Journalist and political writer Walter Karp (1934–1989) was born in New York City and died there at age fifty-five. As a left-of-center Jeffersonian, he passionately criticized American politics, foreign policy, and public education from a consciously republican standpoint. He defended inherited civil liberties and denounced political and economic oligarchs with a rudeness that put him well outside mainstream discourse. [1] He wrote several books and numerous essays in Pageant, Horizon, American Heritage, and The Public Life (which he coedited with H. R. Shapiro in the late 1960s), and was a regular contributor to Harper’s from 1979 to 1989. He was active in PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee. [2]

Noteworthy essays by Karp include “How to Think about Politicians” (Horizon, January 1977), a blistering treatment of Woodrow Wilson; “Textbook America” (Harper’s, May 1980) and “Why Johnny Can’t Think” (Harper’s, June 1985), on public schools; as well as “The Cold War Decoded” and “All the Congressman’s Men” (Harper’s, July 1989). [3] Karp’s books include Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America (1974), The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890–1920) (1979), Liberty Under Siege: American Politics: 1976–1988 (1988), and the posthumous collection Buried Alive: Essays on Our Endangered Republic (1992). Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham wrote that Karp “had the courage to think for himself” and compared him—as “a writer cut in the American grain”—to Ambrose Bierce, Albert Jay Nock, and H. L. Mencken. [4]

Karp’s popular presentations of republicanism ran parallel with an academic revival of republican ideas. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt influenced Karp and endorsed his work as useful. [5] From at least the late 1950s, Arendt, historians Bernard Bailyn and J. G. A. Pocock, and other scholars stressed the historical importance (sometimes the superiority) of a body of ideas variously called republicanism, civic humanism, or country ideology. While the War Between the Historians has subsided, it raised important questions about compatibilities and incompatibilities between republicanism and liberalism, particularly in their Anglo-American versions. [6]

Classical and neo-republican thought spotlights independent proprietors whose courage and dedication secure republican liberty. Civic virtue, a proper balance of property, and a mixed constitution overcome individual and institutional corruption and the vagaries of fortune. Community is prior to individuals and participation in civic life is central to genuine freedom. [7] Here are ideas potentially opposed to liberalism, which (allegedly) grounds politics on individuals and their rights and takes a republic as a mere form of government.

There have been many republics and many versions of republicanism. The primacy of community draws forth complaints that the ideal republic looks narrow, militarist, and closed. Yet a closed republic may not be oppressive and its militarism (if any) might be defensive and consciously intended to avoid the complications of empire. Friendlier-sounding commercial republics may be “republics for increase,” which build mercantilist empires and welcome foreigners, while dominating their homelands. Their oppressions, if any, take place abroad—at least until diminishing imperial returns set in and “blowback” arrives. (Meanwhile, such republics will count as great centers of liberalism.) With many possible shades of republicanism, it would seem that from inside any particular one, other republicanisms will appear as gross distortions.

Many historical actors have seen republicanism and liberalism as reasonably compatible. Historian Ralph Raico comments that “it would indeed be a mistake to hold that they are mutually exclusive in every historical incarnation of liberalism.” American revolutionaries including Jefferson appealed to both sets of ideas, as did nineteenth-century liberals Benjamin Constant in France and Eugen Richter in Germany. Indeed, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European “bourgeois republicans” from proto-liberals. [8] Sticking with the American story, it seems that a broad “liberal republican” consensus long existed within which very bitter and divisive struggles took place. The two traditions—ideally separate or not—seem inextricably mingled in American practice. Arguably, liberalism as such lacked an articulated theory of government; republicanism as such lacked a theory of rights. [9] Hence the attempt on American shores to put (and keep) them together.

