A Traditionalist Critique of the American Republican

In the hierarchy of true civilization, economics is never the summit. Julius Evola warned that when wealth and production become the sole measure of greatness, the spiritual axis has already collapsed and the society is living only in its material residue (Evola, Men Among the Ruins 45). Yet the American Conservative Republican has enthroned the idol of gross domestic product as its supreme god. Their leaders do not speak of destiny, sacrifice, or hierarchy, but of “growth,” “prosperity,” and “jobs.” For them, the nation is a market, the citizen is a consumer, and history itself is measured in quarterly earnings.

The fruits of this creed are plain. Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercials reduced patriotism to a matter of mortgage rates and consumer confidence, proclaiming national renewal through shopping malls and car loans. After the trauma of September 11, George W. Bush told the American people that their duty was to “go shopping,” as if the highest expression of sacrifice were the credit card swipe. Here the liturgy of GDP reveals its emptiness. Where once men were called to arms or to prayer, the Republican summons his flock to the mall.

Such a vision inverts the order of castes and values. In the traditional world, the priest and warrior stood above the merchant, and material life was subordinated to higher authority. The Republican, however, has enthroned the banker and speculator as sovereign. Evola described this as the “reign of quantity,” a stage in which the merchant’s arithmetic replaces the ruler’s sacred duty (Revolt Against the Modern World 279). The result is a civilization that mistakes prosperity for destiny.

The spiritual cost is catastrophic. A people who define themselves by consumption alone cannot rise above consumption. Patriotism becomes a brand, sacrifice is outsourced to the underclass, and the family is subordinated to the demands of the market. To worship GDP is to kneel before the golden calf, to accept a counterfeit in place of transcendence. The Republican calls himself a conservative, yet he conserves nothing, for he no longer knows what is worth conserving.

When the foundation of transcendence is lost, leadership collapses into demagoguery. The Republican Party has not raised up rulers in the traditional sense, men who embody sacred authority and stand above the flux of the crowd. It has instead elevated performers, men whose strength lies in spectacle. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump stand as examples of this condition. Both mastered the art of mass appeal, yet neither ascended beyond the passions they stirred. They were not Caesars in the sense of restoring order, but false Caesars, rulers by applause rather than by right.

Reagan was praised as a conservative statesman, yet his true legacy was that of an actor-president who sacralized consumerism. His “Morning in America” reduced greatness to interest rates and suburban mortgages, presenting shopping as destiny. The substance of culture and nationhood was replaced by the glitter of prosperity. Trump followed this trajectory more openly. A television personality turned populist, he enthroned himself as the Caesar of the rally, a figure who channeled resentment and fury but never transmuted it into higher order. Like the Gracchi or Clodius of late Rome, he offered the crowd bread and spectacle, but never a principle beyond their passions.

The contrast with traditional leadership is stark. In Rome, the Imperator embodied not only the command of armies but also the aura of sacral authority, standing as a bridge between heaven and earth. Medieval kings ruled not merely by consent but by divine right, binding temporal power to transcendent legitimacy. By comparison, the Republican leader is a creature of polls, markets, and media cycles. His crown is applause, his throne a stage. He is a sovereign without sovereignty, a man of the crowd and not above it.

Thus the cult of personality within the Republican Party exposes its spiritual void. Its heroes are hollow, its Caesars without transcendence. They conserve nothing, for their very existence depends upon the shifting moods of the masses. They are managers of decline, rulers who do not rule, symbols not of order but of disorder. In them one sees not the restoration of hierarchy but the consummation of decadence.

The very word conservative implies guardianship. It implies the duty to defend and transmit the essential forms of life against dissolution. By this standard, the American Republican is no conservative at all, for he has conserved nothing. The family has disintegrated, marriage has been redefined, the Church has lost its grip on the soul of the people, and culture has decayed into a wasteland. The Republican presides over this collapse like a caretaker of ruins, boasting of minor victories while the foundations crumble beneath his feet.

The collapse of marriage reveals this impotence most clearly. In every traditional order, marriage is not a mere contract between individuals but a sacred union of bloodlines, destiny, and continuity. Under Republican stewardship, marriage has been reduced to a sentimental convenience. Divorce spread like wildfire during the Reagan era, pornography flourished without check, and the family was surrendered to the demands of the market. Even the definition of marriage itself was yielded without true resistance. When the Supreme Court handed down Obergefell v. Hodges, the supposed defenders of the family mounted only token protest before quietly acquiescing. A party that cannot guard the very cornerstone of civilization has no claim to the name of conservator.

