From Res Publica to Res Mercatoria: The Hollow Republic

by Donald S. Yarab

**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 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 Its spirit has withdrawn, its voice replaced by noise.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.

The Bewilderment of the Citizen: When RESPECT Was Written in Chalk

By Donald S. Yarab

“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.

Incompetence and Buffoonery: The Threat to Democracy

Preface to the Reader

There was hesitation before I posted the essay below. Not for its merit, but for its timing. I wonder, truly, whether we have already passed the point of rupture—whether the buffoonery we witness in scandals such as Whiskeyleaks (the use of the Signal app by U.S. cabinet officials and others to discuss classified war plans) is not merely incompetence, but a smokescreen for something more deliberate, more calculated, and far more lethal. If the jesters, clowns, and buffoons distract, it may be only so that the knife may fall unnoticed. This essay, then, may read not as prophecy but as postmortem—or as warning flung desperately against a wind already turning. And yet, even still, I believe it must be said.

Note to the Reader

This essay is written not as a partisan screed, nor as a nostalgic lament for some imagined golden age, but as a meditation—part moral reckoning, part civic warning—on the condition of a republic that has allowed itself to descend into spectacle, incoherence, and institutional decay.

It is addressed to those who still believe that government, for all its failings, remains a public trust; that civic virtue is not an antiquated ideal; and that the health of a nation may be measured not merely in wealth or might, but in memory, restraint, and the character of its leaders and laws.

The tone is deliberately severe, for the times are unserious. The satire is not meant to entertain, but to unmask. Where irony sharpens, it does so to reveal truths that cannot be said plainly without losing their edge. And where the anger beneath the prose surfaces, it does so not in despair, but in the hope that the reader, too, is angry—and unwilling to become numb.

This is not a call to revolution, but a call to remembrance, to vigilance, and above all to responsibility. If the republic is to be rebuilt, it will not be by those who broke it, nor by those who profited from its breaking, but by those who, though weary, still believe it is worth the rising.

The Farce of Ruin: On the Buffoonery, Cowardice, and Consent that Endanger the Republic

It becomes difficult indeed to weigh if the republic is more greatly endangered by ignoble, incompetent lackeys such as now populate the greatest offices of state, appointed by the bitter, vengeful, demented, and oft confused and wholly arbitrary despotic personality that resides in the executive mansion, courtesy of the cult of resentment, hate, and fear, than it would have been had he appointed more able men and women to execute his whims and vices. For in one case, we face the farce of ruin—the slow, stumbling, ignoble unraveling of a once-proud polity into absurdity and impotence. In the other, we would face tyranny executed with precision, method, and perhaps permanence. Yet if there is any comfort to be found in chaos, it is this: incompetence leaves wreckage; competence might have left chains. But wreckage, at least, invites the labor of rebuilding—if the will, the memory, and the courage yet remain.

This is the bitter paradox of the present hour: that we may find ourselves grateful not for wisdom, but for the want of it; not for virtue, but for its absence. That the republic’s temporary reprieve lies not in the strength of her institutions nor the vigilance of her people, but in the vacuity and vanity of her despoilers. These are not statesmen in the Roman sense, nor even villains in the Shakespearean; they are caricatures—jesters costumed in stolen robes of office, bumbling through decrees, barking orders not out of conviction but impulse, devoid alike of strategy and shame. And yet, we dare not laugh too loudly. For every laugh chokes on the question: how long can a republic endure when the machinery of its survival is entrusted to hands unfit to hold it?

The Rise of the Cult: Resentment as Political Theology

Power, once grounded in consent and law, now derives its strength from a darker source: resentment. Not merely disappointment or disillusionment, but that deeper, more corrosive sentiment born of perceived humiliation, of grievance nurtured until it metastasizes into dogma. No longer content to reform what they claim to hate, the votaries of this new creed seek instead to destroy—to salt the fields, poison the wells, and tear down every institution that once restrained ambition with honor, and pride with duty.

