When I read The Independent article linked below, I immediately recalled what I call here, in my response essay, The Catalan Principle. The contrast seemed too telling to ignore. Although I do not, in truth, endorse the sanction discussed—certainly not in ordinary circumstances—the historical example provides a striking counterpoint to the modern rhetoric of punishment directed only at the powerless.
Medieval Catalonia—a principality within the Crown of Aragon, governed by its own Cortes and its own body of law—developed one of Europe’s most exacting systems for regulating bankers. This severe and unforgiving regime was born not of vengeance, but of a sober understanding of where real civic danger, and indeed real violence, actually lay. The legislators knew that a banker held the community’s life in his hands. A single failure of trust could ruin families, wipe out savings, and collapse the economic life of a city, indeed, a region. They therefore placed the full burden of responsibility on the man seated at the banker’s bench—the banca, the literal table or counter from which he conducted his trade and at which depositors entrusted him with their funds (the same bench that, when broken, gave us the word bankrupt).
Beginning in 1300, a banker was personally liable for every entry in his sworn journal, his entire estate pledged to his depositors. Should he fail, he was immediately proclaimed bankrupt and disgraced, then confined on bread and water until he made every injured party whole. In 1321, the Cortes went further: a banker who failed to repay his depositors—within one year for past failures, or immediately thereafter—was to be proclaimed bankrupt throughout Catalonia, beheaded, and his property liquidated for restitution. Most strikingly, the law added:
The sovereign may not pardon him unless his creditors have been fully satisfied.
No royal favoritism.
No political clemency.
No early counterpart to the corrupt presidential or gubernatorial pardons used to absolve wealthy offenders in the present era for their financial and other crimes.
This was not theoretical. In 1360, the banker Francesch Castello was beheaded in front of his own bench—the very table at which he had accepted deposits—after failing to repay those whose savings he held in trust. The medieval world understood that economic destruction is a form of violence, and that the most consequential harms are often inflicted by those with power, not by those without it.
Which brings us to idea voiced recently by billionaire Joe Lonsdale for a return to public hangings as a display of “masculine leadership.” His proposed spectacle targets the familiar objects of elite contempt: the poor, the desperate, the socially marginal. Crime, in his imagination, flows upward from the street, not downward from the boardroom.
But consider what a medieval-style code would demand today. If we applied the Catalan principle—that those who hold the wealth of others in trust bear the highest responsibility—we would direct our harshest penalties not at the powerless, but at:
executives who obliterate pensions through financial engineering,
bank officers whose decisions wipe out depositors,
corporate officers whose malfeasances and misfeasances devastate multitudes, in some instances, entire communities,
institutional leaders who destroy livelihoods while shielding their officers through legal artifice.
Would Lonsdale applaud that as “masculine leadership”? Or is his appetite for the gallows limited to those who possess nothing worth stealing?
The Catalan legislators understood something our own era too often obscures: the powerful commit the greatest harms, and justice serves the common good only when it restrains them first.
What Lonsdale demands is not justice but hierarchy—punishment downward, indulgence upward. The medieval world, in this case, was the more virtuous, the more honest. It placed the noose (or lowered the axe, as the case may be) where the damage was greatest: at the bench of the wealthy who had destroyed the lives of others, and it did not permit them to purchase their way out of accountability.
Source: Usher, A. Payson. (1943). The early history of deposit banking in Mediterranean Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard university press, 239-242.
THOMAS COUTURE – Los Romanos de la Decadencia (Museo de Orsay, 1847)
“Est igitur, inquit Africanus, res publica res populi; populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus.”
“Well, then, a commonwealth is the property of a people. But a people is not any collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good.”
— Cicero, De Re Publica I.xxv (39), trans. Clinton W. Keyes-Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica
The Romans named the commonwealth theres publica—the public thing. Ours has become theres mercatoria—the mercantile thing.
I. Form Without Spirit
Republics seldom die by sword or decree. They decay in silence—eroding first in spirit, then in habit, until only the forms remain. The flag still waves, oaths are still sworn, the Capitol dome still gleams in the sun. Yet beneath that marble permanence lies a slow petrification of the civic soul.
Cicero defined the res publica as “the property of the people”—a common good bound by shared agreement on law and justice. But when the people cease to agree on what law means, or what justice demands, the Republic endures only as silhouette. Its forms persist out of inertia, its substance preserved only in ritual memory.
We have reached that stage of endurance. The Republic survives, but uninhabited. Its spirit has withdrawn, its voice replaced by noise.
II. The Market’s Triumph Over the Polis
The hollowing began not in our politics but in our economy. The citizen was slowly replaced by the consumer; civic virtue yielded to commercial appetite.
This transformation did not occur by chance. It was conceived in the classrooms of Vienna and Chicago, where Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman re-imagined freedom itself as a function of the market. Their disciples translated this theory into policy through Ronald Reagan and their obedient acolytes, who proclaimed that government was the problem and private enterprise the measure of liberty.
The revolution was cultural as much as economic. In 1971, Lewis Powell—soon to be a Supreme Court Justice—sent a confidential memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warning that American business faced an existential threat from critics of capitalism. His solution: a coordinated campaign to capture the institutions that shape public opinion—universities, media, courts, and legislatures. The result was a new institutional order: the Business Roundtable, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and a constellation of think tanks and lobbying arms that would spend decades re-educating the political class in the gospel of deregulation, privatization, and permanent growth.
By the 1980s this ideology had become orthodoxy. The social compact that once bound liberty to responsibility was rewritten so that profit alone defined the good. The public good became whatever advanced shareholder value and citizenship became an economic function.
Thus the res publica—the public thing—was supplanted by the res mercatoria—the mercantile thing. The Romans had no such term, for they could not imagine a world in which commerce would claim sovereignty over the commonwealth. But the new condition requires a new name.
