The United States lives under a Constitution filled with words that had a public meaning in 1789. The governing institutions and ideals fostered by that Constitution were the first, but not last, republic of the United States. The Civil War and its aftermath constituted the Second Republic. The Great Depression and World War II marked the start of the Third Republic. We are living at its end.
The Third Republic came into this world through the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in the election of 1936; Republicans came to D.C. in 1937 with 20 percent of the House of Representatives. The seemingly endless difficulties of the 1930s suggested incessant regulation and management of the economy. And there would be few limits outside of politics on the leaders of the republic. As a famous footnote said, politics, not the Constitution, would govern economic management. The same footnote indicated “discrete insular minorities” would be protected from electoral majorities. And victory in the world war gave American leaders the responsibilities for a global empire or if you wish, a Pax Americana.
These changes meant the Third Republic would be a technocracy. Economists would determine and implement policies for prosperity. The harm done to Black Americans would be healed by de jure desegregation combined with programs of uplift designed and managed by experts. Other experts – on everything from the Soviet Union to exporting democracy – ruled in foreign affairs. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, no longer had a place for politicians like Black and Douglas; Platonic Guardians educated at a handful of law schools decided what the Constitution required. The rule of experts had implications for other constitutional offices. The mere politicians elected to Congress or state government were deemed unprofessional at best, hacks at worst, and in all cases, not modern.
The rule of experts had its successes and failures; space does not permit naming them in any persuasive way. But at the height of their power - the 1960s and 1970s - the technocrats began to lose public confidence. By 1980, only a minority thought the federal government would do what was right most of the time. In the ensuing four decades, public confidence in government recovered modestly at times only to fall again. Then came the failed war in Iraq and the global financial crisis of 2008. By then, the Third Republic was as old as the Second Republic when it died.
People were right to doubt the experts, but the latter had failed on their own terms. Max Weber had reconciled popular rule with science by arguing that elected politicians should determine the ends of policy while experts informed leaders about the consequences of their chosen means to those ends. Over the past two decades, and especially since 2016, the policy advice of experts has become more predictable and partisan. Experts rarely tell the leaders of the party of the left things they do not wish to hear; the same is true of the right, perhaps more so, but the relatively few right-wing experts played second fiddle during the Third Republic. In the home of expertise, the universities, only one set of ends was increasingly heard, and those who dissented were suppressed or discarded. And intellectuals became more cynical and more ambitious.
Knowledge was power, a weapon to rule over the rubes. So confident were the professors that they no longer bothered to cover their ambitions with high-minded rhetoric.
The legacies of the Third Republic will live on in the Fourth. Presidential power in service to the most recent electoral majority will define the new regime. Progressives have yet to find their Donald Trump, but they will. The Madisonian in me fears this tendency, but we have not been a Madisonian nation for some time. Rather than indulge my pessimism, I will end with hope. In a republic, the people are allowed to fail and, thereby, to learn. Experts might conclude that their loss of credibility counsels a return to tend their own gardens of policy advice shorn of political ambitions. The people and their champions may eventually learn that achieving their ends demands better knowledge of means. The arc of history, in other words, may tend toward humility and thereby to a better world. Intellectuals have it in their power to move first toward that happy future.
The United States lives under a Constitution filled with words that had a public meaning in 1789. The governing institutions and ideals fostered by that Constitution were the first, but not last, republic of the United States. The Civil War and its aftermath constituted the Second Republic. The Great Depression and World War II marked the start of the Third Republic. We are living at its end.
The Third Republic came into this world through the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in the election of 1936; Republicans came to D.C. in 1937 with 20 percent of the House of Representatives. The seemingly endless difficulties of the 1930s suggested incessant regulation and management of the economy. And there would be few limits outside of politics on the leaders of the republic. As a famous footnote said, politics, not the Constitution, would govern economic management. The same footnote indicated “discrete insular minorities” would be protected from electoral majorities. And victory in the world war gave American leaders the responsibilities for a global empire or if you wish, a Pax Americana.