This is not politics in any meaningful sense. It is theology by other means—a bitter creed that worships neither God nor country but the self, wounded and wrathful. Its high priests preach vengeance cloaked in patriotism, its sacraments are insult and spectacle, and its liturgy is grievance repeated endlessly, unexamined and unrelieved. To belong to this cult is not to believe in anything beyond the negation of others: the “elites,” the “experts,” the “traitors,” the “others”—those perpetual abstractions upon whom every failure may be pinned, every fear projected.

Thus, the executive, himself a totem of grievance, is not admired in spite of his vices but because of them. His incoherence becomes a form of authenticity; his cruelty, a mark of strength; his ignorance, proof that he is unsullied by the corruption of thought. This is the logic of the mob, sanctified and enthroned. It does not seek truth, only validation; not justice, but vengeance. And from such poison grows not a polity, but a pack.

The Machinery of Power: Incompetents in High Places

Once, high office required at least the semblance of merit—a capacity for governance, a grasp of statecraft, or, at the very least, the discretion to defer to those who possessed it. No longer. The new qualification is loyalty alone: loyalty not to the Constitution, not to principle or country, but to personality. And not even to a consistent personality, but to a flickering candle in a tempest—unstable, moody, and perpetually affronted.

Thus have the halls of government been peopled with jesters, flatterers, and feckless opportunists. Ministers of the treasury who do not believe in numbers, secretaries of education who scorn learning, envoys who sabotage diplomacy, and legal advisors who treat the law as a nuisance to be outmaneuvered rather than a structure to be upheld. Their résumés are padded with failure, their careers propped up by sycophancy, their ambitions tethered not to public service but to personal advancement through proximity to power.

Yet their greatest failing is not simply what they do, but what they permit. Their very mediocrity becomes the shield behind which greater abuses are concealed. For while the citizenry scoffs at the spectacle—the press conference gaffes, the mangled grammar, the contradictions piled upon contradictions—policy proceeds maliciously, cruelly. Freed from oversight, insulated by noise, the machinery grinds on: protections undone, laws abandoned, rights weakened, government dismantled, alliances broken. The clown at the helm distracts the gaze, while the bureaucratic knife goes unnoticed beneath the velvet tablecloth.

And in this lies the genius of institutional vandalism: not to destroy with one mighty blow, but to dull the blade slowly—through mismanagement, attrition, and the silent resignation of the capable and the firing of tens of thousands. A thousand small indignities, each one tolerable, each one dismissed, until the edifice no longer stands, and we wonder not when it fell, but how we failed to notice.

The Counterfactual: What If the Tyrant Were Wise?

One is almost tempted to breathe a sigh of relief at the chaos, for chaos is its own limit. A despot who contradicts himself hourly, who governs by whim and forgets his decrees by dusk, is a tyrant only in name. He may wish to rule absolutely, but lacking consistency, foresight, or discipline, he becomes instead a figure of grotesque parody—dangerous, yes, but disarmed by his very incoherence. We may survive him not because of our strength, but because of his weakness.

But imagine, if you will, the inverse: a tyrant possessed of intellect, method, and clarity. One who governs not in the service of ego but of vision—however malignant. One who surrounds himself not with cowed incompetents, but with men and women of ruthless efficiency, cold logic, and administrative precision. This is the tyrant history has known best. It is not the fool who builds the gulag or writes the blacklists, but the functionary with a plan, the theorist with a chart, the orderly mind untroubled by conscience.

Had our moment produced such a figure, how much swifter the erosion of liberty would have been! How much more subtle the theft of rights, how much more durable the machinery of oppression! The republic might not have looked so disordered—it might have seemed vigorous, decisive, strangely efficient. But beneath the appearance of control, the soul of the nation would have already been extinguished, its people transformed not into rebels or resisters, but into docile instruments of the state’s will.