The irony of this transformation is ancient and bitter. For most of Christian history, the merchant stood outside the moral order—necessary, perhaps, but suspect. The early Church Fathers—Ambrose, Tertullian, Leo the Great—condemned merchants outright, inheriting from Plato (Republic) and Aristotle (Politics Book VII, Ch. IX, 1328b-1329a) the conviction that trade was ignoble and inimical to virtue. By the Middle Ages, this judgment had softened but not disappeared. Augustine warned extensively against avarice, that “uncleanness of heart” which weighed down the soul and bound it to perishing things (Sermon 177). Aquinas, centuries later, distinguished carefully: exchange for necessity was commendable, but trading for profit was “justly deserving of blame, because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity” (Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 77, Art. 4). Such trading, he wrote, had “a certain debasement attaching thereto”—it engaged the mind too much with worldly cares and withdrew it from spiritual ones (Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 77, Art. 4). Wealth was a burden to be borne, not a sign of virtue. The Gospels themselves spoke plainly: it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:24).
The Reformation reversed this judgment. Labor became a vocation, profit a sign of election, diligence and thrift the new sacraments of grace. The theological architecture of this reversal is visible in Calvin’s 1545 Letter on Usury, which systematically dismantled thirteen centuries of prohibition. Calvin reinterpreted Luke 6:35—”lend, expecting nothing in return”—as a call to charity toward the poor, not a ban on commercial lending. He dismissed Aquinas’s argument that money was sterile and consumed in its use as “too frivolous” and “childish,” insisting instead that money, like land, could legitimately generate return through productive employment. Most decisively, Calvin divorced usury from property rights and natural law, relocating its ethics in “equity” and “mutual benefit”—a standard flexible enough to bless commerce while condemning exploitation. Yet even Calvin betrayed unease: “it would be good to desire that usurers were expelled from the entire world,” he wrote, before immediately adding, “but since that is impossible we must submit to a common utility.” The tension was never resolved; it was merely buried beneath the momentum of markets.
What Max Weber would later identify as “the Protestant ethic” emerged: the doctrine of predestination created psychological need for visible signs of election, and worldly success became such a sign. Labor was no longer penance but calling; profit no longer suspect but evidence of grace rightly used. The Puritan divine Richard Baxter made this explicit: “If God shew you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way, (without wrong to your soul, or to any other) if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and you refuse to be Gods Steward, and to accept his gifts, and use them for him when he requireth it” (Christian Directory, 1673).
In America, this theology found its most radical expression: a nation that declared itself divinely ordained to prosper, its wealth evidence of providence rather than plunder. The monastery yielded to the countinghouse, the community of faith to the individual of conscience; and the Temple to the money-lenders’ tables. The merchant was redeemed and enthroned, and the marketplace declared holy ground. Yet in this sanctification lay the seed of perversion. What had been a warning against excess became a theology of excess; what had been humility became self-justification. The camel, still unable to traverse the eye of the needle, now claims the needle has widened to accommodate its girth. Thus, through inversion disguised as progress, the old economy of salvation became the new salvation of economy.
Interlude: The Shining Hill and the Idol of Gold
Perhaps this explains the American paradox: the Republic imagined itself a shining city on a hill, a light unto nations. Yet what if that light was never the flame of civic virtue but the glitter of commerce—the reflected gleam of Mammon’s altar? The founders spoke of liberty, but liberty yoked to profit soon ceases to be freedom and becomes appetite enthroned. The idol of gold, once condemned by prophets, now governs the temples of exchange. Thus the Republic mistook the radiance of avarice for the light of grace, and called its marketplace a sanctuary.
If Mammon once ruled the countinghouse, he now reigns through the circuit and the screen.
III. The Digital Usurpation
If the market stripped the Republic of its moral substance, technology has stripped it of its perceptual one. The Internet, once envisioned as a global commons, has been enclosed by a handful of private empires: Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and X.
These companies now mediate nearly every act of citizenship—our speech, assembly, education, even our perception of truth. They claim to connect the world, yet in practice divide it into markets of attention and identity.
Their infrastructures are not neutral. Algorithms decide what can be seen, heard, and believed. Platforms that once promised dialogue now amplify division because outrage is more profitable than understanding. Truth has been outcompeted by virality.
Consider the architecture of a Facebook feed. It does not present information chronologically or randomly, but according to a hidden formula designed to maximize “engagement”—a euphemism for time spent, which translates to advertising revenue. Posts that trigger anger, fear, or tribal affirmation rise to the top; nuance sinks. The algorithm knows no truth, only metrics of return. The result is a kind of epistemic Darwinism in which the most emotionally inflammatory content survives and the most thoughtful perishes unseen.
This is not a bug but the business model. The platform does not sell connection; it sells attention. And attention, in this economy, is harvested through the deliberate fragmentation of shared reality.
What Orwell feared as censorship has become something subtler: curation. The public square has been replaced by the private feed. We are no longer silenced—we are distracted. And distraction, as the tyrants of old never mastered, is the most perfect instrument of control.
IV. The Propaganda Apparatus
Every empire needs its heralds. In the modern order, propaganda no longer marches beneath banners; it wears the costume of journalism.
The Murdoch media empire—Fox News, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial arm, The New York Post, The Times and The Sun in Britain, Sky News in Australia—has perfected this form of propaganda as entertainment. It does not so much persuade as condition.
By flooding the public square with grievance, spectacle, and especially fear, it transforms political life into perpetual theater. Its message is not ideology but emotion: outrage as identity, resentment as belonging. The goal is not to convince the citizen, but to exhaust him—to make deliberation impossible by ensuring that no common truth remains to deliberate about.
The method is simpler than it appears: repeat the lie, normalize the outrage, monetize the attention. Truth becomes just another narrative competing for airtime—and in that competition, truth is structurally disadvantaged. It cannot offer the satisfactions of tribal belonging that propaganda provides. Thus the empire does not need to censor; it merely drowns signal in noise until citizens, exhausted by the effort of discernment, surrender their capacity for judgment altogether.
The old tyrannies burned books; this one drowns them in noise.
