by Donald S. Yarab
“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 the res publica—the public thing.
Ours has become the res 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 Its spirit has withdrawn, its voice replaced by noise.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.
Northcoast Antiquarian 