Do We Still Have A Republic?

I used to wonder if we were just going through the motions of having a constitutional republic, worry that we had crossed the edge into tyranny.  Back then, though, the concern was only academic.  After learning that Angelo Codevilla shares my concern, the fear becomes real:

Over the past half century, the Reagan years notwithstanding, our ruling class’s changing preferences and habits have transformed public and private life in America. As John Marini shows in his essay, “Donald Trump and the American Crisis,” this has resulted in citizens morphing into either this class’s “stakeholders” or its subjects. And, as Publius Decius Mus argues, “America and the West” now are so firmly “on a trajectory toward something very bad” that it is no longer reasonable to hope that “all human outcomes are still possible,” by which he means restoration of the public and private practices that made the American republic. In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’s transition from that republic to some kind of empire.

Read the whole thing.