V. The Corporations as Princes
It is no longer sufficient to speak in abstractions. The hollowing of the Republic has addresses, headquarters, and quarterly reports.
Sphere of Life
De Facto Sovereign
Instrument of Power
Speech & Assembly
Meta, X, Alphabet
Algorithmic reach, moderation, shadow banning
Commerce & Supply
Amazon, Apple
Infrastructure, logistics, payments
Knowledge & Memory
Google, OpenAI
Indexing, generation, curation of information
Currency & Capital
BlackRock, Vanguard, JPMorgan
Financial concentration, policy leverage
Imagination & Desire
Disney, Netflix, TikTok
Narrative control, aesthetic conditioning
News & Ideology
Fox News / News Corp
Manufactured outrage, narrative distortion
These are not metaphorical princes. They set policy without election, levy fees without representation, and administer justice without appeal—the very acts that once defined sovereignty.
Together they form what might be called The Architecture of Dominion: a network of powers that administer daily life more effectively than any elected government, yet without transparency, consent, or accountability.
VI. The Capture of the Political Class
The final conquest of the Republic occurred when its political machinery was wholly absorbed by the same forces that had already claimed its markets, media, and imagination.
The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission declared that corporations possess a First Amendment right to spend unlimited sums to influence elections. With that ruling, the barrier between wealth and sovereignty collapsed. Money became speech, and therefore power.
In the years that followed, the American two-party system—already in steady decline as a functional mechanism of representation—was captured outright by oligarchic interests. Campaigns became open auctions, legislators became bought investments, and policies became returns on capital. The parties now differ chiefly in the rhetoric by which they justify serving the same donors.
This demolished the Republic’s ancient defense against oligarchy: the principle that political power derives from citizenship, not property. The legal fiction that corporations are persons—a doctrine conjured by nineteenth-century courts without constitutional warrant—had long troubled the boundary between civic and commercial power. But by extending this extra-constitutional invention to include nearly unlimited political spending, and by declaring money itself to be speech, the Court completed a transformation built not on constitutional text but on judicial fiat. The voices of oligarchs and corporations alike could now be amplified a thousandfold, a millionfold, beyond those of ordinary citizens. When one man’s wealth can purchase more speech than a million voters combined, citizenship ceases to be a meaningful source of political power. What had been a legal convenience became a political weapon—the final triumph of cash over voice, of property over person, of the res mercatoria over the res publica.
This was the Republic’s silent coup. What had once been government of the people became government for the shareholders. The Republic remains as ritual; oligarchy rules in fact.
VII. The Cultural Surrender
While these structures were forming, the culture itself underwent a moral inversion. The intellectual skepticism of the twentieth century—postmodernism’s denial of objective truth—escaped the universities and entered the bloodstream of public discourse.
What began as critique of power became the abdication of reason. Truth was replaced by “personal narrative,” knowledge by “perspective,” and moral judgment by performative empathy. The result is not liberation but solipsism: each of us sovereign within our own unverifiable reality.
Hannah Arendt understood that totalitarianism does not begin with the camps but with the collapse of common worldliness—the destruction of the shared reality that binds men together. She called it organized loneliness: a condition in which individuals, isolated yet interconnected, are governed by narratives they no longer believe but cannot escape. It is the perfect soil for manipulation, for in such loneliness the appetite for belonging overwhelms the duty of thought. The algorithm merely perfected what ideology began: it manufactures isolation and then monetizes the yearning to escape it.
This is the perfect cultural soil for the new oligarchies. For when truth dissolves, authority no longer needs to justify itself—it merely needs to define what truth is today. The relativist becomes the authoritarian’s unwitting ally.
Thus language itself has been weaponized. Freedom means security; dissent becomes hate; lies become “alternative facts.” The corruption of meaning precedes the corruption of law, and the res publica fades from speech before it vanishes from life.
VIII. The Retreat of Education and Virtue
At the heart of every Republic lies paideia—the education of the soul toward wisdom and citizenship. We have replaced it with credentialing and metrics, with the pursuit of “outcomes” rather than understanding.
This transformation, too, bears a lineage. Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, The Role of Government in Education, proposed the idea of school vouchers as a mechanism for privatization under the guise of parental choice. It took root during the backlash to desegregation in the 1960s and matured in the 1980s and 1990s as “school choice” and “charter reform.” Education was recast as a competitive market rather than a civic institution.
The language of civic formation gave way to the rhetoric of productivity. The so-called “education crisis” of the 1980s culminated in A Nation at Risk (1983), which declared that public schools were failing to serve the economy. From that moment, economic utility supplanted intellectual cultivation as the standard of success. The humanities—once the Republic’s nursery of conscience—were defunded, mocked as impractical, or harnessed to “skills-based learning.”
In higher education, the same logic prevailed. University boards filled with corporate executives who treat knowledge as a commodity and students as clients. The algorithm now decides who is admitted, how teaching is evaluated, and which disciplines survive. The classroom itself has become a data laboratory: outcomes tracked, performance engineered, curiosity quantified—education reduced to the management of metrics rather than the cultivation of mind.
A high-school English teacher is evaluated not by her students’ capacity for insight but by “value-added metrics” derived from standardized test scores—metrics that reduce King Lear to a datapoint in a district’s performance dashboard. A university professor knows that thoughtful, difficult texts will harm her evaluation scores, and that those scores will determine her career. The algorithm optimizes for satisfaction, not formation; for comfort, not growth. Thus the institutional incentive is to teach what pleases, not what challenges—to produce consumers of education rather than citizens capable of self-governance.
Washington, in his Farewell Address (1796), warned that morality and religion were the “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. Adams wrote in an October 1798 letter that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and was inadequate to govern any other. We have tested that hypothesis—and proved them right.
IX. The Political Consequence: Empty Institutions
What remains of politics is theater. Legislatures deliberate for the camera; executives govern by fiat; courts arbitrate between corporate interests. Public authority survives as ceremony, while real power migrates to the unelected oligarchs: the financial houses, the data lords, the platform barons, and the propaganda merchants.
