Benjamin Franklin said that our nation is 'a republic if you can keep it.' Historian Chalmers Johnson said that a nation cannot continue to be both a republic and an empire. In saying that, he was focussing on the Roman Empire, Great Britain, and the United States. According to Johnson, Rome chose empire while Great Britain chose a republic when the choices had to be made. Johnson said what he said because the demands of each form sabotages the other. And finally we have President Trump. Trump called U.S. policy toward the rest of the nations in the Western Hemisphere the 'Donroe Doctrine,' which seems to be a more intense form of the Monroe Doctrine. For America's 250th birthday, does the Donroe Doctrine tell us which path America has chosen between empire and republic?
To answer that question, one could consider Trump's request for a $600 billion increase in defense spending. This is despite the fact that the U.S. spent more on defense in 2025 than the combined spending of the next 6 nations. Also consider that with the war possibilities that Trump anticipates, Trump claimed that the U.S. government cannot also support Medicare, Medicaid, and daycare programs while financially supporting the military.
And so the demands of the Donroe Doctrine as well as Trump's other foreign interests require reducing our government's responsibilities to that of financing its military. But are the President's priorities here the same as the majority of Americans?
Why the big increase in defense spending? Did not Trump say that it was in anticipation for fighting new wars? What new wars is Trump talking about? Is Trump speculating what it might take to get some of the nations in the Western Hemisphere in line with his agenda? Here, Trump has had success in influencing some elections in some Western Hemisphere nations. But what will he do to those nations that are not so influenced? Also, is Trump anticipating more Middle East entanglements? And is Trump planning to eventually have a war with China? Are Americans willing to sacrifice their republic to satisfy Trump's appetite for domination and/or acquisition?
And speaking of imperialism, didn't Trump express imperial intentions when he talked about annexing Canada or threatening to use force to do the same to Greenland? Didn't Trump say that he could do anything he wanted to do with Cuba?
And so it seems that Trump is seeking a position of an emperor and/or hegemon. Does the cost of that combination require such executive control of the budget and other facets of government, that allows the President to curtail or eliminate certain rights and benefits? Are there other reasons why Trump wants to remove the Federal Government's support for our current social safety net programs?
And what about the American people. I don't know what the polls say but my preliminary reading of the MAGA doctrine says that Trump's vision for the future includes some key elements which go against what MAGA devotees voted for. And, being that many of those MAGA followers are some of my fellow religiously conservative Christians, I can safely say that at least some of them are no longer keen on keeping the Republic. For some prefer a strongman leader because we religiously conservative Christians have a penchant for authoritarianism. For others, the emergence of the LGBT community from the margins of society have caused them to lose faith in our democracy. I have even heard some of them even say that they prefer a government led by Putin to supporting full equality for those in the LGBT community. And considering that Project 2025, which Trump seems to be following, is the work of organizations like the Heritage Foundation, conservative preference for a strongman leader as opposed to a republic is significant.
And finally, we need to look at who financially benefits from Trump's imperial and hegemonic dreams. Is it not the Military Industrial Complex including the executives, shareholders, and those employed by the companies in that complex? And there are others besides those in the Military Industrial Complex who also greatly benefit from Trump's imperial and hegemonic dreams. How many of them prefer personal financial gain to keeping our republic?
Because of Trump values-free agenda, he has majored in promoting a transactional agenda. That agenda measures the value of decisions by profit margins. And so all decisions are measured by the amount of profit that can be acrued by Trump and his major donors. The problem with a republic, when the republic takes the form of a representative democracy, is that its emphasis on principles of equality and the value of each individual person works against the governmental needs of supporting an empire. And the question for America is whether there are enough Americans, most of whom if not all, who have been raised in a consumer-oriented society, who are concerned enough with principles of equality and the value of each person to still prefer a republic.
What values and prinicples are needed to maintain a representative democratic republic? One value is treasuring the sanctity of human life. Besides the abortion issue, when a nation so values the human life of immigrants, especially those who are emigrating to escape poverty and/or violence, so that it freely takes in those who are emigrating to stay alive. Another way of valuing the sanctity of human life is to try to ensure that there are enough jobs with living wages, enough affordable access to food and healthcare, and the realistic chance of economic upward mobility for those in the lower economic classes.
Another essential value to our democratic republic is to protect the equal rights of all people within one's borders regardless of race, religion, national identity, language, sexual orientation, or gender identity. We should note that regardless of the democratic processes we employ, without equality we have no democracy. What we would have instead is some kind of ethnocracy or classocracy with the latter consisting of either oligarchy or plutocracy. And the best way of preserving equality is to work to ensure the equal rights of others.
There are other ways of preserving a democratic republic, especially in the area of voting rights. We need to realize that federal id cards for voting based on birth certificates usually makes it difficult for many in economic lower classes where birth records are more difficult to recover because of the recovery process or the lack of formal record keeping at the time of birth. Those who want federal id cards for voting are not concerned with the obstacles that many in the lower economic classes face in obtaining such id cards. Instead, they are more concerned with restricting voting to only certain American citizens.
The U.S.A. will soon be 250 years-old. It has a complicated history. While those obsessed with patriotism will, at best, acknowledge that America is not perfect; others will point out that perfection is not the issue, direction is. And up until Trump's Republican Party Revolution, we could see a very slow but positive social-justice direction of the nation just by looking at the number and identity of groups that were emerging from the margins of society. That direction was positive however slight and slow it was. That positive direction was due to prioritizing values over interests, principles over transactionalism when the they clashed.
Trump's Republican Party Revolution has changed the direction of the nation in several ways. Not only has the nation more strongly pursuing a transactional direction that prioritizes profit margins over people, it is becoming more authoritarian. And note the pairing here. When we are more concerned with principles of equality and the value of people, we tend to be more democratic in how we are governed. When we measure value by profit margins, we also place a higher value on domination, we look to authoritarianism. And that is not only true when we passively look on while oligarchy gains more influence on our government, it is also the case when we become more ethnocratic such as what exists in Christian Nationalism.
And so America at 250 faces a crossroads. Will it restore that slight but positive direction toward a more equal and just society and nation, or will Trump's Republican Revolution become more and more the status quo of our nation. Please note that all of the negative end results that Marx saw in Capitalism are incarnated in Trump. We cannot have both Trump's Republican Revolution providing the new status quo for our nation while maintaining a democracy with equality. The more we slide down Trump's rabbit hole, the more authoritarian, and thus darker, our status quo and thus our future becomes. And the defense against such a future is simple. We need to be vigilant in defending the equality of others in the nation. For in so doing, we prioritize principles of equality and the value of each person over profit margins when they clash.
