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A nation can endure hardship, disagreement, and even bitter factional conflict—and still remain a republic. What it cannot survive is the steady replacement of law with raw force, until “authority” means nothing more than whichever armed agency arrives first. America is now witnessing, in real time, what it looks like when the Executive claims powers the Constitution never granted, while Congress stares, stunned, as if the words on the page were only ceremonial.
And yet something new is breaking through the fog: a real and broad backlash against the accelerating abuses. The expanded ICE deployments, the street clashes, the mistaken arrests, and the deadly raids are no longer being processed as “tough policy,” but as a rupture in the very idea of the republic. When the public can no longer tell whether elections are fair; when domestic “law enforcement” becomes indistinguishable from foreign occupation; when even basic rights of speech are treated as deportable offenses—then the country itself is coming undone.
This is the deeper danger hiding behind the day’s headlines: not only the shock of Minneapolis, nor the unsealed records of students targeted for their protected speech, nor the ongoing threats against Canada’s sovereignty, nor the propaganda drumbeat for war with Iran—but the emergence of a single, unifying principle across them all: might makes right. Abroad, it looks like seizure and intimidation. At home, it looks like a creeping constitutional vacuum filled by federal power grabs.
But there is a limit to a tyrant’s power—not because tyrants restrain themselves, but because reality eventually refuses to cooperate. Stauffacher expresses this in Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell:
Yes! there’s a limit to the tyrant’s power!
When the oppressed looks round in vain for justice,
When his sore burden may no more be borne,
With fearless heart he makes appeal to Heaven,
And thence brings down his everlasting rights
Which there abide, inalienably his,
And indestructible as are the stars.
From the time of the American Revolution, through the War of 1812 and the Civil War, that “tyrant” was the British Empire, which ruled through military might, financial domination, and manipulation.
The question before the United States, entering the 250th anniversary of its founding, is whether we will merely condemn the swamp—endlessly describing the qualities of the mud, the anatomy of the parasites—or grasp the rope being thrown to us: a new paradigm worthy of the republic’s promise, grounded not in simple libertarian protest, but in the best intellectual tradition that shaped America itself: the Leibnizian idea that the purpose of government is the advancement of the general welfare, and the creative powers of the human mind.
That is why the Declaration of January 12 is not a “commentary” on the crisis, but a pathway out: a movement of world citizens, acting to restore international law, pursue international growth on the basis of physical economy, and build genuine development corridors—rather than lurching, outrage by outrage, into a new dark age.
There is a limit to the power of empire. The question is whether we choose, now, to install a new paradigm. Let us create a movement of world citizens!