The façade of republican government still stands, but within it resides an empire of bureaucracy and capital—not the civil service devoted to civic stewardship, but the corporate bureaucracy of extraction and surveillance. The old tyrants ruled through fear; the new through dependency. The oath of allegiance has been replaced by the click of “I agree.”
We live under what Sheldon Wolin called inverted totalitarianism—a system in which corporate and governmental power fuse seamlessly while citizens, intoxicated by consumption and misled by propaganda, mistake submission for freedom.
X. The Present Condition: The Hollowing Complete
Consider the life now administered by algorithm: a gig worker’s income depends on maintaining a five-star rating from customers who can destroy his livelihood with a single click—customers who are themselves strangers with no accountability for the judgment they render. A young professional’s romantic prospects are curated by an app that reduces human beings to swipeable commodities, optimizing not for companionship but for the addictive dopamine loop that keeps users returning. A family’s access to housing hinges on a credit score calculated by a private company using undisclosed factors—a score that can deny them a home without explanation or appeal.
This is governance without government, sovereignty without accountability. We have comfort, but not character; connection, but not community; information, but not understanding. The Republic’s architecture remains, yet the light that once filled it—the shared moral imagination of a free people—has gone out.
This is not collapse but inversion: the Republic turned inside out, liberty administered by those who profit from dependence. The Republic endures as interface, its promise reduced to user experience, its citizens reborn as users—forever clicking “I agree.”
XI. Memory as Resistance
And yet, memory remains—the one province not yet colonized. Memory is the Republic’s last frontier: the remembrance that truth exists, that words have meaning, that citizenship is not consumption but conscience.
To remember rightly is to resist silently. For the memory of the Republic is not nostalgia but defiance: the assertion that what once was good need not remain lost.
Yet remembrance need not remain abstract; it begins in quiet acts of fidelity. The decision to read a book rather than scroll a feed. The choice to speak in full sentences rather than in slogans. The cultivation of attention in an economy designed to fragment it. The insistence that words still mean what they have always meant—that truth is not “my truth,” that justice is not self-interest dressed in virtue’s language, that freedom is not the absence of constraint but the capacity for self-government.
These are not grand gestures. They are the quiet practices by which a republic is inhabited rather than merely remembered. And from such practices, carried out by enough citizens in enough places, the Republic becomes possible again.
Within the small fidelities of teachers who still teach the canon, of local journalists who still pursue fact rather than traffic, of congregations that maintain common worship in an age of private spirituality, of small business owners who measure success by craft rather than scale, of librarians who curate knowledge rather than data, and of parents who guard their children’s attention from the platforms’ harvest—within these scattered practices, the memory of the Republic endures not as doctrine but as disposition, not as ideology but as habit.
XII. Coda: The Seed Beneath the Ashes
The form of the Republic may endure, but its substance has subsided into memory.
So it seems. Yet memory, if guarded, may become seed once more. The founders built not merely a machine of government, but a moral architecture designed to house what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. The machine still stands. It awaits habitation.
The Republic will rise again only when its citizens once more deserve it—when they reclaim the courage to speak truth, to resist convenience, and to hold power, even digital, financial, and propagandistic power, accountable to the moral law that no algorithm or Supreme Court ruling can repeal.
Until then, the Republic remains—its monuments intact, its meaning in exile. But even exile is not extinction. For memory, like embers beneath the ash, waits for the breath of the living to make it flame again.
The question is not whether the forms of the Republic shall endure—they shall, embalmed in marble and lit by the flicker of screens. The question is whether we shall prove worthy to reinhabit them.
In the photographs taken within the Oval Office (2017, 2025), the seat of American executive authority has been transformed into something older and stranger—a sanctuary of royal consecration. At its center sits Donald J. Trump, head bowed, encircled by ministers and advisers whose hands rest upon him in the gesture of impositio manuum, the laying on of hands. Their eyes are closed, lips moving in prayer, yet their posture speaks less of intercession than of veneration. What unfolds in that moment is not simply political theater but a ritual reenactment of an ancient idea: that power may be embodied, sanctified, and made flesh.
Impositio Manuum 2017
The Reversal of Benediction
In Christian and pre-Christian rites alike, the laying on of hands conveys the transmission of grace or authority. The priest’s touch confers the Spirit upon the baptized; the bishop’s hand consecrates the king. Here, however, the direction of sanctification is reversed. The clergy do not mediate divine blessing to the ruler on behalf of the people; they draw legitimacy from him. The bowed heads and concentric hands create a living reliquary around the sovereign’s body. The Oval Office, ordinarily a stage for civil governance, has been re-imagined as an apse, its curved wall a secular altar niche. What was intended as prayer has become an act of anointment—without chrism, yet heavy with its symbolism. In 2025, the Christian supplicants’ language included a declaration of divine appointment: “You assigned him, you appointed him, you anointed him for such a time as this…”
Impositio Manuum 2025
The Living Law
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, in The King’s Two Bodies, described how medieval jurisprudence conceived the ruler as lex animata—the “living law.” The sovereign’s person contained within it both the mortal, fallible flesh (corpus naturale) and the immortal, juridical body politic (corpus mysticum). Law was not merely administered by the king; it was enfleshed in him. The maxim omnia iura in scrinio pectoris imperatoris—“all laws reside in the emperor’s breast”—expressed the same belief: that the sovereign’s will constituted legality itself.
Trump’s self-understanding, as revealed in his statements that “I (have) the right to do anything that I want to do. I’m the president of the United States,” and that he could even “declassify by thinking” alone, reflects this archaic conception of sovereignty. In the photographs, that philosophy becomes visible form. His body, ringed by supplicants, stands as the physical repository of authority: thought and flesh fused into the living source of law. The constitutional process is eclipsed by a medieval metaphysic—the emperor’s breast revived within a republic.