These changes meant the Third Republic would be a technocracy. Economists would determine and implement policies for prosperity. The harm done to Black Americans would be healed by de jure desegregation combined with programs of uplift designed and managed by experts. Other experts – on everything from the Soviet Union to exporting democracy – ruled in foreign affairs. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, no longer had a place for politicians like Black and Douglas; Platonic Guardians educated at a handful of law schools decided what the Constitution required. The rule of experts had implications for other constitutional offices. The mere politicians elected to Congress or state government were deemed unprofessional at best, hacks at worst, and in all cases, not modern.
The rule of experts had its successes and failures; space does not permit naming them in any persuasive way. But at the height of their power - the 1960s and 1970s - the technocrats began to lose public confidence. By 1980, only a minority thought the federal government would do what was right most of the time. In the ensuing four decades, public confidence in government recovered modestly at times only to fall again. Then came the failed war in Iraq and the global financial crisis of 2008. By then, the Third Republic was as old as the Second Republic when it died.
People were right to doubt the experts, but the latter had failed on their own terms. Max Weber had reconciled popular rule with science by arguing that elected politicians should determine the ends of policy while experts informed leaders about the consequences of their chosen means to those ends. Over the past two decades, and especially since 2016, the policy advice of experts has become more predictable and partisan. Experts rarely tell the leaders of the party of the left things they do not wish to hear; the same is true of the right, perhaps more so, but the relatively few right-wing experts played second fiddle during the Third Republic. In the home of expertise, the universities, only one set of ends was increasingly heard, and those who dissented were suppressed or discarded. And intellectuals became more cynical and more ambitious.
Knowledge was power, a weapon to rule over the rubes. So confident were the professors that they no longer bothered to cover their ambitions with high-minded rhetoric.
The legacies of the Third Republic will live on in the Fourth. Presidential power in service to the most recent electoral majority will define the new regime. Progressives have yet to find their Donald Trump, but they will. The Madisonian in me fears this tendency, but we have not been a Madisonian nation for some time. Rather than indulge my pessimism, I will end with hope. In a republic, the people are allowed to fail and, thereby, to learn. Experts might conclude that their loss of credibility counsels a return to tend their own gardens of policy advice shorn of political ambitions. The people and their champions may eventually learn that achieving their ends demands better knowledge of means. The arc of history, in other words, may tend toward humility and thereby to a better world. Intellectuals have it in their power to move first toward that happy future.
The United States lives under a Constitution filled with words that had a public meaning in 1789. The governing institutions and ideals fostered by that Constitution were the first, but not last, republic of the United States. The Civil War and its aftermath constituted the Second Republic. The Great Depression and World War II marked the start of the Third Republic. We are living at its end.
The Third Republic came into this world through the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in the election of 1936; Republicans came to D.C. in 1937 with 20 percent of the House of Representatives. The seemingly endless difficulties of the 1930s suggested incessant regulation and management of the economy. And there would be few limits outside of politics on the leaders of the republic. As a famous footnote said, politics, not the Constitution, would govern economic management. The same footnote indicated “discrete insular minorities” would be protected from electoral majorities. And victory in the world war gave American leaders the responsibilities for a global empire or if you wish, a Pax Americana.
These changes meant the Third Republic would be a technocracy. Economists would determine and implement policies for prosperity. The harm done to Black Americans would be healed by de jure desegregation combined with programs of uplift designed and managed by experts. Other experts – on everything from the Soviet Union to exporting democracy – ruled in foreign affairs. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, no longer had a place for politicians like Black and Douglas; Platonic Guardians educated at a handful of law schools decided what the Constitution required. The rule of experts had implications for other constitutional offices. The mere politicians elected to Congress or state government were deemed unprofessional at best, hacks at worst, and in all cases, not modern.
The rule of experts had its successes and failures; space does not permit naming them in any persuasive way. But at the height of their power - the 1960s and 1970s - the technocrats began to lose public confidence. By 1980, only a minority thought the federal government would do what was right most of the time. In the ensuing four decades, public confidence in government recovered modestly at times only to fall again. Then came the failed war in Iraq and the global financial crisis of 2008. By then, the Third Republic was as old as the Second Republic when it died.
