Republic. This is a word that encompasses a meaning much greater than what it shows in its three syllables. While its main significance is political, its conception is larger than that and guides itself to a moral dimension where it can be better understood.

The Latin word for Republic is res publica, meaning the public affairs, those that are common for all the individual citizens that have a saying in the way their community is ruled. This relates to an English word that is pretty much its equivalent: Commonwealth, whose meaning is pretty much straightforward from its component parts, common, that is, of the community, larger than its members, and wealth, the material and moral good produced by the human beings who live in that community, for themselves and for others.

These concepts, of Republic and Commonwealth, are, by necessity, projections of the common good, a moral definition of those conditions needed for each individual member of a group to be able to fulfill its own life project respecting the others’ rights and freedoms to fulfill their own.

The republican model of government is founded on these principles, and its implementation as the model adopted not only in the United States Constitution, but widely copied from its example demonstrates the victory of a moral conception of politics that preserves the free and sovereign quality of the individual and the collective conception of a community constituted and ruled by a free and sovereign association of these individuals for the common good, whose will and moral intentions are set in a document, intended to be a law of the land for themselves and their descendants.

But the common good is not the provision of material goods and services from a higher entity to inferior beings who worship it and are directed by it. The common good needs unbound and self-governing people, who exercising their own free will and considering the contingencies of their needs, associate themselves to form a ruling body that will protect their rights and freedoms, derived from their human dignity, and will establish a framework, enforceable by the authority they are creating for their government and the general well-being of their community, that will be respected by them all.

This is the reason a Constitution, established by the founders of any Republic as the most basic act of creation of their community and its ruling body and intended to be the general a set of rules to be followed and respected by its individual members, is sacred to those who value the republican model of government. The Constitution of a Republic limits the power its government can wield, guides it to the common good, and allows for the people that constituted and legitimize it to scrutinize the ruling citizens in their use of the power given to them for the best of their people.

In summary, it prevents the people who rule to abuse of the people who are ruled by setting imperatives that cannot be broken without interfering with the basic individual liberties and the general conception of the common good. This is also the reason constitutionalism, limited government, and the common good go together hand in hand: the conditions allowing for the individual person to fulfill his or her own life project respecting other people’s natural rights and liberties cannot be granted by people in the same conditions, they can only be recognized by them.

No ruling body composed of human individuals can disrespect their nature by abusing of a power given to them to recognize the general rights and freedoms each person has, no matter their individual differences from one to another and to rule for the common good in regard of those rights and liberties.

The main limitation of any republican government is the moral constitution of its primary goal, that of the common good, and for it to be general knowledge for all the community, that constitution must be written and spread, for the people who constituted and legitimize that government to know it cannot forfeit its orientation for the common good without abusing of the power and authority given by its founders and renewed by their descendants.

In ages past, both individual and local freedoms and rights, as well as the limitations of government were guaranteed by tradition and common law, but since there are times when it had become necessary for a people to break of the rotten ties of traditional institutions gone sour, that had forgotten their main duty to uphold the common good, a Constitution must be established to reset and renew the values and principles upon nations are formed.

In any case, no government can suddenly change its course of action from a body to rule on the legally enforceable conditions for the common good of its people to an all-powered wish-granting structure that was not established by the people and for the people. That entity is not a government and definitely not a republic, but something else entirely, something perverse, founded on the will of ill-intended individuals to rule over others and to abuse of the power they get for their own personal well-being at expenses of that of the community. It is the subversion of the common good.

And that is the main problem: there are people nowadays, who do not want to rule for the common good, but for their own agendas and interests. Such people divide themselves and divide society into identity groups and push for a concept of the political not based on making rules to preserve liberty and justice for all, but to make these identity groups clash with each other along friend and enemy lines, just as the German jurist Carl Schmitt observed for the basis of politics. These people, and their ideology, called identity politics, are the main dangers to constitutionalism and limited government today.

After Abraham Lincoln accepted the Illinois Republican Party’s nomination to run for that State to the United States Senate, he famously said: “A house divided against itself, cannot stand“. He was not wrong. Our current era, and the order given by the US Constitution and the national constitutions inspired by it all around the world are being threatened by the division caused by this new kind of tribalism, that knows nothing of the dignity of the individual person and of its freedom to peacefully associate with others with the same values and principles to form families, guilds, counties, and nations ruled for the higher collective end, which is the common good of its people.

It should not be a surprise identity politics have a similarity to the old Marxist doctrine of class struggle, that also divided society along oppressed and oppressors, but based on an economic reading of the social conditions of the person and its environment. Those who promote identity politics know this very well and have been promoting the division of our societies into racial, gender, and many other identity groups, posing as oppressed minorities to ask for quotas and privileges and to stalk and persecute unimpeachably those who lawfully oppose them, with an overall disrespect for the equality under the law and the Constitution that has established it as a condition to guarantee freedom and justice.

Ultimately, the main goal of these identity groups is to obtain power, abolish the Constitution and create a new one that allows for their whims to be made into law by enlarging the size of the government to persecute those who stand against them and their partialized view of politics.

Under identity politics, constitutionalism and limited government are under threat as they will either become a tool for abuse and oppression instead of the common good, or will disappear in order to create a monstrosity akin to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, a ruling body whose only intentions are to wield power for its eternal growth, treading on the individual rights and liberties, erasing all traces of any order preceding that of the State, and destroying all institutions created from the individual’s free will, such as family, church and community.

To see the Republic as a limited government constituted for the common good is to do a moral reading of politics, trying to make sense of the good, the true and the beautiful in political order. And so far, the republican system of government has proven to be moral, as it recognizes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as principles worth protecting as part of human dignity, creating institutions and a legal framework for wealth, association, and unity to thrive. Identity politics want to destroy everything the Constitution represents, and what a limited government tries to preserve, and to replace it with tribal groups engaged in eternal conflict with each other, under a giant State that only works for the interests of its ruling class. They are the moral antipodes of constitutionalism and limited government and thus represent its greatest threats in our time.