The Mystical Body of the Republic
In Kantorowicz’s analysis, the king’s dual body was not a theological curiosity but a political necessity: it allowed the continuity of the realm despite the mortality of its ruler. The body politic outlived the natural body through the fiction of divine investiture. Yet in the Oval Office images, the relationship is inverted. The ruler’s flesh absorbs the polity rather than the polity transcending the ruler. The praying ministers become members of his mystical body, as if the state were incarnate in him rather than he in the state. The photographs thus performs a political transubstantiation—the transformation of a secular office into a sacred organism whose head alone is divine.
Iconography of Idolatry
The camera captures only the back of the president’s head in one of the images, a composition that echoes the devotional art of relic veneration. The viewer’s gaze aligns with the worshippers’ hands, all converging on the same luminous focal point: the golden hair, haloed by the light of the room. The gesture is tactile worship, the contact-relic as conduit of grace. In medieval reliquaries, touch transmitted sanctity; here it transmits legitimacy. The image collapses the distinction between religion and politics, portraying a people seeking salvation through proximity to power.
The Return of the Arcane Sovereign
What Kantorowicz chronicled as a vanished theology of monarchy reappears in modern populist guise. The constitutional republic, built upon the rejection of divine kingship, finds itself haunted by its ghost. The sovereign’s “two bodies” are re-fused: the office and the man, the law and the will, the symbol and the flesh. Those who kneel do so not before the law but before its living embodiment. When the sovereign’s body absorbs the state, law becomes indistinguishable from will. In such a regime, dissent is not disagreement—it is heresy. The king’s body, once divided for the safety of the state, is whole again.
The danger lies not only in the man but in the myth reborn around him—the longing for the immediate, the personal, the sacred ruler who is the nation. In that longing, the modern citizen becomes medieval subject once more. And the Oval Office, once the seat of the people’s servant, becomes the sanctuary of an arcane sovereign whose heart, like the emperor’s of old, is presumed to contain all laws within its breast.
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” — Matthew 22:39
“I hate them too. I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really do believe they hate our country.” — President Donald J. Trump, July 3, 2025, Iowa State Fair, speaking of Democrats as the internal enemy
It is not the demagogues who bewilder me. The political class, the oligarchs who sponsor them, and the ambitious mediocrities who ride their coattails—these I understand. Their motives are ancient and ever-recurring: power, wealth, the intoxicating delusion of being above others. History has never lacked for such befouled souls. What confounds me is not their corruption, but the ease with which so many of my fellow citizens—ordinary men and women raised in homes of decency—abandon their values, their civility, and even their reason to follow such selfish and manipulative men.
Reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism brings a sense of recognition as much as revelation. Her breadth of learning and depth of judgment are immense, yet her insight feels uncomfortably near. She wrote of loneliness, of the dissolution of shared reality, of the loss of what she would later name “the common world.” These, she warned, are the preconditions of tyranny. Her warning about that loss recalls a time when the common world was still carefully, even tenderly, built in classrooms.
When I taught as an educator at a Catholic junior-high school years ago, I once wrote on the blackboard—in chalk, for those were chalk days—the single word RESPECT. My pupils were told that respect, for oneself and still more for others, was the foundation of our classroom and of the larger world. It need not be earned, but it could be lost. Respect was the first principle of civilization: acknowledgment of another’s humanity, even in disagreement or uncertainty.
In my religion class, that same word deepened through Christ’s commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Respect, I told them, was the beginning of that love—not the sentimental kind that flatters or excuses, but the disciplined recognition that others, too, are made in the image of God. Such love is not mere emotion but moral vision. It binds community, restrains cruelty, and demands humility; for I believed then, as I do now, that if children learned that lesson, the rest would follow—discipline, fairness, empathy, and truth.
Yet today, the nation seems one in which respect has eroded into mockery, disagreement into contempt. Men and women who once prized civic decency now sneer at simple kindness as weakness and mistake public cruelty for laudable candor. Forgotten are the lessons once taught by parents and teachers—forgotten that respect is not submission but recognition, not indulgence but acknowledgment that every person bears the image of something sacred.
Arendt helps to explain part of this descent. She wrote that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced ideologue but the person “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” In our time, that confusion has been engineered deliberately by those who control mass media, public discourse, and civic conversation. Facts are now optional, reality malleable, and truth a commodity sold to the highest bidder. Noise replaces discernment; pundits and influencers, preachers of grievance and merchants of outrage, fill every silence until the ordinary citizen, weary of discerning, yields to the comfort of belonging. To be part of a movement—any movement—feels safer than standing alone amid uncertainty in an increasingly fragmented civic community.
But belonging comes at a cost. The price is moral collapse. Once fear replaces thought, hatred becomes easy. Once truth becomes relative, cruelty seems justified. Once self-respect erodes, submission feels like relief. It is with great grief that one watches people trade the humility of faith for the arrogance of fanaticism, the rigor of science for the comfort of superstition, the patience of democracy for the immediacy of mob emotion.
Some will say it is economics—that poverty, inequality, and insecurity drive people to such extremes. There is truth in that, but not the whole truth. Others will say it is ignorance, the failure of education. That too plays its part. Yet beneath both lies a deeper malady: spiritual exhaustion, a weariness with freedom itself. To think for oneself, to weigh evidence intelligently, to question authority doggedly—these require effort and courage. Many—perhaps most—prefer the narcotic of certainty. It is easier to be told what is true than to bear the burden of finding out responsibly.
That is why propaganda works—not because people are fools, but because they are tired, frightened, and longing for meaning. The demagogue offers them belonging, moral clarity, and enemies to hate. He tells them their failures are someone else’s fault. He gives them a cause grand enough to drown their doubts. And in surrendering to him, they mistake obedience for faith, vengeance for virtue, and ignorance for authenticity.