People were right to doubt the experts, but the latter had failed on their own terms. Max Weber had reconciled popular rule with science by arguing that elected politicians should determine the ends of policy while experts informed leaders about the consequences of their chosen means to those ends. Over the past two decades, and especially since 2016, the policy advice of experts has become more predictable and partisan. Experts rarely tell the leaders of the party of the left things they do not wish to hear; the same is true of the right, perhaps more so, but the relatively few right-wing experts played second fiddle during the Third Republic. In the home of expertise, the universities, only one set of ends was increasingly heard, and those who dissented were suppressed or discarded. And intellectuals became more cynical and more ambitious.
Knowledge was power, a weapon to rule over the rubes. So confident were the professors that they no longer bothered to cover their ambitions with high-minded rhetoric.
The legacies of the Third Republic will live on in the Fourth. Presidential power in service to the most recent electoral majority will define the new regime. Progressives have yet to find their Donald Trump, but they will. The Madisonian in me fears this tendency, but we have not been a Madisonian nation for some time. Rather than indulge my pessimism, I will end with hope. In a republic, the people are allowed to fail and, thereby, to learn. Experts might conclude that their loss of credibility counsels a return to tend their own gardens of policy advice shorn of political ambitions. The people and their champions may eventually learn that achieving their ends demands better knowledge of means. The arc of history, in other words, may tend toward humility and thereby to a better world. Intellectuals have it in their power to move first toward that happy future.
The United States lives under a Constitution filled with words that had a public meaning in 1789. The governing institutions and ideals fostered by that Constitution were the first, but not last, republic of the United States. The Civil War and its aftermath constituted the Second Republic. The Great Depression and World War II marked the start of the Third Republic. We are living at its end.
The Third Republic came into this world through the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in the election of 1936; Republicans came to D.C. in 1937 with 20 percent of the House of Representatives. The seemingly endless difficulties of the 1930s suggested incessant regulation and management of the economy. And there would be few limits outside of politics on the leaders of the republic. As a famous footnote said, politics, not the Constitution, would govern economic management. The same footnote indicated “discrete insular minorities” would be protected from electoral majorities. And victory in the world war gave American leaders the responsibilities for a global empire or if you wish, a Pax Americana.
These changes meant the Third Republic would be a technocracy. Economists would determine and implement policies for prosperity. The harm done to Black Americans would be healed by de jure desegregation combined with programs of uplift designed and managed by experts. Other experts – on everything from the Soviet Union to exporting democracy – ruled in foreign affairs. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, no longer had a place for politicians like Black and Douglas; Platonic Guardians educated at a handful of law schools decided what the Constitution required. The rule of experts had implications for other constitutional offices. The mere politicians elected to Congress or state government were deemed unprofessional at best, hacks at worst, and in all cases, not modern.
The rule of experts had its successes and failures; space does not permit naming them in any persuasive way. But at the height of their power - the 1960s and 1970s - the technocrats began to lose public confidence. By 1980, only a minority thought the federal government would do what was right most of the time. In the ensuing four decades, public confidence in government recovered modestly at times only to fall again. Then came the failed war in Iraq and the global financial crisis of 2008. By then, the Third Republic was as old as the Second Republic when it died.
People were right to doubt the experts, but the latter had failed on their own terms. Max Weber had reconciled popular rule with science by arguing that elected politicians should determine the ends of policy while experts informed leaders about the consequences of their chosen means to those ends. Over the past two decades, and especially since 2016, the policy advice of experts has become more predictable and partisan. Experts rarely tell the leaders of the party of the left things they do not wish to hear; the same is true of the right, perhaps more so, but the relatively few right-wing experts played second fiddle during the Third Republic. In the home of expertise, the universities, only one set of ends was increasingly heard, and those who dissented were suppressed or discarded. And intellectuals became more cynical and more ambitious.
Knowledge was power, a weapon to rule over the rubes. So confident were the professors that they no longer bothered to cover their ambitions with high-minded rhetoric.
