The colonial republics referred to as the "thirteen colonies" were in fact, with great variation among them, already "republics," not ideally but certainly functionally, as they seceded from the authority of the British crown. Some of them were already territorially too big to be republics,for instance Virginia, that being one reason why Virginia ceded her "northwest territory" and later Kentucky as North Carolina ceded Tennessee. Jefferson even spoke of the necessity as population would grow of breaking the remaining rump of Virginia into semi-autonomous ward republics, not unlike Swiss cantons. He envisioned a replication of republics as Americans settled to the west, seeing these new republics joining up to five confederations on what is today the territory of the United States. Jefferson was not the only one who understood scale, demographic and territorial scale. Yet, the "Drang" to centralization, always present in the political realities of man but dangerously formalized by Hobbes in his Leviathan, would prevail. In 1865, the nascent Hobbesian state, paralleling its counterparts in Germany and Italy,had managed to destroy two unions of constitutionally federated republics: that of the remaining United States of America and that of the Confederate States of America. The last gasp of this republican spirit was under the administrations of Grover Cleveland, perhaps even there not being a "last gasp" but merely the gases of the bloated corpse making their final effusion. What classical nationalists like Pat Buchanan do not understand is that the national state which emerged in 1865 was merely the Hobbesian guise. It now no longer needs its nationalist guise, nor can it tolerate it; for it must expand into the global, flattening and subsuming all other jurisdictions and authorities, anti-subsidiarity and therein, ultimately, anti-Trinity and anti-Christ.
Still avoiding Leviathan.
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