Foreign Policy as the Oligarchs’ Opportunity

But we have wandered far away from Walter Karp. All this big theory must wait. Perhaps the terrain will look different after a survey of Karp’s republican jeremiads. In his Politics of War (1979), Karp set the Spanish-American War (1898) against a backdrop of popular political insurgency dangerous to the “oligarchs” of both major American political parties. The Panic of 1893 added to their troubles. “Laissez faire” Democrats channeled or dodged populist anti-trust, anti-monopoly, and pro-silver activists, whose ideas threatened Republicans more directly. Real reforms threatened both machines, and many party leaders came to see foreign policy as an ideal diversion useful, too, in strengthening their power at home. When revolution broke out in Cuba in 1895, some were ready to seize the opportunity.

President William McKinley was among them. Self-effacing, he led by indirection but “always had his way,” as Elihu Root later wrote. On Karp’s reading, McKinley’s drawn-out negotiations with Spain were meant to fail, leaving him with the little war he wanted. The chance to seize the Spanish Philippines as a jumping-off point for involvement in China was an attraction, but unlike New Left historians, Karp takes fin de siècle Republican economic oratory about fabulous Chinese markets as rhetorical cover for power-political motives.

As of 1912, the political machines’ incentives had not changed. Democrats still curbed and co-opted dissent, while Republicans communed with big eastern capitalists. But new troublemakers had arisen: “Progressives,” especially western ones. Karp writes, “Following [Robert] La Follette, western progressives on the whole regarded big business as an artificial menace to self-government . . . made possible by a whole system of special privilege.” These nominally Republican western insurgents were a huge headache for the GOP apparatus. When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, party oligarchs saw new opportunity. Ever the republican, Karp does not neglect the role of individual character in the making of history—especially the character of President Woodrow Wilson, victim of his own vainglorious ambition to impose lasting peace on the world, through war, if necessary. By 1916, the administration was caught between the economic boon of Allied war orders and the belligerent parties’ creative violations of the rules of naval warfare. Wilson’s interim solution was thinly disguised, pro-Allied “neutrality.”

For political reasons, the GOP could not openly stand as a war party in 1916. But Wilson could run as a peace candidate certain to provide a war once reelected. This suited the oligarchs quite well. Karp sees popular response to U.S. entry as “sullen submission to an odious fate.” Subject to “the government spy and the government burglar, with the neighborhood stool pigeon and the official vigilante, with the local tyranny of federal prosecutors,” etc., Americans learned they “did not count.” This experience did not exactly teach them self-government. Things quickly ran their course—changing American life forever—and in 1920 the GOP could safely repudiate the war; a cowed populace, retrained in their duties to the state, returned the Republicans to power.

Charles C. Tansill, Walter Millis, and Albert Jay Nock have told the same story. By putting party oligarchs on stage, Karp intended to shed new light. He declined to give American leaders benefits of any doubts in the face of contrary evidence and frequently inferred their motives from his republican understanding of how men operate in the world. This approach is uncharitable, but has its uses. There is realism, too, in someone who can ridicule the childish American response to the Zimmermann Note: “A war stratagem aimed against America that was contingent on America’s waging war against Germany was scarcely a shocking proposal.” Karp could be rather satirical. Summarizing events in February 1916, he says: “For a few tense days America was to totter on the brink of peace.” Then, by early March: “The right to travel safely on armed belligerent merchantmen had come a long way since the days—a mere three weeks before—when nobody knew it existed.”

Politics as Usual: Oligarchs at Play

Karp’s critical “system” (so to speak) had already emerged in Indispensable Enemies (1974), where he painted the two-party oligarchy both in broad strokes and in detail. Control of permanent party machinery was the chief interest of the oligarchy; winning elections was secondary. The machinery guaranteed political power and profit to its operators. Accordingly, oligarchs punished elected officials insufficiently beholden to them and blocked popular insurgencies—those two sources of disturbance to the status quo.

The entrenched system of two-party collusion arose in the later nineteenth century in the “as yet unwritten history of the post–Civil War Republic.” Having set out his basic case, Karp surveys the parties. The Democratic Party rested on an alliance between northern big-city machines and “Bourbon” courthouse gangs in the South. American city government prevented local self-rule, making urban residents “an almost undifferentiated political mass.” [10] Northern Democrats campaigned for reforms they did not want and relied on their southern allies to block them. Blessed by the party bosses, “discretionary use” of seniority secured Bourbon control of key congressional committees, which then obstructed legislation. Bourbons stood for rather little and their invocations of states’ rights were entirely bogus.

