2025

REPUBLICAN ROOTS:

Sources of Authority: The Roots of the Great American Identity Crisis (D.C. Schindler, September 14th, 2025, Imaginative Conservative)

According to the classical mind, the ultimate root of social order is authority. To know what this means, we should explain the various words. “Order” is a unified multiplicity, a whole in which the many and diverse parts are all related to each other because they are related to a common principle that transcends them. In this respect, there cannot be an order without a source of unity that transcends what it unifies; every order has a principle, just as every principle implies an order. In a social order, or in other words in a society that is not simply a set of self-contained and unrelated individuals who just happen to occupy the same geographical space (Aristotle compares such a “society” to cows feeding at the same trough), there must therefore be some unifying principle that is able to bind the individuals together in a genuine whole. This unifying principle must be, on the one hand, transcendent of the individual members of the whole, and indeed of the whole itself, in order to bring it about as a unity, but on the other hand it has to be a reality immanent within the whole in order for its unifying power to be effectively communicated. This is the role, in a social order, of authority, which represents the originating principle in the community as one of its members, and at the same time as distinguished from the members of the community through office. The word “authority” denotes an asymmetrical bond between human beings that arises through (as opposed to “merely” symbolic) representation of a transcendent principle of order by one person to another. This transcendent principle—the “auctor,” originator, appealed to in auctoritas—unites the holder of office and those that are subject to the office within a more basic order: since they are both originated by it.

The Anglosphere’s Unifying principle is republican liberty: we invest the state with authority to enforce restrictions on freedom that are arrived at in participatory fashion and applied universally.

ORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN:

You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Be a Reenactor: Benedict Arnold’s boot wouldn’t come off, and other hardships from my weekend in the Revolutionary War. (Caity Weaver, November 2025, The Atlantic)

The reenactor community generally discourages members from claiming to be dressed as specific historical figures—though a few key roles may be assigned in highly choreographed public-facing reenactments. A reenactment of Washington crossing the Delaware, for instance, needs to have a Washington. With the exception of Arnold and a pugnacious Ethan Allen (the leader of the Green Mountain Boys, famous for yelling, as interpreted that weekend by a man named Tommy Tringale), plus a coterie of commanders at a reenactment of the attack on Bunker Hill, few reenactors I met purported to be dead people. They portrayed, instead, historically plausible types (a scraggly farmer; a wealthy townsman), which reenactors call “impressions.”

Who would you be if you traveled to America’s colonial past in 2025? If you have a large disposable income, an obsessive personality, an idolatrous affection for protocol, or ideally all three, then you possess the trappings for a fine portrayal of a member of the King’s army. Top-notch redcoat impressions are renowned among “RevWar” reenactors for requiring an exceptional degree of precision, and also for their eye-bursting expense. The stiff bands of contrasting fabric, or “lace,” sewn around each button on the front of a British regimental coat can cost several hundred dollars. Again, just the part around the buttons. An entire “kit”—reenactors’ term for all the clothing, weapons, and associated paraphernalia—can easily cost thousands. (Reenactors reject the assumption that they wear “costumes,” which they do not consider functional clothing.)

A man named Sean, who works as a military contractor—one of several Green Mountain Boys who normally “do British” but were slumming it as rebels for the weekend—told me that he likes to portray a British officer because of how hard it is. British Army reenactors, he said, possess “a desire to do things to a level of research perfection.” Unlike the tailors, sailors, and shopkeepers who took up arms against them, the British forces were professional soldiers. “We can’t look like a quote-unquote ragtag band of militia,” Sean said. “We have to look like people who, this is their job.” Emily, a college student studying music—one of three women dressed up as a Green Mountain Boy—told me she delights in “the degree of organization” and “very standardized drilling” inherent in redcoat portrayals.

(Note: People who spend thousands of dollars outfitting themselves as 18th-century British soldiers reacted so strongly when I asked if they considered themselves Anglophiles—they do not—that I felt embarrassed to have even suggested they might.)

If you want to be a reenactor but are laid-back, messy, or broke, you might be better suited to portraying an American. Or rather, a “Patriot”; technically, there were no “Americans” at Fort Ticonderoga or Lexington and Concord. The American Revolution began as a British civil war; before the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, indignant colonial citizens considered themselves as “British” as the crimson-coated soldiers sent to patrol them.