When "Republican" Meant "Radical"

This week, Republicans in Congress have been fighting to extend the repeal of the estate tax at the cost of several hundred billion dollars. The estate tax affects less than 2% of all estates, and, since the first $2 mil are exempt, the few estates that are taxed tend to be assessed at less than 20% of their overall value, meaning that, even in rare cases where an estate is taxed, money you inherit is taxed at about the same rate as money you actually earn. So this really is the "Paris Hilton Relief Act of 2006."

Paul Krugman, Molly Ivins, and Thomas Frank have spent years documenting how today's GOP bends over backward to favor entrenched wealth and privilege. That the GOP would do this in the same week that they kill off legislation to increase the minimum wage illustrates how their defense of wealth comes at the expense of hard work. I can't add much to the policy debate here beyond what's been said already. Instead, what I'm most interested in is how much of an inversion in terminology this represents from an historical perspective. Simply put, the Republican Party is in many ways the very antithesis of what "republican" once meant.

At the time of the American Revolution, "republican" was largely a scare word used by Tories to suggest radically democratic, egalitarian, and anti-authority principles. And for good reason. The English writers most often associated with republicanism--James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and Cato's Letters (by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon)--were radical, not only by the standard of their day but of ours as well. These were the English Machiavellians, advocates of an expansive and "free" republic on the Roman model, and fearful of the slide into wealth, corruption, and imperial hubris. Harrington, whose The Commonwealth of Oceana was one of the works most quoted by the American founders, famously argued that political power followed economic power, meaning that republics, to survive, had to prevent great inequalities of wealth that would allow a privileged elite to corrupt the public interest. Harrington solved this problem by advocating an "agrarian law," essentially a massive redistrubutionary tax on inherited wealth. This love for what today's royalist GOP derides as the "death tax" was not shared by all American founders, but it did exert a positive influence on people like Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

There's been a raging debate in political theory over the last several decades about whether the American founding was more Lockean liberal, devoted to individual rights, or Harringtonian republican, committed to public virtue. Framed in that way, the republican view seems the more "conservative." But this is a big misconception. In many ways, the republican writers were more radically anti-authoritarian than was Locke, partly because that ideal of "virtue" was such an invitation to suspicion about the covert interests of the powerful. I'll have more to say about Cato's Letters in a future post, but for now I'll just note that anyone who writes a series of 144 newspaper columns arguing that corporate crooks should be hanged and their property confiscated, while their corrupt and warmongering government enablers are impeached and then lynched, is neither conservative nor moderate.

Picking up on an earlier post, I'd argue that Sidney is the original wellspring of the radical republican argument. Jefferson once wrote that he wasn't trying for originality with the Declaration of Independence, but was simply distilling the wisdom of Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney. Indeed, it is from Sidney, much more than Locke, that Jefferson takes the rhetoric of "self-evident truth" (see Discourses III.25, 456). Like Locke, Sidney embraces the right to revolt, but Sidney is the much harsher critic of executive power. Legend has it that Sidney was the last man left standing at the Rump Parliament after Cromwell had it disbanded and that he only left when dragged out by the army. As protest, Sidney commissioned the performance of Julius Caesar at his estate and played the part of Brutus personally. Not surprisingly, Sidney was violently opposed to the idea of executive "prerogative," and demanded far stricter limitations on the king's power than did Locke. Executive discretion was a form of "slavery" (III. 21, 440).

Sidney also attacks the nobility's claims to virtue, argues for the supremacy of a broadly-construed "Commons," and defends popular sovereignty. A stickler for "rule of law," Sidney develops a theory of natural law constitutionalism that foreshadows what we often call a "living constitution." As he writes in the Discourses,

Besides, such is the imperfection of all human constitutions, that they are subject to perpetual fluctuation, which never permits them to continue long in the same condition: Corruptions slide in insensibly; and the best orders are sometimes subverted by malice and violence, so that he who only regards what was done in an age, often takes the corruption of the state for the institution, follows the worst example, thinks that to be the first, that is the most ancient he knows; and if brave people seeing the original defects of their government. . . do either correct and reform what may be amended, or abolish what was evil in the institution. . . these men impute it to sedition, and blame those actions, which of all that can be performed by men are the most glorious. We are not therefore so much to inquire after that which is most ancient, as that which is best, and most conducing to the good ends to which it was directed (III. 25, 460).

You couldn't ask for a much clearer critique of Scalia-style conservative "originalism" in the idiom of 1683. Sidney's anti-authoritarianism taught him that you couldn't even fully trust the founding fathers, since nations always suffer from "the defects of their own foundations." As he goes on to say, "there can be no greater mark of a brutish stupidity, than for men to continue in an evil way, because their fathers had brought them into it." (III. 25, 462). The density of Sidney's writing has long rendered him the forgotten influence on the American founders. But in our era of corrupted "republicanism," it might help to remember exactly what that word once meant, and what it might mean again if the Democrats can muster some of the backbone that Sidney tried in vain to bequeath us. That would be an inheritance worth collecting in full.