Republicans were eternally split between an eastern machine allied with big business and western insurgents searching for principles on which to stand. The party machinery could allow western Republicans to espouse principles, knowing that eastern Republicans would “betray” them. As Karp wryly notes, this cut into the party’s ability to accomplish anything. Yet it had followers: “Given the Hobson’s choice between New Deal liberalism and nothing, many voters have preferred nothing.” The result was “the pseudo-conservatism of blighted hopes.”

Thus each party had “a reform wing and an obstructionist wing” well-coordinated to prevent popular self-government. Anticipating the conspiracy-theory charge, Karp argues that multiple political acts yielding consistently similar results suggest intention. Where the actors’ self-interest is implicated, “the presumption becomes a fair certainty.” On this basis, Karp explains some mysteries of American political history: why the New Deal ground to a halt after 1937 and why Lyndon Johnson sacrificed his domestic program to a war in Asia. Scornful of bureaucracy-centered explanations, Karp writes: “Had Johnson decided not to bomb North Vietnam, no ‘process’ would have bombed North Vietnam.”

Where the economic power of moneyed classes is concerned, Karp focuses on relations of power rather than relations of production. Party oligarchs created American monopoly capitalism, from the late nineteenth century forward. Their institutional-financial health required them to “make corrupt privilege the very source and foundation of wealth and influence.” (Alexander Hamilton is mentioned.) Pursuing the subject, Karp treats Marxist explanations of monopoly capitalism as mistaken ideology. In truth, corrupt government power caused monopoly, and expectations of continued government favors had raised the paper value of affected companies from the era of imaginary laissez faire onward. Economic “ideology”—from Theodore Roosevelt to the Marxists—misleadingly dismissed insurgent small businessmen and farmers as troglodytes “trying to ‘hold back social change’” and hid the fact that “the oligarchs were trying to get rid of them.” As for trade and industrial unions, Karp treats them as mere appendages of the Democratic machine with no internal democracy and which, despite repeated protests, liked the Taft-Hartley regime just fine since it actually sustained their power.

This brings Karp to the “rule of caprice.” Having created monopoly capitalism, the oligarchs “reformed” it through independent agencies “captured” by the regulated companies with the approval of the oligarchs. Supposedly “above politics,” bureaucracies became a firewall between the parties and responsibility to the public and promoted the very monopoly system they allegedly fought. The farm bureaucracy got rid of farmers in an American variation on Enclosures [my terms] and educational bureaucracies treated young Americans as future employees rather than future republican citizens.

Karp next develops some themes found later in Politics of War. New Left historians had seen “the soft core of mendacity” in the Cold War, but their Marxist analysis was flawed. On the Marxist theory of imperialism, only a few capitalists made a buck out of empire. It could not be shown that those capitalists controlled the state. Instead, party machines controlled the state, made policy, and engrossed irresponsible power as they went. Overseas activism distracted the public and licensed assaults on their liberties. Like Felix Morley and Charles A. Beard, Karp believed in the primacy of domestic politics. Indeed, he asserts that there was no recent American war which the oligarchs “could not have readily avoided,” had they so wished.

Conceding to Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy the existing order’s need to absorb surplus profits [11]—but conceding little else—Karp details the enormous waste involved in “defense.” He asks why public spending on domestic needs could not serve the same purpose (“waste”). Once again the party bosses’ needs come to the fore. In a short chapter on Watergate (just then unfolding), Karp describes Richard Nixon’s philosophy of “elective despotism.” Nixon’s theory was not, as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. held, a simple “culmination” of past trends. [12] Karp: “Presidents make Presidential trends, not the other way around.”

