July 4, 2026 marked 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Should this historic anniversary have evoked unabashed patriotic celebration or cause for reflection? Inspired by Joseph Solis-Mullen’s “The Sixth Republic,” I argue for the latter.
America wasn’t born as the eternal constitutional republic your civics teacher swore it was. It has been reborn—radically remade—multiple times, each iteration shedding more of the Founders’ restraints on centralized power while wrapping itself in the same red, white, and blue myths.
Unlike the French, who frankly number their republics after each upheaval, Americans cling to the comforting fiction of seamless continuity. The Constitution’s text lingers as a sacred prop, but the operating system of power has been upgraded, patched, and hijacked several times.
This isn’t nostalgia for some golden age; it’s a clear-eyed autopsy to understand why the system feels so alien to its original design—and what that means for those living inside the latest version.
One might counter that the Constitution’s text, though amended, remains intact, thereby proving continuity, not rebirth. Article V remains; the three branches persist; the Bill of Rights still binds. Are these not phases of a single republic, evolved rather than replaced?
This formalist objection mistakes the vessel for the voyage. The presidency of 1789 commanded a few hundred clerks and a tiny militia; today’s executive directs over a million active-duty personnel, a sprawling intelligence apparatus, and issues executive orders with the force of law on matters the Founders left to local sheriffs and state legislatures.
Today’s Constitution endures in theory while the machinery runs on different fuel entirely. Yet America’s founding myth portrays a virtuous people forging an eternal constitutional republic under divine providence and enlightened Founders.
Heterodox scrutiny, drawing on Sydney George Fisher’s True History of the American Revolution (1902), reveals something rawer: colonists habituated to near-unfettered autonomy under British “salutary neglect,” who revolted when the Empire—cash-strapped after imperial wars—tried to claw back control.
Each subsequent “republic” has been a further entrenchment of power, marked by elite capture, crisis-exploited centralization, and the steady erosion of the original decentralized spirit. Principal-agent failures, regulatory capture, and moral hazard aren’t bugs; they’re the operating system.
Power consolidates because it benefits those who hold it. The Constitution remains a revered document, but the machinery of governance has been repeatedly rewritten.
The First Republic (Roughly 1776–1789): The Era of Spoiled Colonial Liberty
This was the Articles of Confederation era—a decentralized alliance of sovereign states wary of strong central authority. No powerful executive, no national courts dictating to states, minimal taxation, or standing army. It was messy, often ineffective, but it reflected the revolutionary spirit: power close to the people, voluntary association over coerced unity.
As Joshua Mawhorter notes in a recent Mises analysis, nationalist calls for stronger centralization under the Articles and the Bank of North America were sold as war necessities—but historical timing shows the Revolution was largely won before either fully took effect. These were not indispensable to victory but crucial stepping stones toward the very consolidation the colonists had resisted in Britain, entrenching elite incentives early.
To understand why that original setup was so short-lived, we must bust the myth of how the Revolution actually began. Contrary to schoolbook tales of heroic overnight resistance to tyranny, the colonies enjoyed generations of de facto independence and lax oversight.
Britain—preoccupied with European power plays and the French threat in Canada—practiced salutary neglect: minimal enforcement of trade laws, allowing smuggling, self-governance, and local assemblies to flourish.
Colonists—native-born after early migrations and rapidly growing in population—developed a fierce attachment to this semi-independence. Charters granted extraordinary freedoms (e.g., Connecticut and Rhode Island electing their own governors). They bought influence from governors, evaded regulations, and viewed heavy-handed interference as intolerable.
Fisher’s account stresses this wasn’t sudden oppression sparking virtue; it was spoiled children of liberty recoiling when post-1763 fiscal pressures (French and Indian War debts) led Britain to tighten the reins for revenue and order.
The “revolution” was, in part, a defense of accustomed autonomy against a metropole asserting sovereign claims. This foundational spirit of self-rule and skepticism of distant authority gave rise to the loose Articles of Confederation.
The Second Republic (1789–1861): Constitutional Federalism
Constitutional federalism was a more structured experiment in a limited central government with enumerated powers. States retained vast sovereignty; Washington was remote. Yet incentives for expansion lurked—Hamiltonian finance, judicial nationalism, and slavery’s contradictions festered.
The Civil War wasn’t merely about abolition; it crushed compact theory and state sovereignty via force. “Indivisible Union” triumphed through bayonets, setting the template for future centralizing crises.