The cultural sphere tells the same story. Universities have become temples of radical ideology, the arts instruments of subversion, and the youth have been abandoned to a realm of screens and consumer distraction. Republicans offered no counter-vision, no myth to oppose the void. They spoke only of tax codes, deregulation, and balanced budgets, as if the soul of a people could be saved by an accountant’s arithmetic. Evola warned that conservation without transcendence is meaningless, for one cannot guard a form once its spirit has fled (Revolt Against the Modern World 241). What Republicans defend are not living traditions but dead husks—procedures, contracts, and paper monuments to institutions already hollowed out.

This is their paradox: they call themselves guardians, yet they conserve ruins. Their victories are tombstones raised over dead institutions, their resistance a slowing of decay rather than its reversal. Lacking higher vision, they can only guard ashes, not fire. A party so spiritually barren cannot conserve, for it no longer knows what is worth conserving.

The Republican invokes religion as the cornerstone of his identity, yet what he calls faith is not the sacred but its profane simulacrum. The party has been captured by the lowest expressions of Protestantism, by the sects that exalt sentiment over sacrament and noise over mystery. Where Catholicism and Orthodoxy preserved hierarchy, ritual, and transcendence, the Republican embraces the flattened world of megachurches and stadium rallies. Here the sacred is reduced to entertainment, the altar to a stage, and the priesthood to the personality cult of the preacher.

The emergence of the Moral Majority under Jerry Falwell revealed this transformation. It clothed itself in the mantle of Christianity but spoke the language of politics. Pat Robertson’s televangelism, Billy Graham’s stadium crusades, and countless imitators transformed worship into mass spectacle, substituting applause for devotion and emotional fervor for discipline. This is not Christianity in its eternal dimension but an Americanized parody, a church made in the image of the crowd.

Evola warned that when the sacred is subordinated to the temporal, both are profaned (Men Among the Ruins 117). Republican “Christian nationalism” demonstrates this truth. It waves the Cross as a partisan emblem, reduces the Gospel to campaign rhetoric, and confuses the eternal Kingdom with the fortunes of a political party. This hybrid produces neither true religion nor true politics but a counterfeit of both. The Constitution is treated as scripture, the flag as icon, and rallies as liturgy. In this distortion, faith ceases to be the channel of transcendence and becomes a utility of power.

The metaphysical consequence is grave. True religion unites man to the vertical axis, binding him to the eternal and the immutable. Republican religiosity, however, drags the sacred down into the horizontal plane of temporal struggle. Instead of sanctifying the nation, it idolizes the nation, and in so doing corrupts both Church and State. The sacred hierarchy is replaced by emotionalism, individualism, and prosperity-gospel marketing. Their pulpits are stages, their sacraments, applause, their gods' success and numbers.

Thus the Republican who proclaims himself the Christian defender of America is revealed as the priest of a false church. He has built not a temple but a theater, not an altar but a podium. This religion cannot elevate the nation, for it has abandoned the eternal. It can only hasten decline, for it is itself a creature of decline.

The American Republican calls himself a conservative, yet in truth he is only a liberal moving at a slower pace. His creed is not the defense of hierarchy, tradition, or transcendence, but the preservation of liberal errors in a more cautious form. He is the caretaker of decay, delaying rather than halting the advance of dissolution. The essence of liberalism is the exaltation of the individual, the worship of progress, and the enthronement of quantity. These are not foreign to the Republican but define his every program.

History confirms this duplicity. Eisenhower boasted of fiscal prudence but entrenched the welfare state he inherited from Roosevelt. Nixon expanded federal power through wage and price controls and through the Environmental Protection Agency, sanctifying the New Deal consensus rather than dismantling it. Reagan, the prophet of small government, presided over ballooning deficits, a swelling bureaucracy, and the further atomization of American culture under the cult of consumption. George W. Bush cloaked himself in conservatism while launching endless wars abroad, expanding Medicare, and instituting the surveillance state of the Patriot Act. The party that chants of “limited government” is revealed, in every generation, as the party of liberal government disguised.

The same hypocrisy is found in their worship of the Constitution. The Republican treats the founding document as a sacred scripture, quoting its clauses with ritual solemnity. Yet he violates both its letter and its spirit. He invokes originalism while presiding over endless centralization, mass surveillance, and the erosion of state sovereignty. He waves the Constitution in one hand while strangling it with the other. This is no conservatism, but liberal democracy in its most hypocritical form. Evola warned that modern man mistakes paper for authority, legality for legitimacy, and procedure for order (Men Among the Ruins 89). The Republican has fallen into this very trap, confusing his idol with the living principle it once embodied.