Karp’s thesis is directly contrary to much that we are taught, but he backs it up with shrewd inference, numerous concrete cases, and direct quotations from party oligarchs speaking candidly. Oddly enough, there is even Marxist support for Karp’s thesis—from Friedrich Engels, no less, who wrote in 1891:

Nowhere do politicians form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America. There, each of the two major parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics. . . . It is well known how the Americans have been trying for thirty years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and how in spite of it all they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends—and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it. [13]

Engels has conceded considerable “autonomy” to politics, or the state. And rightly so even on Marxist grounds, since if the state had no autonomous power, it could hardly serve (if it does) as the instrument of economic interests. Interestingly, both Marxists and Karp reject liberal pluralist analyses, in which no one seems to be in charge and where some societal machine “goes of itself.” [14] The fault line is elsewhere: disagreement on which elite dominates the system in the last instance.

Karp’s monolithic political focus is a useful and bracing corrective to pluralism and Marxism alike. It becomes hard to overlook party machinery after reading him. His restatement of republican themes had great merit. But there are problems with Karp’s system. In 1978, political scientist Philip L. Beardsley suggested a synthesis integrating Karp’s “Jeffersonian,” “critical liberal” analysis with pluralist and Marxist perspectives. He took Karp’s thesis that political oligarchs dominate economic elites as true as far as creation of privilege goes, but as weak where maintenance of privilege was at issue. Further, by manipulating mass opinion, economic elites could effectively pressure political elites—a possibility Karp declined to see. Beardsley also regarded Karp’s views on the origins of U.S. foreign policy as rather oversimplified. Certainly, if more than one form of power exists, relations between or among them will require specific analysis; and we may agree with Beardsley that the constant dominance of one form over the others in all arenas is to be doubted. [15]

Karp’s positive recommendations appear in Chapter 15 of Indispensable Enemies, “The Restoration of Self-Government.” Oligarchs had seized popular power and Americans had to relearn how to “act in their own behalf.” They needed to “augment” (not invent) political liberty, because our revolutionary Constitution still existed: “its fundamental rights and immunities are not, as professors and pedagogues so often tell us, mere safeguards for private men against an encroaching government.” They exist “to protect the citizens’ capacity for public and political action.” Federalism, further extended, was part of the answer. Invoking Thomas Jefferson’s speculations on “ward republics,” Karp called for establishing micro-republican jurisdictions across the land with as much responsibility as they could reasonably handle. Such a reform would unleash local ambition and insurgencies in a constructive fashion, break the party machines, and counter trends (real or imaginary) toward the rise of a shapeless American “mass.” Local liberty was, for Karp, “neither conservative nor liberal nor radical, though in the genuine meaning of those terms it is all three combined.”

There has been a corporal’s guard of latter-day ward-republicans, including Hannah Arendt, Albert Jay Nock, and economist Fred Foldvary. (Nock’s suggestion that the smallest units should have sole power to tax would—if pursued—put some teeth into endless discussions of federalism and subsidiarity.) And in New York City in the 1960s and after, there were H. R. Shapiro and Public Life, Citizens for Local Democracy, and minimalist artist Donald Judd, all involved in the Stop the Freeway movement. [16] This New York ferment lay in the background of the decentralist Mailer for Mayor Campaign (1969), endorsed by even that non-republican Murray Rothbard. (The early New Left’s parallel theme of “participatory democracy” might also be noted.)

Renewed interest in republicanism arises in part because of some potentially crippling limitations built into liberal and libertarian conceptions of politics. Libertarians in particular display an inability to think in “policy” terms, since those necessarily involve using government. Many would rather indulge in collapse scenarios or wait for some charismatic leader who will “smash” the existing system and leave an anarcho-capitalist “law code” brooding over the rubble. But the Patriot King as Anarchist Regent hardly seems a workable plan. And it is a matter of experience that in a perceived political crisis, libertarians (like ordinary people) often recur to republican themes of public rights and liberties, or to rights deriving from English law. [17] This recurrence seems a reasonable alternative to theorizing the free-market millennium while providing arguments sure to be co-opted by neo-mercantilists. And it may be true that republicanism in some form can provide an antidote to certain “fatalities” of liberalism, and the other way around. Perhaps our ancestors were right to combine the two traditions, after all. We may quarrel with their particular mixture and its long-run results, but the project itself had its merits.

