There is a certain subspecies of conservatives in which the members seem impervious to the abundant evidence all around us that the constitution of the “founding fathers” is a dead letter and the American republic created in the late eighteenth century is now a relic of the past. One can identify this type of person based on certain slogans they are fond of saying such as “we must do something to preserve our freedoms guaranteed by the constitution.” Another common claim is that “the American experiement”—i.e., the republic created in the late eighteenth century—is still very much in force, but is perhaps “threatened.” Note the curious reference to the loss of our freedoms as if this were something that might happen in the future. Or note the strange insistence on the idea that the constitutional order introduced by the so-called “founding fathers” still exists. All of these are obviously false statements, of course. The constitutional order to which both these statements appeal ceased to exist at least a century ago. The constitution itself—that is, the one ratified in 1788—hasn’t been in force for a very long time.
Many Americans have a certain gift for allowing themselves to be deceived into believing that the words of the written constitution actually describe the de facto reality around us. So, the fact that politicians swear an oath to the old 1787 constitution manages to fool many people into thinking that the politicians actually care what the original intent of the constitution was. An honest assessment of the state of American politics should make it clear today’s politicians—like most politicians over the past century—couldn’t care less about such antiquated notions.
Or, the fact that some Republicans like to read the text of the constitution on the House floor fools others into thinking that the de jure text governs the thinking of modern American federal judges and officials. This, alas, is not at all the case. In truth, the constitution says whatever the federal judges say it says. And this means that the meaning of the US constitution, in the year 2026, has almost nothing at all to do with the constitution as interpreted in say, the year 1801, when Thomas Jefferson was sworn in.
The regime uses a brilliant ruse to hide this reality: they have abolished the old constitution while claiming to revere it. Many are taken in by this.
This is hardly a new observation, however. Many other Americans over the years have taken a more savvy look at the way that the constitutional order evolved into something new altogether and that a revolutionary change had taken place. It was a revolution in which the old constitution was wiped away and a new one took its place—even if the change took place without changing the superficial form of the regime itself.
“The Revolution Was”
Perhaps the most eloquent of these prophets of revolution was Garet Garrett who in his great 1938 essay “The Revolution Was“ notes that many Americans are looking in the wrong direction to spot the revolution. He writes:
There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.
There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, “Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.” These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when “one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.”
Garrett goes on to describe how new content was inserted into the old form. It was no coincidence that he was writing this during the New Deal since much of this revolution “within the form” was accomplished through the new administrative state introduced by the Roosevelt revolution. To note just one example, Garrett describes how the executive state has eclipsed all the other branches of government, making the president into a lawmaker and co-opting even the judicial system through administrative law “judges.”
The thoroughness of the takeover was impressive, and in the end, Garrett concludes:
So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them. Much of it is irreversible. That is true because habits of dependence are much easier to form than to break. Once the government, on ground of public policy, has assumed the responsibility to provide people with buying power when they are in want of it, or when they are unable to provide themselves with enough of it, according to a minimum proclaimed by government, it will never be the same again.
America’s Four Republics
Even Garrett, for all his clear-eyed assessments of the US regime in the 1930s, still apparently believed that the United States had adhered to its original form right up until it was transformed into the administrative state. Garrett was certainly right that a revolution had taken place. But he was identifying only the most recent one. Previous revolutions had already taken place in earlier decades and which had fundamentally changed the nature of the US state.
The earliest of these was, as Murray Rothbard notes in Conceived in Liberty, a counterrevolution. The jettisoning of America’s original constitution, the so-called Articles of Confederation, had been carried out by a small cabal of wealthy American politicians who sought to centralize political power into the hands of a national government. This was a counterrevolution against the decentralist and libertarian constitution that had been adopted during the Revolutionary War. This new decentralist constitution was deemed insufficient by the handful of “founding fathers” who sought to overturn the consensus-based constitutional order for which American soldiers had fought. Through a variety of political tricks and machinations, the centralizers eventually got their new, more powerful government.
The second revolution came with the Civil War and the establishment of the might-makes-right principle in ensuring political “unity” and monopoly power in the hands of the central government. Prior to the Civil War, it was commonly held that the United States was a confederation of independent states. This was hardly an idiosyncratic view of the plater class, as northerners like William Lloyd Garrison and William Leggett contemplated the dissolution of the Union as a legally and politically viable option. The Civil War changed all that and it became an established principle that none of the “sovereign” states could leave, and faced military conquest should they try. This was a fundamental change to the relationship between the central government and the member states. This was solidified in the Reconstruction amendments which overturned the old intent of the Bill of Rights—which had been written to limit the powers of the federal government alone. After the post-war revolution, the Bill of Rights became a means of extending federal power to every corner of the country in the name of limiting state and local power.
The next revolution came with the Progressive Era. These new changes included the creation of the current central bank, the legalization of a federal income tax, and the adoption of the seventeenth amendment. The creation of an enormously powerful central bank—which would eventually assert monopoly power over the entire financial and monetary system in the United States, was an immense break with the past. Perhaps even more monumental was the adoption of the the sixteenth amendment which legalized a federal income tax on individuals. Up until then, ordinary American individuals had virtually no direct relationship with the federal government. The progressive revolution essentially abolished the remaining vestiges of idea that the United States was a confederation of independent states. This was done by ending the role of state legislatures in appointing members of the US Senate while also ending the apportionment of taxation among states in accordance with population. After the Progressive revolution, American income was subject to surveillance and taxation directly by federal authorities on a scale never before seen. Other developments of this period included the implementation of the first modern federal system of conscription, the rise of the FBI, and the creation of a police state fueled by anti-German hysteria during the First World War. Altogether the changes represented an immense leap forward in federal police and financial power.
Finally, the most recent revolution was set permanently into law by the so-called “switch in time that saved nine,” after which the Us Supreme Court started granting its imprimatur to New Deal legislation which had previously been regarded as obviously unconstitutional by honest jurists.
Thus, if we were to be truly honest about the state of the American republic, we would describe the current republic in a way similar to how the French do it when they refer to the “Third French Republic” or the “First French Republic.” The French don’t pretend that their constitutional order of 1950 is the same as the one used in 1848. The French, perhaps, lack the capacity for nostalgic self-delusion that Americans possess in spades. Since the abolition of the old monarchy during the French revolution, the French have had five republics, interrupted by a couple of “empires” and the period of German occupation.
There is no denying that the American constitution has repeatedly been subject to radical changes that have profoundly altered the relationship between the individual citizen and the state in some cases, and the relationship between the states and the federal government in other cases.
So, we ought to list these de facto republics as such:
First Republic (1776-1788)Second Republic (1787-1865)Third Republic (1865-1910)Fourth Republic (1937- )
The old republics are gone. The constitutional order of the Jeffersonian years—i.e., the so-called “American experiment”—was swept away long ago. There is no member-state sovereignty. There are no “checks and balances.” There is simply what the federal judges say there is: a massive federal administrative state that can define for itself what are permissible federal powers and what are not.
We’re living in the Fourth American Republic. Those who speak of conserving the work of “the founding fathers” or “the American experiment” are living in a republic of the imagination alone. Many conservatives like to quote Benjamin Franklin who, upon exiting the 1787 constitution convention allegedly said that the convention had created “a republic, if you can keep it.” Well, they didn’t “keep it.” It disappeared in the nineteenth century, and what we have today is something else altogether.
