Our political regime does not deny ambition, but sublimates and channels it. Yet those who have defended America have long seen the perils of those whose aims our institutions could not satisfy. From the beginning, Lincoln was worried about such people. Dissatisfied with the possibilities available to them in a merely republican system, they would seek greater offices. “Distinction” would be the “paramount object” of America’s would-be Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon. “And although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” He was right to worry then; his diagnosis remains sound now.

And to embrace the second idea is to evince a lack of faith both in the American people and in the political principles that undergird our republican system — the option not touched upon in these ostensibly sophisticated ruminations. Acknowledging the extent of the challenges before us should not — must not — mean rejecting America itself.

Maybe I am naïve for thinking this foundation is still worthy. But the Caesarists are ignorant for not realizing they have placed themselves in a long — and suspect — line of theorists who think American self-government inadequate to some new challenge. “The old political formulas do not fit the present problems,” wrote Woodrow Wilson in 1914. “They read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.” He added in the same work: “The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day.” But those who believe in America have proved doubters wrong and defeat challenges not by abandoning America’s principles but by embracing them, defending them, and restoring them via people and institutions who try to do the same. Writing decades before Wilson, Lincoln rebutted him, noting that the Declaration introduced “into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” And so it still is.