ACR Project, the American Classical Republic projectAmerican Classical Republic Project

IThe end of politics

Government exists to secure a good held in common, under law, for a people who intend to go on existing.

A republic arranges public authority under law. Those who exercise it answer to the governed and pursue purposes that can be stated and defended in public.

Elections, votes and majorities are instruments for producing that arrangement. They are good instruments and they have no independent claim on us. When an instrument stops producing the arrangement it exists to produce, the instrument is what should be revised.

IIRights are equal and complete

Every citizen holds the same rights, in full measure, unconditionally.

Conscience, speech, worship, property, movement, privacy, due process and protection from arbitrary force belong to every citizen alike. They do not scale with intelligence, wealth, service, ancestry or office. They are not earned, and they cannot be forfeited by failing a test.

Nothing later in this document may be read to qualify this article. Where a later article appears to qualify it, this one governs and the later article is defective.

IIIThe right of resistance

When public power destroys every lawful remedy, the people retain the right to resist it.

Law binds rulers and citizens alike. Officials who violate rights remain answerable to courts, legislatures, elections and removal while those remedies remain open.

Locke called the final recourse beyond a captured legal order an appeal to heaven. The American founding acted on the same principle: a government that destroys the rights it exists to secure dissolves its own claim to obedience.

That right begins only when the constitutional means of redress have been closed or made fraudulent. Disagreement with a lawful decision, defeat at election, or impatience with due process supplies no such right.

IVAuthority is earned

Equal human worth does not entail an equal claim to govern other people.

These are two propositions, not one, and running them together is a recent habit rather than an old truth. A citizen's standing as a human being is not a function of competence. Whether that citizen should hold power over the lives of others is a question about competence and about very little else.

Every other high-stakes responsibility in the society is allocated on demonstrated fitness. Surgery, flight, command of troops, custody of a child. Political power is not the single domain where fitness is beside the point. It is the domain where the consequences of getting it wrong are largest and slowest to reverse.

VWhat this does not say

No citizen is a lesser person for holding no office.

The passenger is not a lesser human than the pilot. Office is work with a competence requirement attached, not a rank in an order of human worth, and the moment it is treated as a rank the doctrine has become the thing it was written against.

Any version of this project that produces contempt for ordinary citizens has failed, whatever it has achieved otherwise.

VIWhat the doctrine inherits

The arguments here were settled, or at least sharpened, long before America existed to inherit them.

Taking a thinker's question is not taking his answer. From Plato the project takes the question and rejects the reply: no philosopher-king standing above the law, no abolition of private life, family or property, no censorship of the poets.

• Platowho should govern
• Polybiushow power is divided
• Cicerolaw and the common good
• Machiavelliwhat keeps a republic strong
• Hamilton and Madisonwhat it must protect against, including itself

VIIThe guardians

Political authority is held by citizens who have demonstrated fitness to exercise it.

Demonstrated means tested, observable and on the record: education, judgment exercised under real responsibility, competence in the matter at hand, and service rendered before power is held. Not a score. Not a credential purchased. Not a talent for winning attention.

Fitness includes character. A guardian who is brilliant and cannot be bound is disqualified by the fact of not being bindable, and the standard should be written so that this is the first thing it catches rather than the last.

VIIIEntry is open

Any citizen may qualify. No citizen inherits.

Birth, family, wealth, race, religion and region confer no political standing whatever. The standard is published, applied uniformly, and appealable by the person it is applied to.

Open entry is a measurable condition, not a statement of intent. If the children of the wealthy qualify at a markedly higher rate, the pathway has been captured, and the pathway is what must change. Keeping it open is a standing obligation of the republic, discharged in schooling and in access, and it costs money.

IXGuardians are removable

Every guardian is subject to law, to review, and to removal.

Fixed terms. Records open to the people governed. Courts with jurisdiction over guardians that guardians do not control. Removal for corruption, for incompetence, and for exceeding lawful authority, by a process that does not require the consent of the person being removed.

A governing class that cannot in practice be removed is a monarchy with extra steps, whatever it calls itself and however it was originally selected.

XPower is divided

No institution, and no guardian, holds enough of the state to act without the others.

Polybius described the durable constitution as one in which distinct institutions each hold real power to obstruct the rest. That is the structural core of this doctrine and it is not negotiable for the sake of efficiency.

