Republic

Friday

Daniel McCarthy

What Britain taught us

Being in Britain around the Fourth of July is always an odd experience for an American. It was especially awkward to be at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London a week before the 250th anniversary of US independence. ARC is a British organization whose massive annual conference – about 4,000 people this year – is styled as a kind of counter-Davos, an international gathering of center-right types including a heavy representation of Americans. Given the timing, various speeches by gracious British hosts praising their American guests’ homeland – and by Americans themselves praising the principles of their revolution against the British two and a half centuries ago – were to be expected. But that didn’t diminish the cognitive dissonance.

Christopher Buskirk

Ambition is in America’s DNA

Rome Last month, I found myself sitting on a panel discussing the European Union’s digital asset strategy. The conversation revolved around the digital euro, tokenization, stablecoins, financial regulation and the future of capital markets. Outside the conference hall stood one of the great cities of human civilization. Rome encourages long thoughts. Every stone seems to remind visitors that history is not a straight line. Great nations rise, stagnate and sometimes disappear altogether. Walking through Rome after the conference, I started thinking less about digital currencies and more about something else entirely. America turns 250 this year. For any nation, two and a half centuries is a respectable run. For a republic, it is extraordinary.

Friday

Daniel McCarthy

Should America be Venice or Sparta?

Americans never tire of asking themselves whether their country is turning into Rome. A Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States proclaims a novus ordo seclorum – a “new order of ages.” But in the poem from which that phrase is adapted, Virgil’s fourth eclogue, the words mean a quite exact replay of past events: there will be, for example, another voyage of the Argo and another Trojan War. Our new order might likewise repeat the history of Rome. One philosopher who gave a great deal of thought to new orders and Roman history as a template was Niccolò Machiavelli, particularly in his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy.