Wednesday is Constitution Day, the date on which that venerable document was signed by the delegates to the convention that drafted it. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it’s worth asking ourselves whether we are still capable of keeping the republic it created.
The United States was the first nation in the history of the world to attempt to govern an extended territory via republican self-government. This mode of rule that seems so normal to us today was, in fact, a radical experiment. A betting man back in 1787 would have been forgiven if he had bet heavily on its failure.
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The Founding Fathers carefully studied prior efforts at republican self-government and knew its inherent ailments. Internal, factional strife was the normal cause of a regime’s collapse, and division in dealing with foreign powers was another. Therefore, they crafted the Constitution to minimize the dangers from each threat, thereby maximizing the odds that their creation would endure.
Two hundred thirty-eight years later, we know they were largely successful. America has never been played by a ruthless enemy who divided our loyalties and played one side against another. Nor have we fallen prey to the endemic cycle of violent revolutions that condemned ancient democracies to bloody failure.
That’s not to say that self-government has been easy or that debate has always been calm. Politics ain’t beanbag, the saying goes, and democratic debate is always shrill, angry, and direct. It has nonetheless rarely been accompanied by the violent passions that rocked the ancient and medieval worlds, or which even today have caused republics such as Spain, France, and Germany to collapse within the last century.
That has largely been due to two reasons. First, one side in a dispute usually wins rapidly and undisputedly when passions rise to a boiling point. The election of 1800, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Civil Rights Era — each of these highly contentious times culminated in clear victories for one group of partisans that then established a new reigning orthodoxy.
That orthodoxy crucially always gave the defeated side room to exist and flourish. President Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans did not launch a purge of the defeated Federalists, and Roosevelt’s Democrats established an extensive new federal government while retaining the basic elements of free capitalism. This meant that the defeated side had no motive to turn to violence — they could retain their property and their rights as citizens despite their loss.
That fact brings us to the second, more important reason for our republic’s endurance: the idea of the loyal opposition. Modern democracy differs from its ancient and medieval counterparts in this respect. One can today virulently disagree with the nation’s rulers and organize to remove them from power without being considered disloyal or traitorous.
That concept rests on the idea that there is a public good that exists beyond the public orthodoxy and policies of a particular regime. So long as a political actor works within the constitutional contours, seeking to persuade rather than command, people have largely been willing to treat a victor as legitimate and worthy of being obeyed.
The Civil War is the one great exception to this pattern. The debate over slavery was one that increasingly drove partisans on both sides to consider those on the other as beyond the pale. Rhetoric intensified, and so did violence. Think of Bloody Kansas, the caning of Massachusetts abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner on the Senate floor by a South Carolinian representative, and John Brown’s attempt at fomenting a slave insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, are etched in the national memory.
Southern secession was the ultimate expression of disregard for republican government. President Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860 was the last straw for them. The republic could not exist, in their view, if slavery were to be placed on the course to its ultimate extinction. And so the war came.
Kirk’s murder is just the latest indication that our politics is dissolving the vital concept of the loyal opposition. We’ve all noted the rising heated rhetoric, especially that emanating from the institutions dominated by the political left. When that side labels its political opponents as fascists and Nazis bent on destroying democracy, it’s easy to see how fevered minds could take that as a call to arms.
Jan. 6, 2021, is another example of how unjustified inflammatory rhetoric pushes the unstable to violence. President Donald Trump did not ask his followers to storm the Capitol, but it’s not surprising that they did, given that they were being told their republic was being stolen from them by Congress as it certified the Electoral College result.
We see this intensification of political conflict throughout our daily lives. Liberal judges enjoin Trump policies on the flimsiest of grounds, using law to fight political battles they have, for the present, lost in the court of public opinion. Trump pushes the dial on executive power beyond 11 on a host of issues, daring the Supreme Court to rule against him. The dispute over his comprehensive tariffs is only the latest high-profile case that the court will have to decide in the next year or two.
These practices and tendencies can cease to be consistent with our republican, constitutional heritage only if one side prevails in elections by large margins in the near future. That’s how Presidents Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan established new modes and orders over intense opposition. The fact that our ongoing battle has been locked in a near 50-50 outcome for roughly 30 years has simply increased the tensions, thereby increasing the stakes of each election.
It did not used to be the case that every election was considered to be the most important in our lifetime, one where victory was considered vital to national survival. That kind of focus and passion is not helpful to continued constitutional and republican order.
If the 50-50 division continues, history tells us we should expect more violence, not less.
History also points toward dismal options to resolve such interminable, irreconcilable conflicts. The most common outcome is tyranny: One side triumphs and removes the defeated side’s rights — and often its liberty, property, and lives. The harsher elements of that outcome are difficult to imagine in America, but it’s not hard to imagine a world where the victors limit the speech of the vanquished in the name of national unity.
The religious wars of 16th- and 17th-century Europe point out two other possible outcomes: separation and extreme federalism. If two parties can no longer live with each other in peace, the most peaceful solution is to agree to let each side go its separate way. It’s not too hard to imagine a Pacific America consisting of the blue Western states and an Atlantic America comprising the Acela Corridor and New England thriving while the rest of America, overwhelmingly Republican and Trumpist, charts its own course.
Extreme federalism would essentially return America to the limited federal government of the early 19th century, one where federal power was primarily concentrated on foreign affairs. This would mean that the scope of national individual rights would be severely curtailed: The Bill of Rights’ protections and their extension to the states through the 14th Amendment could not survive a return to this system. But such a return would allow California to chart its progressive domestic course while permitting Alabama to institute its preferred vision of Christian democracy, thereby removing some of the root causes animating our divisions from national discourse.
Those of us dedicated to constitutional republicanism now face a time for choosing. Do we still want a United States of America, one that is capable of acting as a nation domestically and internationally subject to the considered opinion of the people? Or has that experiment run its course, forcing us to choose between a loose or nonexistent union or a tyrannical one based on “values” rather than the Founders’ noble vision?
The only course capable of keeping us free, both internally from our adversaries’ passions and externally from our enemies’ designs, is the one we have traditionally taken: finding a democratic way to unmistakably resolve our disputes in one direction while providing ample space for the defeated to live decent, dignified lives. That way, in turn, means crafting a message and a set of policies that ends the 50-50 division to create a 55-45 or 60-40 one. And that course means shifting political strategy from the mobilization of a base to persuasion of the middle.
Trump has slowly been doing that despite all odds. His popular vote victory in 2024 is proof of that. More telling is the partisan shift that has accompanied his time in public life.
2024 was the first presidential election since 1932 in which more voters said they were Republicans than Democrats. That means people in the middle are starting to shift rightward, a development that bodes well for a resolution of our disputes in the conservative direction if it continues.
Getting there won’t be easy. Rhetoric is always sharp in defining election periods as the stakes are high. But once that defining victory is achieved and then ratified by a subsequent landslide win, things change. The losers see that there’s a new playing field, the stakes lower, and normal politics, and peaceful politics, return.
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That, not triumph at all costs, must be the conservative aim.
This Constitution Day, let all of us rededicate ourselves to the pursuit of that course. Let us resolve to pursue a republican remedy for political ills and reject the vain pursuit of victory at the expense of our national heritage. Let us, once more, show that Americans can keep the republic we have been bequeathed, and in doing so continue to keep the U.S. the shining city on a hill that the world can seek to emulate.