A written constitution stands above the guardians. It binds them, it is interpreted by a body they do not command, and it is amendable by a process difficult enough to be serious and possible enough to be honest.

XISpeech, including against this

Opponents of the doctrine keep every right the doctrine names, in full, including the right to organize for its abolition.

Speech, press, assembly and political organization are protected without reference to what they are aimed at. There is no loyalty test for ordinary citizenship, no compulsory ideological conformity, and no offence of criticizing the arrangement.

An order that has to suppress its critics has already conceded the argument it is suppressing.

XIIPrivate life

The state has no jurisdiction over conscience, household, belief or association.

The ambition of this doctrine is public order and public competence. It is not the improvement of private character, and a republic that takes on that project acquires powers it will not give back.

Privacy is a right under Article II and is meant here in its strong sense: the citizen is not obliged to be legible to the state.

XIIIAgainst faction

Guardians owe their judgment to the republic as a whole. Permanent organized interests may not command it.

Madison's problem is the enduring one. Factions do not merely compete for the state; given time they capture it, and the capture is usually legal by the time anyone notices.

Party discipline that substitutes loyalty for judgment is a form of that capture, and a guardian whose votes can be predicted from his affiliation alone is not exercising the judgment he was selected for.

XIVSelection is not for sale

Organised money should not determine who holds authority.

If the purpose of political selection is to identify fitness to govern, then large-scale spending intended to alter that selection introduces a variable with no relation to fitness. It is not corruption in the narrow sense. It is interference with the test.

The objection is not to wealth, which Article XVI protects. It is to the conversion of wealth into political outcome, whether through committees that exist to move elections, or through the professional campaign industry built around them, whose entire competence is the moving of selection by money.

XVWhat that would actually require

Under current constitutional doctrine this cannot be done by statute.

Federal law distinguishes direct contributions to candidates, which are limited, from independent expenditure, which is not. Corporations and unions may not give treasury funds directly to federal candidates, but may fund independent-expenditure committees, and Citizens United and the cases following it treat significant categories of independent political spending as protected speech.

A serious version of Article XIV therefore means constitutional amendment, or a sustained argument that the selection of public officers is a different kind of act from speech and is governed by different rules. Both are long roads, and neither of them is a bill that passes next session.

XVIProperty and enterprise

Private property and free enterprise are conditions of liberty, not concessions granted by the state.

Independence from arbitrary power requires a material base that the arbitrary power does not control. A citizen whose livelihood is held at the discretion of officials has rights on paper and a supplicant's position in fact.

Markets allocate better than ministries and, more importantly here, they hold something back from the state. Government enforces contract, punishes fraud, prevents capture, and supplies what markets structurally cannot.

XVIISupport that ends

Public assistance is measured by whether the person needs it later.

This is not abandonment and should not be mistaken for it. Health, schooling, training and stability through a shock are transfers that build capability, and a republic that lets capable people be destroyed by bad luck is wasting its own citizens.

The standard is the direction of travel. A program that reliably produces permanent dependence has failed by its own stated purpose, and defending it on the grounds that it is generous is a way of not looking at the result.

XVIIIAspiration

A republic that aims only at comfort will not keep what it has.

Discovery, building, science and the willingness to attempt things that may fail are not decoration on top of a functioning society. They are what a society does when it still believes it has a future.

Comfortable survival is not a national purpose. It is what is left when a nation stops having one.

XIXExpenditure abroad is statecraft

Public money leaves the country for a defined purpose, or it does not leave.

Foreign assistance is an instrument of security and foreign policy. It is not charity, it is not owed, and the existence of a program is not a reason for the program.

So the legitimate cases are real and they are specific: arms and financing for an allied republic that cannot otherwise defend itself, denial of strategic position to an adversary, the strengthening of an ally that matters, relief where the humanitarian reason is compelling on its own terms.

XXFour conditions for foreign expenditure

Purpose, plausibility, monitoring, termination.

Name the American, allied or exceptional humanitarian objective. Explain why this expenditure is likely to accomplish it. Track where the resources actually arrive. End the funding when the objective is met, when it fails, or when it disappears.

Note the consequence, because it is not the obvious one. This test does not mean spending less everywhere. It can mean spending considerably more on one program that demonstrably works while ending ten that do not. The measure is proven purpose, not the number of dollars crossing the border.