Hannah Arendt understood this weariness well. She observed that “mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived, because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” That insight reaches beyond politics into the realm of spirit. When cynicism becomes habitual, truth itself grows unbelievable; when every statement is assumed false, the liar becomes prophet, and the soul, deprived of trust, welcomes its own deception.
What bewilders most is not the malice of my fellow citizens but their forgetfulness. Gone is the decency of parents, the moral instruction of their faiths, the civics once taught in schools, the respect once owed to fact, reason, and one another. Forgotten is that fear corrodes the soul and that hatred is the cheapest imitation of strength. Forsaken is the understanding that self-government depends not on leaders but on citizens—on the willingness to think, to listen, to doubt, and to care for one another.
Fifty years from now, scholars will no doubt write of these years with the detachment of hindsight. They will trace the algorithms, the demography, the disinformation networks, and the economic despair. They will find causes, correlations, and turning points. Yet they will still struggle to answer the simplest question: how did so many, knowing better, choose worse again and again?
For the manipulators, history has an answer—ambition, greed, vanity. For the manipulated, the explanation is more tragic: surrender not out of evil but out of weariness; not out of ignorance but out of fear; not because the way was lost, but because memory failed.
That is the lesson of our time. Evil will always exist; it requires only opportunity. But tyranny of the spirit—this quiet decay of conscience—thrives only when the many forget that decency is a daily act, not a tribal badge.
This reflection is written not to condemn but to plead—for remembrance. To remember what was taught when we were young: that truth matters, that kindness binds, that facts are not partisan, that faith without humility is idolatry, and that freedom demands thought.
When RESPECT was written on that blackboard years ago, it was in the belief that children were being prepared for a world that valued it. That belief endures—if enough choose to live as if it were true. For if it is forgotten, then no constitution, no scripture, no science can save us. We will have undone ourselves, not by conquest, but by consent.
The old fiction that America’s two major parties represent opposing interests—one for business, the other for working people—no longer persuades anyone who pays attention. Nor does the claim that they meaningfully occupy the ideological poles of right and left. The observant voter, that dwindling minority, sees that both parties have long answered to the same masters: corporations, financiers, and those who profit from the machinery of endless growth and permanent inequality. In 2024, the top one hundred billionaire families poured $2.6 billion into federal elections—one of every six dollars spent. Dark money reached a record $1.9 billion, more than double the amount in 2020. Corporate lobbying hit $4.4 billion, with Big Tech alone spending $61.5 million and employing one lobbyist for every two members of Congress. Their quarrels are theatrical. Their policies, however dressed in partisan language, converge upon the preservation of the same order.
But something darker has taken hold. The oligarchs who once influenced the system now rule it directly. They have seized one party outright, hollowed out the other through dependence on the same donors, and reduced the national contest to absurd theater. Thirteen billionaires with combined wealth exceeding $450 billion now hold cabinet positions in the federal government—the wealthiest administration in American history. The man who spent between $277 and $290 million to help elect the president—the largest individual political donation ever recorded—was rewarded with a government position granting access to Treasury Department systems containing Americans’ Social Security numbers and bank accounts. The performance conceals the deeper reality—that the constitutional balance envisioned by the founders has collapsed, not from sudden assault but from gradual surrender. We have kept the shell of the Republic while its substance has been drained away.
Today, all three branches of government serve the same masters—and it is not the people.
The Executive
On June 7, 2025, a president deployed approximately 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles after immigration raids sparked protests, claiming “incidents of violence and disorder…constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government.” The governor actively opposed the deployment, stating local police could handle the situation. Three months later, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled the action violated federal law, writing that “there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.” Judge Breyer described the administration’s rationale as “contrived” and warned of an apparent attempt at “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” It marked the first time since 1965 that a president deployed National Guard over a governor’s objections.
By October 2025, the president has authorized federal troop deployments to at least five American cities on fabricated claims of civil disorder, including to Washington D.C. claiming a “crime emergency” despite violent crime being at a thirty-year low, to Memphis despite crime at a twenty-five-year low, and to Portland where a federal judge found protests “generally limited to fewer than 30 people and were largely sedate.” When courts issued restraining orders, the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, declaring at an August cabinet meeting: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”
He orders the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents and protect allies, compiling an enemies list reminiscent of the darkest regimes of the twentieth century. On September 25, 2025, former FBI Director James Comey became the first senior government official indicted under the second Trump administration—four days after the previous federal prosecutor was fired for refusing to pursue charges he considered baseless, and four days after Trump’s former personal attorney was installed as the new prosecutor. She presented the case to the grand jury alone, without a single career prosecutor present. The president had posted on social media five days earlier: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.” A grand jury probe of New York’s Attorney General stretched five months despite federal prosecutors finding insufficient evidence. Investigations were ordered into a philanthropist’s foundation for potential racketeering charges. The Attorney General stated on national television: “Whether you’re a billionaire, funding organizations to try to keep Donald Trump out of office, everything is on the table. We will investigate you.”
He threatens to revoke media licenses for unfavorable coverage and uses emergency powers as instruments of ordinary governance. After a comedian criticized the president’s supporters on September 16, 2025, the FCC Chairman appeared on a conservative podcast the next afternoon threatening license revocation. That same evening, major network affiliates announced they would not air the program, and the network suspended it indefinitely. During the suspension, the company lost close to $5 billion in market value, employees received death threats, and approximately twenty affiliate stations refused to air the program even after its return. The president stated aboard Air Force One: “They give me only bad publicity or press, and I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” The FCC Chairman followed: “I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop…the consequences are going to continue to flow.” An FCC Commissioner responded: “The FCC does not have the legal authority, the constitutional right, or the ability to revoke a license just because the president does not like what that broadcaster is broadcasting. But the threats are the point.”
On his first day in office, he declared a “National Energy Emergency” claiming “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” despite government research showing fossil fuel production had reached record levels. In April, he invoked emergency powers to impose tariffs, declaring that trade relationships with “each and every country in the world” posed “unusual and extraordinary threats”—including nations he dismissed as places “nobody has ever heard of.” He declared a border emergency claiming America’s sovereignty was “under attack” despite December 2024 recording the second-smallest number of border encounters since August 2020, representing an 81% decrease from the previous year. He invoked emergency powers eight times in his first hundred days—more than any modern president in the same period—transforming what were meant to be extraordinary measures into instruments of routine policy preference.
