The United States was founded to be a republic built on shared habits, responsibilities, and a common civic culture, but decades of expansion and mass change have pushed it toward a different model of rule. What once fit a self-governing commonwealth now strains under the weight of scale, multicultural pressures, and centralized authority. This piece argues that America’s change in substance requires us to rethink whether republican government still matches the nation we have become.
Political systems are not interchangeable blueprints you can drop into any country and expect to work the same way. Different peoples carry distinct customs, loyalties, and strengths that shape how power is held and how order is kept. When leaders pretend institutions are neutral tools that will work everywhere, they ignore the human realities that make government functional or not.
Classical republican theory assumed a tight moral and social fabric among citizens, a web of obligations that turned rights into responsibilities. A republic depends on neighbors knowing and policing each other, on churches, businesses, and local institutions forming a civic backbone. When that backbone decays, the lightweight governance a republic expects no longer holds the whole society together.
If conservatives wish to make the United States a republic again, they must begin by admitting what America has become.
Empires operate on a different logic. They accept diversity by layering a stronger, more centralized enforcement over a plurality of peoples and customs. Historically, successful empires tolerated local differences while insisting on tribute, military support, and loyalty to central power. That design lets very different groups coexist under one ruler, but it is not republican self-rule.
Scale matters more than we like to admit. Small, homogeneous polities can govern themselves through shared norms and mutual accountability. Larger, multiethnic states accumulate friction that ordinary civic persuasion cannot erase. When a society grows diverse enough that its fundamental assumptions diverge, the delicate machinery of a republic jams and requires heavier levers to keep the peace.
Immigration and multicultural policies have consequences for political cohesion. Bringing in large numbers of people who do not share core civic habits changes the incentives facing elites and voters alike. Politicians facing fragmented publics often reach for centralized power to manage the resulting instability, and that concentration of authority undermines the republican ideal of dispersed, accountable self-government.
Leaders in liberal democracies now routinely choose governance strategies better suited to empires than to republics. They expand administrative reach, centralize decision-making, and use national institutions to integrate or manage groups that lack common ground. The result is a state that looks democratic in form but behaves imperial in practice.
That shift has real effects on civic life. Voting becomes a mechanism for competing blocs rather than a reflection of shared judgments, and public institutions serve to smooth conflicts instead of cultivating virtue. When civic education, local engagement, and civic responsibilities are weakened, the republic’s informal enforcement mechanisms fade and the state must fill the gap.
Restoring a republican order is not a matter of nostalgia. It requires recognizing hard trade-offs and acting on them: slowing or stopping the flows that dilute civic cohesion, reining in foreign adventures that stretch political attention and resources, and rebuilding institutions that transmit shared habits and responsibilities. None of these moves is easy, but pretending scale and diversity matter only in the abstract makes revival impossible.
Republics demand more from citizens than elections and slogans. They ask for steady participation, service, and sacrifice so that rights are matched by duties. If those expectations are not reestablished in everyday life, the only alternative is an ever-strengthening center that holds an uneasy union together by decree rather than by consent.
The choice facing Americans is simple in its stakes: either rebuild the civic conditions that make self-government feasible, or accept governance that functions more like imperial management. Those who want the republic back should start by confronting the transformation already underway and proposing concrete, candid steps to reverse it.
