In recent years, as in the Sixties, we’ve seen the take-over of large sections of American cities by armies of drug-addicted zombies, riots in Washington, dirty political tricks by the FBI and the CIA, the capture of universities by militants obsessed with race and gender, dire warnings about the fate of the planet, and the wholesale abandonment of American military allies. The more immediate point is that another American Republic is collapsing, and also that we’ve been here before.
Whether Roosevelt’s Republic properly ended with the social chaos of the late Sixties or with America’s victory in the Cold War, and whether we are therefore currently living in the Fifth, Sixth or arguably even the Seventh American Republic, is the type of question that future history students in Beijing or Singapore are bound to contemplate on their final exams. The Fourth Republic, Franklin Roosevelt’s, was centred around the strong Federal state that won the Second World War, sent men to the moon, and overcame the rival Soviet empire. Jackson’s Republic in turn collapsed into the fratricidal bloodshed of the Civil War, which gave birth to a Third Republic, ruled by an incredibly wealthy class of Northern-based industrial capitalists, which collapsed in the face of the Great Depression. The First Republic, born of the American Revolution, ended with Andrew Jackson’s Trumpian assault on the genteel elites of his day.
UNHERD MATTHEW CRAWFORD SERIES
American history can best be understood not as a single continuum but as a series of Republics, each arising from the ashes of its predecessor.
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