Recently, Ryan McMaken posed a provocative question: if the French are willing to number their republics, why not Americans?
The French, after all, openly acknowledge that their political order has undergone multiple transformations. The current French regime is known as the Fifth Republic, reflecting a succession of constitutional and political systems stretching back to the Revolution of 1789. No French historian would claim that the republic governed by Charles de Gaulle was identical to that governed by Adolphe Thiers simply because both called themselves republics.
Americans, however, tend to insist that they still live under the same republic established by the Founding Fathers. The Constitution ratified in 1788 remains in force. Politicians still swear oaths to it. Schoolchildren still learn to revere it. Therefore, many conclude that the American republic remains essentially unchanged. But constitutional continuity and regime continuity are not the same thing.
As Ryan recently argued, the United States has already passed through several distinct constitutional orders, each characterized by a different distribution of power and a different relationship between citizens and the state. Indeed, following Murray Rothbard’s analysis, America’s First Republic was not the constitutional regime created in 1788 at all, but the decentralized confederation established under the Articles of Confederation. That First Republic lasted from independence until the Philadelphia Convention replaced it with a more centralized national government.
The Constitution inaugurated America’s Second Republic. This was the republic of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson. Although imperfect in many respects, it was characterized by limited federal administration, substantial state autonomy, and a widespread understanding that the federal government possessed only a narrow range of enumerated powers. Political life remained overwhelmingly local. Washington was important, but it was not yet the center of American life.
The Civil War destroyed that arrangement. Whatever one thinks of the conflict’s causes or consequences, it settled a question that had remained unresolved since the Founding: Was the Union a voluntary compact among states or an indivisible nation? After Appomattox, there could be little doubt. Secession was no longer regarded as a constitutional possibility but as rebellion. The federal government emerged from the war vastly strengthened, and national citizenship increasingly eclipsed state citizenship. Thus was born America’s Third Republic.
The next transformation arrived during the Progressive Era. The Federal Reserve System, the federal income tax, the direct election of senators, wartime conscription, and the rapid expansion of federal policing powers fundamentally altered the relationship between Americans and their government. Prior to 1913, most Americans had little direct interaction with federal authorities. Afterward, Washington increasingly inserted itself into citizens’ economic lives. This Fourth Republic laid the institutional foundations for everything that followed.
The Fifth Republic emerged during the New Deal and became permanent after the Supreme Court’s famous “switch in time that saved nine.” The administrative state—long advocated by Progressive reformers—finally achieved constitutional legitimacy. Federal agencies acquired vast rulemaking authority. Congress increasingly delegated its legislative responsibilities to bureaucratic institutions. The executive branch expanded dramatically. Economic management, welfare provision, and social regulation became permanent responsibilities of the federal government.
Then came September 11, 2001. The attacks of that day and the wars that followed were accompanied by a series of transformations at home. The most obvious manifestations were the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the expansion of surveillance powers, the normalization of endless military interventions, and the growth of the intelligence bureaucracy. But the deeper transformation concerned the organization of political power itself.
Congress became increasingly marginal to governance. Major policy decisions migrated toward executive agencies, courts, intelligence institutions, emergency declarations, and presidential directives. Budgeting devolved into perpetual crisis management conducted through enormous omnibus bills that few legislators read and even fewer genuinely shaped. Presidents of both parties increasingly governed through executive orders, administrative guidance, emergency powers, and regulatory interpretation.
The legislature remained. Its constitutional forms survived. Yet its practical role steadily diminished. This is precisely the sort of “revolution within the form” that Garet Garrett described nearly a century ago. The shell remained intact while the substance changed.
The defining institution of the Fifth Republic was the administrative agency. The defining institution of the Sixth Republic is the security-administrative state: a fusion of bureaucratic governance, executive power, intelligence institutions, permanent emergency management, and increasingly symbolic legislative oversight.
Naturally, the boundaries between republics are never perfectly clear. Historians still debate when one French republic ended and another began. Future historians may likewise disagree about the precise date America’s Fifth Republic gave way to its Sixth. Yet the broader point remains.
A citizen of 1780, 1830, 1920, 1950, or 2025 would each encounter a fundamentally different political order. They would find different assumptions about sovereignty, citizenship, federal authority, taxation, war powers, economic management, surveillance, and the proper role of government. The French would have numbered those republics long ago. Perhaps it is time Americans did the same.
