![]() Struck by the similarities of our current situation to 1930s Spain, I mused on Twitter some months back: “Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco.” By this I meant that unless something changes, our anarchic trajectory will soon require a person like Franco to reestablish order, and that this muscular leader would most naturally be Protestant. To the extent that our regime now purports to be a pure democracy (to say nothing of the corrupted aristocracy that is the administrative state), most of our founders would not recognize it as a continuation of their own project. Adams and the other founders had a dim view of pure democracy (against which they distinguished their republican Constitution) and believed it tended to break down into anarchy, making the coming of a strongman inevitable. ![]() Or consider John Adams, who in his later years said Polybius’s theory of regime cycles “has been the Creed of my whole Life.” His 1787 Defense of the Constitutions exhibited a careful study of a host of regimes across history, articulating how the federal Constitution had carefully blended the three forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and republic) to mitigate the perennial pitfalls of various regime types. “One method of assault,” warned Washington, “may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations, which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown.” Faction, said George Washington in his Farewell Address, has “its roots in the strongest passions of the human mind.” It exists “under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness.” The factional spirit is uniquely perilous for the republic because its tendency is to produce a strongman. Having read the classical political philosophers, they knew that human nature does not magically transform, that America would be subject to regime cycles much like any other nation. America’s founders understood the rare and fragile nature of the regime they established. Such complacency is the opposite of filial piety. Far too concerned with manners, we defend the status quo, pursuing short-term benefits while ignoring meaningful tail risk. The right knows all of this and yet remains complacent. Our circumstances augur the return of history: The constitutional and cultural tensions echo our Civil War and a number of others. to be a schizophrenic state, divided by incompatible visions of justice and the good life. Contested elections, failures to pass a federal budget, impeachments, talk of packing the Supreme Court, emerging fights between states about extradition, politicized persecution of dissidents, and many other such strains all reveal the U.S. ![]() Our Constitution is stretched to the breaking point. American conservatives know things are bad.
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