XXIFraud, oversight and evidence

The case for a stricter standard rests on specific documented failures, not on the claim that assistance is inherently fraudulent.

Government auditors have identified fraud, waste and diversion in particular assistance programs, and have found that conflict environments make direct oversight harder and raise the risk of diversion and corruption. That is a real and sufficient basis for demanding more.

It is not a basis for saying that American assistance generally lacks oversight. Evaluation requirements exist, spending data is published, and some programs work. The claim of this doctrine is that the standard in Article XX should bind, and that it currently does not bind hard enough.

XXIIPrivate giving is free

A citizen may send his own money anywhere he likes.

The restriction in this part is on public money, which is taken by compulsion and therefore owes an account of itself. Private wealth given abroad owes no such account.

Any reading of this doctrine as a general prohibition on money leaving America would violate Articles II and XVI and should be rejected on that ground.

XXIIIPrimacy without adventure

American strength is a condition of American independence.

Primacy means not living at the discretion of another power. It is a defensive proposition before it is anything else, and a republic that cannot secure itself will eventually be governed by whoever can.

It does not mean war as a habit, permanent occupation, or an obligation to resolve every crisis on earth. Force is used where the interest is real and the objective is achievable, and those are two separate questions that both have to be answered.

XXIVWhat it carries

Continuity with the American founding, and one republic at the center of it.

Thirteen stripes and the blue canton are kept, in the same colors, because this is a revision of the American political order and not a replacement of American identity. The symbols are white, which keeps the vocabulary of the existing flag rather than borrowing a revolutionary one.

A single five-pointed star stands for one republic and one common citizenship. The laurel around it is the classical inheritance: civic achievement, honor earned rather than assumed.

XXVOne star is not one government

The single star is all of the states in one republic, not the erasure of any of them.

This is the reading the flag most invites, and it is the wrong one. Local self-government is a check on central power, and the republic described here keeps it for the same reason it keeps divided institutions in Article X.

The star gathers the fifty rather than replacing them. What the citizens of the republic hold in common is prior to which state they live in, and it does not follow that the government they hold in common should be the only government they have.

Named in full, the arrangement is the United States of the American Republic. The states remain states. The star is what they amount to together.

XXVIIs this anti-democratic?

Yes, in one specific sense.

If democracy means equal political authority for every citizen, then this doctrine rejects democracy in that sense, and a critic who says so is reading it correctly rather than unfairly. What it does not reject is accountability, consent, rights, open entry, removal, or the rule of law, all of which are ordinarily counted as democratic and all of which are required here.

None of this rests on the claim that America was never a democracy. Madison distinguished a republic from a pure democracy, but that distinction does not make representative democracy foreign to American government, and the modern United States is correctly described as both a constitutional republic and a representative democracy. The slogan is a weaker claim than the one made here, and it is not made here.

The doctrine therefore rejects equal political authority while preserving equal rights in full. It judges government by the common good secured under law, with majority preference serving as one instrument of accountability.

XXVIIIs this authoritarian?

The limits in Articles IX through XIII are essential safeguards against authoritarian rule.

Guardians bound by a constitution they cannot rewrite, judged by courts they do not control, removable for cause, facing a free press and a legal opposition, with entry open to any citizen, is not authoritarian government in any usable sense of the word.

Those limits are the doctrine, not trimming around it. Every authoritarian regime of the last century opened with a competence argument and then disposed of the limits, which is why the limits here are stated before the competence claim and not after it. Suspicion on that point is warranted until they are shown to bind.

XXVIIIIs this anti-American?

It is revisionist toward the current order and continuous with the older one.

What it means to preserve is recognizably American: natural rights, liberty under law, opportunity unbound from birth, private enterprise, constitutional government, self-reliance, and national independence.

The honest qualification is constitutional. Voting rights are protected explicitly in the text, and one person, one vote was developed by the Supreme Court out of equal protection. Any actual implementation of unequal political authority runs directly into that, and this is a doctrine rather than a plan for next year.

XXIXWill people call it worse than that?

Yes, and some of the compression will be fair.

In hostile hands the whole of this compresses to one sentence about clever people deserving more power. The answer to that is not tone, it is order. Rights come first in this document because they come first in the argument, and a doctrine that opens with hierarchy and arrives at rights later means the hierarchy.