It becomes clear, then, that those who push for reasserting State power must know how the Founders defined a republic in both size and scope and what they meant by republicanism. Returning to the founding principles of the United States is an obvious way to end the insanity in Washington D.C., but it won’t happen if State’s rights are consistently viewed as a knee-jerk reactionary response to unconstitutional federal legislation. Yes, the 10th Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, but why did the Founders insist on state sovereignty? Rather than a theoretical fabrication at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention or the State ratification conventions, State’s rights were explicitly linked to the stability of the United States from the Revolutionary War forward. That is the key to the State sovereignty movement.
Professor McClanahan is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, which is supposed to be published at the end of June. (Hmm. H.W. Crocker III has written The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Civil War.)
From Donald Livingston in the current issue of Chronicles:
The United States is not now and has never been a republic. It is a federation of states, each of which, in Article IV of the Constitution, is guaranteed a republican form of government. But a federation of republics is not itself a republic any more than the federation of nations in the United States, or in the European Union, is a nation. A federation is a service agency of the political units that compose it. Whatever else a republic might be, it is not a service agency of something else. So instead of talking about 'restoring the old Republic,' we should talk of restoring republicanism in a federation of states. And this can only mean recalling the vast domain of unenumerated powers that the Constitution reserves to the states and which have been usurped by that artificial corporation, known as the United States, created by the states for their welfare.
Some words from Robert M. Peters:
It is to note, that although our term “republic” is a rendering of “res pulica,” a republic is itself, in its Aristotelian sense, the manifestation as polity of a social order which is organic in nature, reflecting in its confessing or living out, a function in the cosmic order, being a symbiotic relationship of various commonwealths - family, Church, local community, etc. - and thereby having unto itself unique traditions, customs and laws. Thus in a healthy society, res pulica and res familiaris are in an intricate dance with one another, if I may mix my metaphors. When the republics which formed the union of constitutionally federated republics delegated and enumerated specific rights to the general government -their creature and their agent - they reserved unto themselves all of the other rights and authorities unique to them individually. Those rights and authorities which Virginia reserved to herself were not the same as those which Rhode Island reserved for herself, for they had different components and different historical experiences, although there were, of course, enough common elements among them to bring them to the compact table.
The Hobbesian state which took power in 1865 had and continues to have absolutely no sensibility for real commonwealths, communities and republics. The Hobbesian is a man with a bulldozer - a monopoly on coercion and the ability to define the limits of his own power. He sees the landscape of the union of constitutionally federated republics as a mere patch of divergent weeds to be pushed down, drained of their essence and ultimately eradicated. On the ground which he has made barren, he will build his Utopia, which will some form of banal sameness.
The Hobbesian state can be possessed by different demons; but they all seek, as is the wont of demons, barren sameness: Stalin wanted a classless society and pursued sameness with terror and death. Hitler wased one race and pursued ssmeness with terror and death. The “fascitoid social democrats” who possess and embody our Hobbesian state also pursue sameness with the weapons of “civil rights,” “equality” and “social justice.” Their volent phase is yet to come.
Yet, despite the fact that the fall is working its way through the cosmic order, with the Hobbesian state being one manifestion thereof, there is a Cosmological Absolute, Who has in the Second Person of the Trinity, the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, become our Kinsman-Redeemer through His passion, death, resurrection and ascencion and has thereby undone as the Second Adam what the First Adam, in his fall, did. We must, therefore, in faith, hope and charity, await the workingout of this process and confess through our lives these things. I firmly hold that those fleeting moments of history, when the scale is right, when republican men can be found - freeholders who acquire and live out the cardinal virtues, the capital virtues and ultimately the theological virtues, men like Cincinatus, Washington and Jefferson Davis and when folks are focused on kith and kin, then we have a foretaste, although passing and momentary, of that Restoration which is yet to come in the plan of Providence. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot: this is the cause which is never truely lost because it has, as yet, to be fully gained. In the fullness of time, so is our hope, it will be. It is our duty to nurture it, not as an abstraction, but as a reality, be it but in the relative safety of our homes, and to be ready, with courage, to showcase it, when the historical opportunity presents itself.
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