Well over a century ago the vicissitudes of reconstruction caused members of the emergent WASP upper class to contemplate the terrible question of what would happen if America ever had a president who, it could not be said, was a gentleman. Oliver Wendell Holmes waxes poetic
“I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of our fellow-citizens. It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been what might be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may happen,—how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,—an unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political oblivion!”
Holmes’ prophecy has unhappily since come to pass (the first such man is unimportant), but there is much to glean from his concern. What we call the American Republic, or at the very least what was the American Republic, was sustained by a quasi-religious commitment to what the Romans called the Res Publica, which translates approximately to ‘The Commonwealth’. In the words of Christopher Sandbatch
“The native Roman religion, with relatively little Athenian degeneracy, is the abstract notion of "res publica", the public thing, to which each head of household aspires to give the greatest contribution. The anxiety of influence exerts itself. You must sacrifice more for the republic than your neighbor and your father and your father's grandfather.”
To them, it meant the very essence of Rome, the state that bound them all together, that they engaged with as families to propagate civilization. Which brings us back to Gentlemen, America, and the late Oliver Wendell Holmes.
When George Washington and Thomas Jefferson entered the white house, they did not do it as a career move, indeed the concept would have been wholly foreign to them. Both Washington and Jefferson left the white house considerably poorer than they entered it, and neither found the fact very remarkable. What they had done was sacrifice for the Res Publica, the Commonwealth, for their allotted time before retiring once more to their estate.
To the forefathers of our country, liberals to a man, the Commonwealth was by men like this, the 6% of the country who were landed gentry, who poured themselves into the Res Publica til they had no more to give. Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence died ruined or poor, yet none of them turned from their shared project.
But as Holmes’ feared somewhere along the way, we lost it. The Gentlemen ceased to rule public affairs and the politician, the careerist, the manager, and the salesman took his place. Our Commonwealth suffers greatly from the loss, of those men whose character, wealth, and greatness are already established, and who descend at the behest of Solemn Providence to pour their virtue into the Res Publica.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., represents the most fascinating and novel candidate in that we see in him faint echos of the Gentlemen who severed our allegiance to the British Court Party and unleashed us upon North America. Kennedy represents our desperate hope — that a gentleman will descend from their Camelot, enraged at the wickedness that abounds and determine to spend themselves in war with it. We desperately need and desire the return of the Gentleman Statesman, our Republic is doomed without such a class. These are the people we must be creating, or dreaming of forging ourselves into.
Regardless of Kennedy’s fate, our dream and goal of Rome, of an Anglo-Protestant Maritime Republic, relies indubitably on this sort of man. It was said that good men did not love Rome because she was great, but that she was great because good men loved her. My former Twitter mutual August said it best
“I Love America because I am hers and she is mine; I didnt show up here to leech off her virtues and move on when I had exhauseted them. I will die here, as my ancestors for a dozen generations have.”
Godspeed brothers. We are going to win.