The question, then, is no longer whether we are fortunate in our calamity, but whether we understand its nature. For fools can be replaced. But should a day come when their successors wear the same mask but wield it with purpose—then the hour will be far darker, and the laughter that once served as shield will curdle into silence.

The Theatre of the Absurd: Democracy as Entertainment

If the republic falters from within, it is not only because of those who hold the levers of power, but because of those who have come to see governance not as a civic duty, but as a form of entertainment. The forum has become a stage, the statesman a performer, and the electorate an audience demanding sensation. Nuance bores, compromise offends, and truth is a distant, flickering ghost—unwelcome and unprofitable.

In such a theatre, absurdity is not a bug but a feature. Every gaffe becomes a meme, every outrage a headline, every policy a subplot in an endless narrative of grievance and spectacle. The media, desperate to retain its vanishing grip on attention, ceases to inform and instead curates the drama—cutting, splicing, amplifying. The body politic is no longer a deliberative citizenry but a viewership conditioned to react, not to reason.

And what is the role of the elected official in this new dramaturgy? Not to lead, but to brand. Not to govern, but to trend. They issue not laws, but slogans. They trade not in facts, but in feels. Even their failures become assets, for in the logic of the spectacle, visibility is power, and infamy sells just as well as virtue—often better.

Worse still, even those who know the performance is a fraud feel trapped within it. To disengage is to surrender the stage to the most unscrupulous actors; to engage is to be complicit in a system that rewards noise over thought, allegiance over principle. This is the final genius of the absurd republic: to create a politics where participation itself feels degrading, and yet absence feels dangerous.

Thus the state becomes not a polity of free and deliberative people, but a spectacle of exhaustion. We scroll, we jeer, we despair. But rarely—too rarely—do we act.

The Fragility of Memory: When History No Longer Speaks

No tyranny begins as tyranny. It begins in the forgetting. A forgetting not only of facts or dates, but of the moral weight of precedent, the slow accumulation of civic wisdom, the lessons written in blood and ink by those who came before. When memory is intact, it serves as conscience; when eroded, it becomes convenience. We do not recognize the fall because we no longer remember what it was to stand.

Once, a statesman would rise in the chamber and quote Pericles or Lincoln, Cicero or Solon—not merely to adorn his speech but to anchor it in tradition, to draw from the well of republican virtue. Now, even such allusion is dismissed as elitist pedantry. The past is regarded not as a guide but as a burden, and history is reduced to a buffet of misremembered grievances, curated to flatter the resentful and indict the dead.

In this vacuum, lies grow bold. Fictions parade as fact, myths usurp monuments, and the record of what was is rewritten by those who benefit from what is. The archives decay; the historians, sidelined or silenced, speak to a shrinking audience. Memory becomes tribal, curated by algorithm and sentiment. The young no longer study the fragility of freedom because it is no longer taught. The old recall its price, but their warnings are heard as the mutterings of a defeated past.

And what, then, remains? A citizenry adrift—cut loose from history’s moorings, vulnerable to every charlatan with a flag and a grievance. The republic, in such a state, is no longer endangered by enemies at the gates, but by the silence within. Not the silence of censorship, but the quieter, more dangerous silence of indifference. The silence that follows when memory no longer speaks and no one cares to ask what it once said.

Wreckage or Rebirth?

It is tempting, when surveying the present wreckage, to surrender to despair—to believe that the republic, having stumbled so absurdly into decline, can never be set aright. The pillars have cracked, the roof sags, and the foundation seems to shift beneath our feet. But wreckage, for all its tragedy, is not the same as ruin. What has been shattered can, in principle, be rebuilt. The question is whether the will endures, and whether the anger now rising can be forged into resolve rather than simply rage.