The legacies of the Third Republic will live on in the Fourth. Presidential power in service to the most recent electoral majority will define the new regime. Progressives have yet to find their Donald Trump, but they will. The Madisonian in me fears this tendency, but we have not been a Madisonian nation for some time. Rather than indulge my pessimism, I will end with hope. In a republic, the people are allowed to fail and, thereby, to learn. Experts might conclude that their loss of credibility counsels a return to tend their own gardens of policy advice shorn of political ambitions. The people and their champions may eventually learn that achieving their ends demands better knowledge of means. The arc of history, in other words, may tend toward humility and thereby to a better world. Intellectuals have it in their power to move first toward that happy future.
The United States lives under a Constitution filled with words that had a public meaning in 1789. The governing institutions and ideals fostered by that Constitution were the first, but not last, republic of the United States. The Civil War and its aftermath constituted the Second Republic. The Great Depression and World War II marked the start of the Third Republic. We are living at its end.
The Third Republic came into this world through the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in the election of 1936; Republicans came to D.C. in 1937 with 20 percent of the House of Representatives. The seemingly endless difficulties of the 1930s suggested incessant regulation and management of the economy. And there would be few limits outside of politics on the leaders of the republic. As a famous footnote said, politics, not the Constitution, would govern economic management. The same footnote indicated “discrete insular minorities” would be protected from electoral majorities. And victory in the world war gave American leaders the responsibilities for a global empire or if you wish, a Pax Americana.
These changes meant the Third Republic would be a technocracy. Economists would determine and implement policies for prosperity. The harm done to Black Americans would be healed by de jure desegregation combined with programs of uplift designed and managed by experts. Other experts – on everything from the Soviet Union to exporting democracy – ruled in foreign affairs. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, no longer had a place for politicians like Black and Douglas; Platonic Guardians educated at a handful of law schools decided what the Constitution required. The rule of experts had implications for other constitutional offices. The mere politicians elected to Congress or state government were deemed unprofessional at best, hacks at worst, and in all cases, not modern.
The rule of experts had its successes and failures; space does not permit naming them in any persuasive way. But at the height of their power - the 1960s and 1970s - the technocrats began to lose public confidence. By 1980, only a minority thought the federal government would do what was right most of the time. In the ensuing four decades, public confidence in government recovered modestly at times only to fall again. Then came the failed war in Iraq and the global financial crisis of 2008. By then, the Third Republic was as old as the Second Republic when it died.
People were right to doubt the experts, but the latter had failed on their own terms. Max Weber had reconciled popular rule with science by arguing that elected politicians should determine the ends of policy while experts informed leaders about the consequences of their chosen means to those ends. Over the past two decades, and especially since 2016, the policy advice of experts has become more predictable and partisan. Experts rarely tell the leaders of the party of the left things they do not wish to hear; the same is true of the right, perhaps more so, but the relatively few right-wing experts played second fiddle during the Third Republic. In the home of expertise, the universities, only one set of ends was increasingly heard, and those who dissented were suppressed or discarded. And intellectuals became more cynical and more ambitious.
Knowledge was power, a weapon to rule over the rubes. So confident were the professors that they no longer bothered to cover their ambitions with high-minded rhetoric.
The legacies of the Third Republic will live on in the Fourth. Presidential power in service to the most recent electoral majority will define the new regime. Progressives have yet to find their Donald Trump, but they will. The Madisonian in me fears this tendency, but we have not been a Madisonian nation for some time. Rather than indulge my pessimism, I will end with hope. In a republic, the people are allowed to fail and, thereby, to learn. Experts might conclude that their loss of credibility counsels a return to tend their own gardens of policy advice shorn of political ambitions. The people and their champions may eventually learn that achieving their ends demands better knowledge of means. The arc of history, in other words, may tend toward humility and thereby to a better world. Intellectuals have it in their power to move first toward that happy future.
The United States lives under a Constitution filled with words that had a public meaning in 1789. The governing institutions and ideals fostered by that Constitution were the first, but not last, republic of the United States. The Civil War and its aftermath constituted the Second Republic. The Great Depression and World War II marked the start of the Third Republic. We are living at its end.
