke “The Death of Communism”
There are two things to takeaway from this. First, it’s triumphal nature. The collapse of the Soviet Union was as important a victory as the conquest of Nazi Germany, and for the same reason: a system entirely contrary to our own, based on societies almost entirely alien to our own7, was cast down by our efforts. We defeated nations that first entered world history in Roman/Medieval times, with nothing but sheer economic power.8 The final line “we’re number one on the planet” has been the guiding principle of our foreign policy for the last thirty years. No one is our peer; no one is untouchable. We are the superpower; everyone else will emulate us or be buried.
The second takeaway is the extent O’Rourke relies not upon ideas, but on cultural markers: 501 jeans and Sony Walkmans and cool sneakers. And these markers are consumer products, things to be sold, less for the needs they fulfill (every society has clothes and music), but as memes embodying the pleasure of consumption. This is what ate Communism from the inside: it was, as perhaps few ideologies are, singularly without pleasure. It speaks to righteousness and contempt, but not pleasure. Even Nazis could enjoy paintings of naked peasant girls tastefully rendered. Communism is all work, all virtue, all hatred, all the time. That can’t last. An American diplomat figured that out in 1947.
But this means that the struggle against Communism could only be accomplished indirectly. Which means that huge swaths of a titanic global struggle were relegated to things the American public did not see. Korea and Vietnam were the exceptions, and both of these peripheral wars were deeply unpopular9 precisely because the voting public saw no purpose to the bodybags. The real war was in the shadows: in guerrilla wars funded, politicians assassinated, elections meddled with, and endless treaties and trade compacts and weapons sales. Only official narrative versions of these ever filtered to the American public.
A covert war has political consequences. If the American people cannot be relied upon to support the necessary strategy, then they must not be given a say. CIA must be given a free hand. The Military-Industrial Complex must be given as much of the public treasury as can be afforded. Who we are doing things to and the way we are doing them is not to be debated, so it must be done behind the scenes, with plausible deniability. The Global American Empire is invisible, an assumption of supremacy rather than a marker on a map. We have added no new official territories since the early 20th century, but the entire world feels our presence.
The Founder of this empire, the Third Founder of the Republic, died in the struggle to bring it to life. After Washington and Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt cast the strongest stamp on American political life. No President since has been as politically successful or as radical. As an economic palliative, the New Deal remains deeply questionable. As a political platform, it utterly transformed the nature of the Republic. FDR was the apotheosis of American Progressivism as a call to cast aside traditional pieties. In the Great Depression, Liberty was nothing, sacrificed for the other revolutionary ideals of Equality and Brotherhood. And this heady mixture was to be transported to the world, a humanitarian alternative to Nazi race-hatred and Communist class-hatred10. America would never abandon the world stage again, but would lead it, run it.
Roosevelt, an ebullient leader who used charm to maintain his aloofness, was an ambiguous combination of political manipulator and visionary. He governed more often by instinct than by analysis, and evoked strongly contrasting emotions. As has been summarized by Isaiah Berlin, Roosevelt had serious shortcomings of character, which included unscrupulousness, ruthlessness, and cynicism… This was the President who propelled America into a leadership role internationally, an environment where questions of war or peace, progress or stagnation all around the world came to depend on his personal commitment.
-Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, pg. 371
FDR’s America was a country dominated by media narratives, in which an ever larger Federal Government expanded into ever more areas of life, making ever more international commitments, and leveraging these commitments to make its allies tow the American line. After the war, ongoing American military presence in and dominance of Western Europe was formalized in NATO.
Ostensibly an expansion of the wartime British, French, and American alliance, NATO has become the modern equivalent of the Delian League. That ancient compact of Greek city-states was dominated by Athens, and historians have called it The Athenian Empire, a term no Athenian would have used. Thucydides recorded how Athens arranged for the other League members to pay their military share in money rather than ships or men, a situation that NATO eerily echos. For generations our allies have been relying on American militaries rather than their own. To wonder at how this can be is to imagine that we do not prefer it that way.
Alliance between unequal states devolves into empire, and the dominant state sullies its political traditions11 in order to maintain its pre-eminence. There is nothing new under the sun.
Conclusion
The preceding, despite its length, is only a sketch of the overall idea. American history has gone through phases, marked by increasing international power at the expense of decreasing popular control. The question is, what comes next. Astute readers will have noticed that the first two republics had roughly 80-year lifespans, ending in dramatic wars, one Civil, the other Global. Since we are 80 years from World War II, the obvious temptation is to wonder if current international dramas harken a new Transformation: a Fourth Republic, or perhaps an Overt Empire, like the Romans had.
I am not in the habit of making predictions. I will only say that transformation continues apace. To call American global hegemony, which is acknowledged, an empire, is but to call the truth out of the shadows. That empire’s continued existence depends entirely on whether it is well or badly run.
I am not here to argue the point of whether the Civil War was about Slavery. Of course it was. One has only to read the documents of secession. Slavery was not merely an economic practice in the Old South; it was the linchpin of their society. Abolitionists were not just smug preening puritans to them — after Haiti and Nat Turner, abolitionists were the equivalent of terrorists. And as soon as an abolitionist acted like a terrorist, the South felt they had no choice but to break away. Neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis caused the war: Jon Brown did.
People absorb this fact and then are mystified why anyone would oppose mass immigration. Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
Gerrymandering, named for Elbridge Gerry, signer of the Constitution and fifth Vice-President of the United States, is as old as the Republic. No one is going to do anything about it, except complain when the other side does it.
Denied oil from America, Imperial Japan had but one place to acquire it: The Dutch East Indies. Securing sea routes to the Dutch East Indies required control of the Phillipines, as they were in the way. Control of the Phillipines meant war with the United States, so obviously the best way to inaugurate such a conflict would be a surprise attack on the American navy. It worked against the Russians at Port Arthur in 1904…
The White House being burned by the British in 1814 is by contrast a meaningless footnote: the government escaped, the British campaign was defeated at Baltimore, and in any case we had declared war on them, so that was within the bounds of accepted possibility. When UK Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Washington in 2004, he made a quip about it to a joint session of Congress, to great laughter.
Under a pseudonym. He called himself “X”. Stay mad, facetards.
The American equivalent of the Prussian Junkers and the Russian intelligentsia has never existed. We’re too young a country to have classes that firmly ensconced.
Stalin pithily summed up the Allied victory against the Germans as being won by British brains, American brawn, and Russian blood. “Brawn” in this sense meant industrial might.
Harry Truman, remembered as a blunt public servant and sage, left office in 1953 with lower approval ratings than George W. Bush, lower even than Richard Nixon on the day of his resignation, all because of the Korean War. Vietnam caused one of the most brilliant political tacticians of the 20th century, who had won election in a landslide in 1964, to throw the towel in.
Roosevelt was certainly softer on Communism, especially during the War. He favored Stalin over Churchill and tended to let the Soviets have anything they asked for. Had he taken a stronger line, Truman’s reaction need not have been so stark.
Pericles created a host of political offices to maintain League commitments, garrison commanders, a diplomatic corps, and tribute overseers.
Outstanding.
Very well written and interesting.