The American Republic is not a phrase you hear thrown around much these days.

One nation, under God. Remember that? We recited that every morning, without much thinking about it, putting our hands on our hearts. I remember a few guys in second grade liked to salute, but I always preferred the hand-on-heart gesture. I remember being weirded out by the "under God" part, since no one in school ever mentioned God, and yet no one seemed to notice that he was right there smack in the middle of something every kid had to say every day! It was an early lesson in not-thinking-about-what-you're-saying, a technique that's gotten me through more group presentations than I can count.

A few years ago, when some showoff atheist tried to get the offending phrase banned, several people expressed their disgust with the fellow. When I pointed out how weird it was that we even make our kids pledge allegiance to the country every morning, they shrugged: That's the way it's always been. You can't change it.

So it is with the American Nation. Its emblems - the flag, the pledge, the eagle, the trappings of militarism and jingoism - are meant to look everlasting and omnipresent. They've always been here, they seem to declare. They'll always be here. You can't change it; you might as well try to pull down a mountain.

And yet. The nation is not the whole story. The pledge mentions not just a "nation," but the republic, for which [the flag] stands. The Republic is what stands behind the shrieking avian chorus of presidents and senators and pundits and talk-show hosts; the Republic is what politicians praise in one breath and betray in the next; the Republic is what America is. Founded on a slew of propositions - "conceived in liberty," "all men are created equal," "of the people, by the people, for the people" - that represented the best impulses of the Enlightenment, brought down to earth in a commonwealth of small republics that had set out to create the freest country in the world.

The Republic is founded on the notion of constant change. If you don't like your mayor, kick him out and vote yourself a new one. If you don't like a law, petition to get it changed. In theory, at least, each citizen has the power to effect change, and this dangerous fact lies behind much of our politics. The struggle between the "friends of liberty," in Madison's phrase, and those who seek to safeguard the Nation's power to look invincible and forever out of reach, may not be the only story worth telling in our Republic, but it is the most interesting story.

This blog is a lone citizen's attempt to revive the kind of talk you heard in the old days, the kind of language that reveals the degraded political discourse of our day as nonstop apologies for corrupt power and gutless pandering, the kind of writing that makes you want to go out and do something. At least, that's what I hope it will be. The political writers I like - Jefferson, Madison, Gibbon, Machiavelli, Tocqueville - did that for me; hopefully I can do it for someone else.

You won't find many of the things here you might expect to find in a political blog. I'm not interested in why some people think Barack Obama "isn't really black" because he grew up in Hawaii. Nor will you find diligent explanations of how "the free market" cures all ills. Nor will you hear all our problems consigned to a drawer and dismissed as the inevitable legacy of "imperialism," "entrenched racism," "institutionalized capitalism," or whatever other empty phrases people like to use as an excuse for not thinking about politics, for the most important thing anyone needs to know about politics is that people, not "institutions," govern our lives. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise has succumbed to the first pretext of cynicism, that what people do doesn't really matter. And if you don't think widespread cynicism serves the interests of our leaders far better than "political naivete" or "idealism" ever could, you haven't been paying attention.

Of course, I'll probably talk about other things, too. That's the way I am.