Even his much-vaunted devotion to freedom reveals him as liberal in essence. Freedom, for the Republican, is not ordered liberty within a hierarchy of duty and responsibility. It is the unbounded license of the consumer and the marketplace. The left dissolves culture in the name of equality, while the right dissolves society in the name of economics. Both serve the same root impulse: the destruction of form and order. Thus Republicanism and progressivism are not enemies but siblings, differing only in tempo.

In this light, the Republican is no guardian of tradition but its gravedigger. He conserves nothing, for he knows not what is worth conserving. He is a liberal with a slower clock, a manager of liberalism’s afterbirth. His victories are hollow, his vision barren, his philosophy indistinguishable from the forces he claims to resist. To conserve is to guard the fire; to delay dissolution is only to guard the ashes.

The Republican cloaks himself in the mantle of fiscal responsibility, claiming to be the stern guardian of national discipline. He boasts of balanced budgets, austerity, and restraint. Yet when examined, this posture collapses into illusion. For every generation of Republican governance has swollen the public debt and expanded the state. Their conservatism in finance, like their conservatism in culture, is a hollow mask.

Reagan, the saint of small government, tripled the national debt and inaugurated deficit spending as a permanent American custom. George W. Bush launched wars without end while simultaneously expanding Medicare and domestic bureaucracy, creating financial burdens not seen since the Second World War. Trump promised to drain the swamp, yet under his administration deficits soared to historic levels, even before the extraordinary spending of the pandemic. Paul Ryan postured as the apostle of austerity, yet his plans withered into nothing, leaving Leviathan fatter than before. When bailouts came in 2008 and again in 2020, Republicans who spoke of discipline rushed to feed the very machine they denounced.

This hypocrisy unmasks their true condition. They slash welfare with one hand but inflate military budgets with the other. They decry bureaucracy but preserve subsidies for corporations and bankers. Their discipline is selective, their austerity theatrical, their stewardship a fraud. In reality, they are no different from their progressive rivals: both worship growth, both mortgage the future, both serve the same quantitative spirit. The left spends to expand welfare, the right spends to fortify the military-industrial complex, and both enslave the nation to the usurer.

Debt itself is more than economics; it is a spiritual disease. To live forever on credit is to live without destiny, to mortgage eternity for the sake of consumption. Evola warned that when money ceases to be a tool and becomes the master, a people have surrendered their soul (Revolt Against the Modern World 271). The Republican epitomizes this surrender. He has mortgaged not only the treasury but the very future of his people. His cry for discipline is hollow, his economics enslaving, his guardianship false. He feeds decline while pretending to resist it, chaining the nation with golden bonds that lead only to servitude.

Thus his fiscal conservatism is not conservatism at all but managed liberalism, another form of the same decadence. He has mistaken quantity for destiny, numbers for truth, and debt for power. In this, as in all else, he reveals himself not as a guardian of order but as its destroyer.

The figure of the American Conservative Republican stands exposed not as a guardian of tradition but as the mask of liberalism’s final stage. He worships GDP as his idol, follows demagogues in place of rulers, fails to conserve marriage and the family, corrupts faith into political theater, disguises liberalism as conservatism, and multiplies debt while boasting of restraint. He is not the defender of order but the accomplice of decay, the steward of ruins who mistakes ashes for fire.

Evola taught that the ultimate test of a civilization is whether it orients itself toward the eternal or sinks entirely into the temporal. The Republican has chosen the latter. His politics are the politics of the Kali Yuga, the age of darkness in which men mistake appearances for substance and quantity for quality. He conserves nothing because he no longer knows what is worth conserving. He delays collapse, but he cannot resist it, for he himself is woven into the fabric of dissolution.

History shows that such “conservatism” is not new. In the final days of Rome, the optimates defended their privileges while abandoning the virtue that once gave Rome its soul. In the twilight of France, nobles mouthed loyalty to tradition while living only for pleasure. In every cycle of decline, false conservatives arise: men who preserve the shell of order while the spirit rots within. The American Republican belongs to this ignoble lineage.

The authentic Right cannot be born from such men. It cannot be the program of a party or the rhetoric of elections. It must be an order of spirit, an aristocracy of being, a new race of men who stand above time. Such men do not draw their legitimacy from applause or constitutions but from their orientation to the eternal axis. They are guardians of the vertical order in a world that has sunk entirely into the horizontal. They embody sovereignty because they themselves are ordered to the transcendent.

This is the path Evola called for: not the management of decline but the rekindling of fire. To conserve is to guard living flame, not to polish the ashes of ruins. The Republican cannot do this, for he is already a creature of decline. The call, then, is for a higher Right—a Right that restores the sacred, that reestablishes hierarchy, that links once more heaven to earth. Only such a Right is worthy of the name conservative, and only such a Right can redeem a civilization drowning in its own illusions.