The Third Republic (1865–1913): National Consolidation
Post-war amendments, Reconstruction, and the triumph of “one nation” over compact theory. Federal authority expanded; national citizenship overshadowed state loyalties.
Industrialization and railroads tied the country tighter, but government remained relatively restrained—until Progressives smelled opportunity. Corruption scandals (such as the Credit Mobilier scandal) exemplified elite capture in the Gilded Age.
The Fourth Republic (~1913–1930s): Progressive Administrative State
The fourth was the age of the Federal Reserve (1913), income tax (16th Amendment), direct Senate elections (17th), and wartime controls. Washington inserted itself into money, banking, labor, and daily economics.
In subsequent decades, the Federal Reserve’s fiat money system, severed from gold in 1971, supercharged this dynamic—enabling endless deficit spending while externalizing the cost as inflation.
Incentives shifted: bureaucrats and insiders gained levers; citizens faced direct federal extraction and oversight.
World War I amplified executive power and surveillance. Regulatory capture bloomed as industries shaped the bureaucracies meant to “control” them. From a heterodox lens, these weren’t pure reforms but power shifts favoring insiders amid crisis.
The Fifth Republic (New Deal–2001): Welfare-Warfare Administrative Leviathan
FDR’s revolution was cemented when the Supreme Court blinked under his court-packing threat, ratifying massive delegation of legislative power to agencies. Permanent welfare, economic planning, and global empire followed. Congress legislates less and rubber-stamps more; unelected regulators rule. The administrative state—so-called experts wielding rule by regulation—became the real sovereign, entrenched further by WWII and the Cold War. This is the version many older Americans still vaguely romanticize as normal government.
The Sixth Republic (Post-9/11–Present): Surveillance-Security Administrative Superstate
9/11 accelerated the fusion: surveillance state (Patriot Act, NSA), endless executive emergencies, intelligence bureaucracy, DHS, normalized perpetual war footing, omnibus spending theater, and presidential governance by decree.
Congress is mostly performative—a symbolic relic passing trillion-dollar packages unread while real decisions migrate to agencies, think tanks, courts, executives, and unaccountable “experts.”
The defining feature isn’t just bureaucracy; it’s the national security overlay fused with administrative control. This apparatus now monitors, regulates, and “protects” through perpetual emergencies—making crisis management the new normal.
Privacy, due process, and legislative supremacy are further eroded. The form (elections, the Constitution, etc.) persists as theater; the substance is a fracturing, managerial oligarchy with security-state muscle.
These aren’t minor tweaks. Each republic marked a decisive shift in sovereignty, citizen-state relations, and power distribution—driven by war, crisis, ideology, and elite incentives. The myth of the “eternal republic” papers over the progressive hollowing out of consent, federalism, and limited government. Americans didn’t vote for most of these transformations outright; they were consolidated amid emergencies, judicial acquiescence, and cultural shifts.
Living amid the Current Sixth Republic
We are managed subjects in a high-tech managerial regime dressed in republican drag. Our taxes and digitally-created fiat currency (inflation) fund a sprawling security-welfare-intelligence complex that monitors communications, maintains a global military posture of empire, and regulates vast swaths of economic and social life via agencies insulated from elections.
Elections appoint figureheads who inherit the machinery; real continuity comes from permanent bureaucracy, courts, and donor/incentive networks. Localism is a shadow—Washington (and its financial/intel extensions) dominates culture, economy, and the law.
Prosperity for many persists due to innovation and inertia, but dependency, debt, surveillance, and elite insulation breed cynicism. The gargantuan wealth disparity between the uber-rich and the dwindling middle class widens by orders of magnitude. “Freedom” rhetoric abounds while principal-agent failures compound. Truth-seeking reveals patterns of deception: official narratives protect the structure; heterodox scrutiny of incentives exposes the rot.
We are freer than many global counterparts in consumption and speech (for now), but structurally farther from self-governing republicans than 1789 citizens.
Conclusion
The myth of the “eternal republic” papers over the progressive hollowing out of consent, federalism, and limited government. Dispelling the myth doesn’t breed despair; it equips realism.
America’s genius wasn’t eternal parchment magic but adaptable energy, decentralized experimentation, and skepticism of authority. Reclaiming that requires piercing illusions, scrutinizing every institutional claim, and prioritizing evidence over loyalty to the current regime’s self-image.