When Congress appropriates funds he dislikes, he withholds them in defiance of the Impoundment Control Act. The Government Accountability Office issued six formal findings by September 2025 that the administration violated the law requiring presidents to spend funds as Congress appropriates. Congressional investigators estimate the administration has frozen, canceled, or fought in court to block more than $410 billion in funding—for electric vehicle infrastructure, early childhood education, school upgrades, emergency shelter programs. When challenged, the budget director dismissed the findings as “non-events with no consequence. Rearview mirror stuff.” The administration removed public access to agency funding data until a federal court ordered its restoration in August 2025. On September 26, the Supreme Court allowed the withholding of $4 billion in foreign aid just weeks before the funds would expire, despite a lower court finding the administration had no discretion to refuse spending what Congress had appropriated. Justice Kagan warned in dissent: “At issue is the allocation of power between the Executive and Congress over the expenditure of public monies.”
When statutes require Senate confirmation of senior officials, he ignores the Appointments Clause, leaving “acting” loyalists in place indefinitely. One official simultaneously served as Senate-confirmed Secretary of State and acting administrator of another agency before that agency was closed entirely and its workforce reduced from over twelve thousand to seven hundred eighteen employees. Federal courts found multiple violations of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. Criminal defendants challenged appointments in federal court, arguing the administration’s interpretation would allow “never-confirmed, FVRA-ineligible shadow officials” with “no limits or eligibility requirements” to serve “indefinitely.” The executive branch has become not an executor of law but the law itself.
The Legislative
Congress, paralyzed by faction and captive to donor interests, has ceased to function as a coequal branch. For fiscal year 2025, it enacted zero of the twelve full-year appropriations bills required by law—the last time all appropriations passed before a fiscal year began was 1997. Instead, on March 15, 2025, it passed a continuing resolution extending the previous year’s funding levels, eliminating $15.9 billion in approved projects, and mistakenly omitting routine provisions that threatened the nation’s capital with over $1 billion in cuts.
On October 1, 2025, the government shut down. As of October 8, approximately 750,000 federal workers remain furloughed, with 420,000 working without pay. Air traffic control towers have closed due to sick calls, causing flight delays. National parks began shuttering. The Senate has failed three times to pass funding bills—on September 30, October 6, and October 8—with the Majority Leader stating the chamber would “keep voting on the same competing bills over and over.” The Speaker canceled the House’s return to Washington, keeping members in their districts, and declared: “The ball is in the court of the Senate Democrats.” The Minority Leader responded: “His members aren’t even here doing their jobs, they’ve been home for weeks.” A controversial administration memo suggested furloughed workers may not receive guaranteed back pay, contradicting a law the president himself signed in 2019. Congress cannot pass a budget without brinkmanship and shutdowns.
It cannot enforce subpoenas or conduct genuine oversight. In August 2025, the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for closed-door depositions to multiple former officials, including five former Attorneys General, two former FBI Directors, and various political figures. Yet courts have given little legal help to congressional committees, causing subpoena fights to drag out for years with no conclusive ability to enforce them quickly. Following a 2020 circuit court ruling, Congress lost a key option for civil enforcement and now faces three inadequate choices: referral to the Justice Department it seeks to investigate, slow and uncertain civil suits, or an inherent contempt power unused since the 1930s and described as “cumbersome, inefficient, and unseemly.” The Afghanistan withdrawal investigation exemplified these challenges, with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claiming subpoenas were unenforceable because they interfered with presidential powers.
It legislates by continuing resolution and press release. In its abdication, it resembles not the Roman Senate of the Republic but the Senate of the Empire—still meeting, still debating, but powerless to constrain the ruler it nominally advises. Sixty-four percent of Americans believe major donors have “a lot” of influence on how members of Congress vote, compared to only fourteen percent who believe constituents have such influence. Research published in 2023 found “a robust relationship between donors and speech” in Congress, with donor activity shaping not just votes but legislative priorities and agenda-setting. One study found that sixty percent of billionaire wealth now derives from “inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections” rather than merit. These are the masters Congress serves.
The Judiciary
Most perilous of all, the Supreme Court—once the guardian of limits—has become the instrument of their removal. On July 1, 2024, in Trump v. United States, the Court grants the president immunity so sweeping that criminal accountability for official acts effectively vanishes. Chief Justice Roberts writes for the majority that presidents have absolute immunity for actions within their “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and presumptive immunity for all official acts unless prosecution “would pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” The decision covers actions “so long as they are not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.” Critically, Roberts rules that courts may not inquire into presidential motives when dividing official from unofficial conduct, calling such inquiry “highly intrusive.”
Justice Sotomayor opens her dissent with words that will echo through history: “Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.” She concludes: “Whether described as presumptive or absolute, under the majority’s rule, a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution…In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” A former federal judge states: “There is no support whatsoever in the Constitution or even in the Supreme Court’s precedents, for the past 200 years, for this reprehensible decision.”
In abandoning the Chevron precedent on June 28, 2024, the Court strips regulatory agencies of authority to interpret and enforce the laws Congress enacts, transferring power from the legislature to the judiciary and, by extension, to the executive the judiciary favors. Chief Justice Roberts declares that courts, not agencies, must “decide all relevant questions of law” and claims agencies “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” The decision overturns precedent cited in over eighteen thousand lower court decisions and seventy Supreme Court cases. Justice Kagan warns in dissent that the Court “gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law…the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.” She provides examples of technical questions courts must now decide without deference: “whether and when an ‘alpha amino acid polymer’ qualifies as a ‘protein’ under the Public Health Service Act, or whether one population of squirrels is ‘distinct’ from another under the Endangered Species Act.”
