The Day the Republic Died: When 1945 Made the American Empire Permanent
Before World War II, the USA was a republic with a limited federal government. Congress made the big decisions. The president was not some world lord who could bomb countries on a whim. The states had real power. The federal bureaucracy was for a long time small and relatively harmless. Americans were first and foremost citizens of their state, not cogs in a colossal central power. Until the Civil War, people still said “the United States are” and not “is”. The pluralism of the states was from the beginning the foundation of the American dream. The Northern states’ victory in the Civil War was a first step in the wrong direction, a direction that undermined independent states, which in themselves were to be regarded as part of the separation of powers, according to the Founding Fathers.
But eventually the great wars and the external enemies came – and the power was never released.
World War II required a strong executive. Most accepted that. But when the war was over in 1945, something decisive happened: the exception became permanent. Through the National Security Act of 1947, a permanent national security state was built – CIA, NSA, Pentagon with enormous powers. The Cold War became an eternal excuse to retain and expand this power. The president was gradually transformed into an emperor who could start wars without Congress’s approval (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria…).
The few in Congress who actually pointed out that the Constitution still requires Congress’s decision to start a war, such as Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, were quickly marginalized during the Iran war that Trump initiated entirely on his own initiative. Congress, which according to the Constitution is supposed to control the war powers, became a cowardly spectator that preferred to delegate its responsibility rather than take it. The courts began to interpret the Constitution as a “living” text that could be bent according to the needs of the times – a pure rewriting of the fundamental law.
The result was the administrative state – thousands of federal agencies that both write the rules, enforce them, and judge over them. Precisely what the Constitution was written to prevent.
The USA was founded on the ideas of the Enlightenment, where strict separation of powers from Montesquieu, strong freedom of speech from Voltaire, and individual liberty were at the center. But these principles are being eroded away through crises, but also through a woke morality that gives special groups extra protection from being criticized. When that happens, the whole idea of a separation-of-powers state that ultimately answers to a free public opinion disappears.
The Founding Fathers warned about this.
James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton all warned against too strong a central power and against permanent standing armies in peacetime. They knew that war and crisis are the power elite’s best friend. They understood that once a bureaucracy has grown strong, it fights with beak and claws to retain and expand its power.
They would have been horrified by today’s America.
A president who rules through executive orders. A Congress that is mostly busy putting on theater for the cameras. A Supreme Court that acts as a super-legislator. And an enormous administrative state that regulates everything from how much water your toilet is allowed to flush to what your children are allowed to learn in school.
The Great Lie
The establishment wants us to believe that this was necessary. That the world became more complex. That we needed a strong central power to meet the Soviet Union, terrorism, China, and the climate crisis.
But the truth is simpler: Power liked the taste of power. And it is usually those with power who create wars and complex problems to give air under the wings of the lust for power.
Once the crisis had given them emergency powers, they never let go. Just as the Founding Fathers feared. They knew that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary exception.
Today the old American republic is mostly a facade. The formal Constitution still exists, but the real power lies with bureaucrats, intelligence services, big corporations, and a political class that despises the ordinary citizen’s freedom.
By Henrik Sundin Editor-in-Chief