Walter Karp took his republicanism as he found it—liberal, American, and insurgent—and worked to bring it back to life. I wrote to him in May 1976, praising Indispensable Enemies, and he wrote back, taking issue with some views I had expressed:

Nor do I think that having rulers who leave their subjects alone [is] the definition of liberty. It’s a paltry sort of liberty to me. Inactive oligarchy is still rule by the few; the want of a common voice in common affairs is still slavishness however restricted the common affairs may be. . . . If the people do not believe in “least government” as the cardinal republican principle (which it most certainly is not), what can a libertarian do but elect a new people? [18]

It was a fair question and I should have pursued it further. A poor correspondent, I (regrettably) failed to continue the discussion.

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1. Comparison might be made with Karl Jaspers’s republican critique of the West German Establishment in The Future of Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), based on his Wohin Treibt die Bundesrepublik? (1966).
2. See “Walter Karp, Writer Specializing in Political History,” New York Times (Obituary), July 20, 1989, online.
3. See www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Democracy_America/Buried_Alive_WKarp.html for the last three; the first is also found at www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/johnny.html.
4. Lewis Lapham, “Walter Karp (1934–1989),” Harper’s, October 1989.
5. Walter Karp Interviewed by Jane Karp, American Heritage, November 1989, available at www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1989/7/1989_7_158.shtml. Arendt praised Karp’s and Shapiro’s journal Public Life (see frontispiece, Indispensable Enemies [1974]). For Arendt’s views, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965) and The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday, 1959), Ch. 5, “Action,” and Ch. 6, “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age.”
6. For accounts of the controversy, see Robert Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis,” William & Mary Quarterly, 29 (January 1972), 49–80; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History, 79 (June 1992), 11–38; and (rather critical) Luigi Marco Bassani, “Bankruptcy of the Republican School,” Telos, 124 (Summer 2002), 131–157.
7. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
8. Ralph Raico, Die Partei der Freiheit (Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 1999), 111–112 (my translation). See Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, I & II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
9. Joseph R. Stromberg, “Tensions in Early American Political Thought,” Freeman, May 1999.
10. On “Modern Mass Society,” see Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1971 [1960]), Ch. 2.
11. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968).
12. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).
13. Frederick Engels, “Preface to Marx’s Civil War in France” [1891] in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 627–28 (italics supplied).
14. Cf. Alain de Benoist, “Hayek: A Critique,” Telos, 110 (Winter 1998), 71–104, describing a vision in which a whole civilization rocks along with no one and nothing in charge of anything.
15. Philip L. Beardsley, “Toward a Synthesis of Conflicting Ideological Views Regarding the Political and Economic Dimensions of the American Political Economy: The Current System,” Peace and Change, 5 (Fall 1978), 12–33. Beardsley also faults Karp for being vague about who the party oligarchs actually are (30 note). On types of power, see John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), 17–23.
16. On ward republics, see Arendt, On Revolution, 252–59; Albert Jay Nock, Jefferson (Washington, DC: National Home Library Foundation, 1926), 311–12, and Our Enemy the State (New York: Free Life Editions, 1973 [1935]), 56–58 and 57 note (move taxing power to lowest level); and Fred Foldvary, “Recalculating Consent” [paper online]. Compare Bruce Frohnen, Ave Maria Law Review, 3 (Spring 2005), 171–96, and Arthur J. Versluis, “The Revolutionary Conservatism of Jefferson’s Small Republics,” Modern Age, 48 (Winter 2006), 6–12. For the New York connections mentioned, see David Raskin, “Specific Opposition: Judd’s Art and Politics,” Art History, 24 (2001), 690–695.
17. For public liberties versus utilitarian freedom, see Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Ch. 2, “Free States and Individual Liberty.”
18. Walter Karp to Joseph R. Stromberg, May 30, 1976, in possession of author.