The Third Republic came into this world through the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in the election of 1936; Republicans came to D.C. in 1937 with 20 percent of the House of Representatives. The seemingly endless difficulties of the 1930s suggested incessant regulation and management of the economy. And there would be few limits outside of politics on the leaders of the republic. As a famous footnote said, politics, not the Constitution, would govern economic management. The same footnote indicated “discrete insular minorities” would be protected from electoral majorities. And victory in the world war gave American leaders the responsibilities for a global empire or if you wish, a Pax Americana.
These changes meant the Third Republic would be a technocracy. Economists would determine and implement policies for prosperity. The harm done to Black Americans would be healed by de jure desegregation combined with programs of uplift designed and managed by experts. Other experts – on everything from the Soviet Union to exporting democracy – ruled in foreign affairs. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, no longer had a place for politicians like Black and Douglas; Platonic Guardians educated at a handful of law schools decided what the Constitution required. The rule of experts had implications for other constitutional offices. The mere politicians elected to Congress or state government were deemed unprofessional at best, hacks at worst, and in all cases, not modern.
The rule of experts had its successes and failures; space does not permit naming them in any persuasive way. But at the height of their power - the 1960s and 1970s - the technocrats began to lose public confidence. By 1980, only a minority thought the federal government would do what was right most of the time. In the ensuing four decades, public confidence in government recovered modestly at times only to fall again. Then came the failed war in Iraq and the global financial crisis of 2008. By then, the Third Republic was as old as the Second Republic when it died.
People were right to doubt the experts, but the latter had failed on their own terms. Max Weber had reconciled popular rule with science by arguing that elected politicians should determine the ends of policy while experts informed leaders about the consequences of their chosen means to those ends. Over the past two decades, and especially since 2016, the policy advice of experts has become more predictable and partisan. Experts rarely tell the leaders of the party of the left things they do not wish to hear; the same is true of the right, perhaps more so, but the relatively few right-wing experts played second fiddle during the Third Republic. In the home of expertise, the universities, only one set of ends was increasingly heard, and those who dissented were suppressed or discarded. And intellectuals became more cynical and more ambitious.
Knowledge was power, a weapon to rule over the rubes. So confident were the professors that they no longer bothered to cover their ambitions with high-minded rhetoric.
The legacies of the Third Republic will live on in the Fourth. Presidential power in service to the most recent electoral majority will define the new regime. Progressives have yet to find their Donald Trump, but they will. The Madisonian in me fears this tendency, but we have not been a Madisonian nation for some time. Rather than indulge my pessimism, I will end with hope. In a republic, the people are allowed to fail and, thereby, to learn. Experts might conclude that their loss of credibility counsels a return to tend their own gardens of policy advice shorn of political ambitions. The people and their champions may eventually learn that achieving their ends demands better knowledge of means. The arc of history, in other words, may tend toward humility and thereby to a better world. Intellectuals have it in their power to move first toward that happy future.
About the Author
John Samples
John Samples is a vice president at the Cato Institute. He founded and directs Cato’s Center for Representative Government, which studies the First Amendment, government institutional failure, and public opinion. Samples serves on the Meta Oversight Board, which provides final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram.
About the Author
John Samples
John Samples is a vice president at the Cato Institute. He founded and directs Cato’s Center for Representative Government, which studies the First Amendment, government institutional failure, and public opinion. Samples serves on the Meta Oversight Board, which provides final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram.
About the Author
John Samples
John Samples is a vice president at the Cato Institute. He founded and directs Cato’s Center for Representative Government, which studies the First Amendment, government institutional failure, and public opinion. Samples serves on the Meta Oversight Board, which provides final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram.
About the Author
John Samples
John Samples is a vice president at the Cato Institute. He founded and directs Cato’s Center for Representative Government, which studies the First Amendment, government institutional failure, and public opinion. Samples serves on the Meta Oversight Board, which provides final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram.
About the Author
John Samples
John Samples is a vice president at the Cato Institute. He founded and directs Cato’s Center for Representative Government, which studies the First Amendment, government institutional failure, and public opinion. Samples serves on the Meta Oversight Board, which provides final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram.
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