The Court declines to enforce the Impoundment Control Act or the Appointments Clause, ignoring clear statutory and constitutional text. On September 26, 2025, it rules that private parties lack standing to sue over spending law violations—effectively making the Impoundment Control Act unenforceable except by a comptroller general the executive could simply ignore. Judge Florence Pan warns in an appellate dissent: “The Supreme Court and our court have stated in no uncertain terms that the Executive, as a constitutional matter, has no authority to disobey duly enacted statutes for policy reasons. Yet that is what the majority enables today.”
On June 27, 2025, the Court rules that federal district courts generally lack authority to issue nationwide injunctions protecting non-parties from executive orders. Justice Barrett writes for the majority that such injunctions “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” Justice Jackson warns in dissent: “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law…a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.” Rights now depend on geography and litigation status. For the first time in modern history, constitutional protections may vary by state depending on whether parents sued.
Through emergency orders on its shadow docket, the Court allows the president to fire officials whom statutes protect from at-will removal—commissioners of independent agencies that Congress deliberately insulated from political control. On September 22, 2025, the Court grants full review signaling likely overturn of the 1935 precedent protecting such officials. Justice Kagan dissents, writing that emergency orders reveal “how that eventual decision will go” and criticizes “the impatience to get on with things—to now hand the president the most unitary, meaning also the most subservient, administration since Herbert Hoover (and maybe ever).”
It strikes down precedents by ideological fiat while leaving standing decisions that expand corporate and executive dominion. What was once judicial review has become judicial complicity. Legal observers characterize the Court’s current term as “executive power, executive power, executive power,” noting the Court’s decisions “may be fueling Trump’s maximalist approach to executive power” in 2025.
Thus the separation of powers, the very architecture of the Constitution, exists now only as echo. The branches that were meant to check one another instead reinforce one another’s dereliction. Congress surrenders; the president seizes; the Court sanctifies. The forms persist—elections are held, opinions are issued, sessions convene—but their meaning is gone. We recite the rituals of democracy while living under the logic of autocracy.
The timeline of 2025 makes visible what might otherwise remain abstract. In June, federal troops deployed to Los Angeles over a governor’s objections—a federal judge would later call it an attempt at “creating a national police force.” In September, the Justice Department indicted a former FBI Director four days after the president’s personal attorney was installed as prosecutor. That same month, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to withhold $4 billion in congressionally appropriated funds, while Justice Kagan warned of executive power unchecked. By October, the government had shut down, 750,000 workers furloughed, and Congress had passed zero of its twelve required appropriations bills. The oligarchs who funded this transformation—thirteen billionaires in the cabinet, one man’s quarter-billion-dollar investment yielding a government position with Treasury access—now govern directly. The forms persist: courts issue rulings the executive ignores, Congress meets but cannot fund the government, elections are held but determined by billions in dark money. What was constitutional architecture has become constitutional theater.
It did not happen overnight. For decades, both parties courted the same wealth, privatized public life, and distracted voters with culture wars while dismantling the civic foundations beneath them. Oligarchic money captured the means of communication, turning news into spectacle and grievance into commodity. In 2024, billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion—$5.7 billion per day, three times faster than the previous year—creating 204 new billionaires, nearly four per week. Meanwhile, median household income increased just $1,040, a statistically insignificant change, remaining essentially flat compared to pre-pandemic levels. The top one-tenth of one percent saw income growth of 1,003% from 1979 to 2021 while the bottom twenty percent experienced 132% growth—meaning top earners’ incomes grew 7.6 times faster. The top ten percent of earners now own 66.6% of all wealth.
Yet on his first day in office in 2025, the president signed executive orders declaring war not on this inequality but on diversity programs, defining sex as “immutable biological classification,” and mandating only two gender options on federal forms. Within two weeks came orders banning transgender military service, pardoning abortion clinic protesters, and threatening to withhold education funding from schools allowing transgender athletes in women’s sports. Five hundred seventy-five anti-LGBTQ state bills were introduced in 2025, with fifty-four passing into law. Twenty-seven states now ban gender-affirming care for minors, affecting 40% of transgender youth. The Attorney General launched a “Civil Rights Fraud Initiative” to prosecute diversity programs while the Civil Rights Division lost sixty percent of its workforce.
When discontent grew, anger was redirected away from the architects of inequality toward the scapegoats of convenience—immigrants, minorities, the powerless. A survey of thirty-six countries found sixty percent of respondents identified “rich people having too much political influence” as the primary cause of inequality, and sixty-six percent of Americans want major economic system changes or complete reform. Yet analysis of the president’s inaugural address and major speeches found he “spent most of his time on the ‘invasion’ of illegal immigrants” and “surprisingly had little to say about his economic plans,” focusing instead on what he termed a “revolution of common sense” emphasizing cultural grievance. Greed, hatred, and fear again proved their ancient utility: they divide the governed and unite their governors.
The result is the government we now inhabit: a Republic that remembers its own name but not its meaning. The Constitution functions as civic décor—invoked ceremonially, ignored in practice. Statutory law becomes optional, precedent disposable, truth negotiable. The president acts; the Court justifies; Congress applauds or cowers. The citizen, bewildered and exhausted, retreats into private life, convinced that participation is futile.
And yet, elegy need not end in silence. The very act of recognizing loss is the beginning of renewal. What has been hollowed out can, in principle, be refilled. But it cannot be refilled by faith in institutions that have already abdicated their purpose. It must begin where the Republic began—in the conscience and courage of ordinary citizens who refuse to mistake ritual for reality. Renewal, if it comes, will come not from those who rule but from those who remember what ruling was meant to serve.
For now, we inhabit echoes. But if we still possess the capacity to listen—to hear the faint music of the Republic beneath the noise of power—then the silence need not be permanent. The dance may yet begin again, not at the command of the puppet master, but when the people cut their strings and remember they were never meant to dance to another’s tune.
Northcoast Antiquarian 