For there is anger—mounting, justified, and no longer concealed. It grows not within the cult, but outside it, among those who have watched with clenched jaws as the instruments of governance were handed to buffoons and cowards, as the executive strutted and raged, as the political class bowed and curtsied, mumbling excuses, averting eyes, trading principle for position. And it is not merely the executive that earns their ire, but the entire edifice of acquiescence—a legislature that mutters indignation but funds the farce all the same; a judiciary that, cloaked in solemnity, too often validates the very abuses it ought to constrain. These are not neutral bystanders. They are collaborators by convenience, guardians turned ushers to a constitutional catastrophe.

And so the citizen watches, furious and exhausted, as the republic’s very stewards conspire in its diminishment. Yet this fury, though dangerous if left to fester, may still be redemptive if rightly directed. The task is not to lament the collapse of a golden age that never was, but to resist the entrenchment of a cynical age that need not be. The republic will not be saved by the institutions that failed to defend it, nor by the party machines that greased its fall. If salvation comes, it will be through memory rekindled, virtue rediscovered, and courage reclaimed—not in grand gestures, but in the hard, slow work of rebuilding what was squandered.

We stand, then, not at the end, but at a crossroads between farce fulfilled and tragedy averted. The clowns will fall—their nature guarantees it. But what comes next will not be dictated by their collapse. It will be shaped by those who remain: the watchful, the angry, the resolute. The question is not whether the republic can rise again, but whether we still believe it is worth the rising.

The Tragic Lesson of Verginia: Power and Tyranny

Guillaume Guillon Lethière (French, 1760 – 1832) *The Death of Virginia*, about 1825–1828, Oil on paper, mounted on canvas. Unframed: 73.5 × 117 cm (28 15/16 × 46 1/16 in.).
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2023.7

Livy’s History of Early Rome offers a timeless case study in the corruption of power through the story of Verginia. In Book 3, Appius Claudius – a member of the decemviri tasked with codifying Roman law – becomes consumed by lustful desire for Verginia, a young woman of plebeian birth. Unable to win her through legitimate means, he orchestrates a fraudulent court case to claim her as a slave, abusing his authority to ensure the verdict.

When her father Verginius, a soldier, arrives to defend his daughter, he finds the machinery of justice has been wholly perverted to serve Appius’s desires. Faced with no recourse against this tyranny, Verginius takes his daughter’s life in the forum rather than see her enslaved and defiled. His tragic act galvanizes both the people and army, leading to the overthrow of the decemviri and restoration of constitutional government.

The story has relevance today as we witness how unchecked power still corrupts, with modern figures who – like Appius – seduce both masses and elites with promises of reform while pursuing personal gain and dismantling democratic safeguards. The allusive poem I drafted below below explores this persistent danger, using Verginia’s sacrifice to illuminate the cost of our collective failure to recognize and resist tyranny in its early stages.

The Wages of Compromise: The Blood of Verginia

Beneath the rostra’s shadowed height, he stood,
The man whose gilded words had bought the crowd.
Their cheer, a wreath for virtue misconstrued,
Their gaze averted, though his deeds grew loud.
What harm, they thought, if petty sins abound?
A jest, a taunt, though brazen, met no plea;
The slights were not whispered, though unjust,
Personal gain o’er public trust was clear to see.

Yet they excused what honesty would shun,
For promised change, for vengeance lightly jested.
The wrongs of old made present wrongs seem none;
A brighter future claimed, though untested.
And so, unchecked, his shadow stretched and grew,
Till justice bowed before his grim designs.
A father’s hand, with love and fury true,
Struck down the bonds of tyranny’s confines.

Her blood, a warning, sanctified the square,
The people’s slumber shattered by her cry.
The forum rang with shouts that pierced the air,
The dream of freedom breathed, though she must die.
No longer could they feign or look away—
Their wish for ease had birthed a tyrant’s reign.
The jest of vengeance turned to ash that day,
And Appius fled, undone by grief and shame.

Let not the lesson fade within our time:
That deeds unchallenged fester into might.
To mock the law, to cloak a crime sublime
In promised gold, ensures the coming blight.
The people’s trust, the lords’ approving nod,
May crown a man or break his staff and rod.