On the Nature of Pillars
The Jefferson Club | Party, Republicanism, and Pillars of Coalition, no. 1
In 2020, I sat in my office, a square of stillness amid the dislocation of that year, logged into a graduate seminar conducted over Zoom with a cohort of PhD students here in Southern California. It was, in its composition, predictable — and yet revealing. Of the six assembled, I was the only republican (small-r). The setting itself carried a certain irony: a seminar devoted to the history of the Early American Republic, unfolding in real time alongside one of the most chaotic elections in American history (Trump v. Biden). The past and present, rather than illuminating one another, seemed to collide.
What began as a discussion soon took on a different character. Exchanges moved not toward understanding but toward accumulation — points scored, positions staked, a cadence less of inquiry than of performance. It was in this atmosphere that the professor — one of the finest historians in California, an author I greatly admire, and one who knew me, simply, as “conservative” — turned the conversation. With a deliberate ease, he posed the question: “Who can give us insight into the republican mind?” The room did not need to shift for the intention to be clear. The question had already found its mark.
My response emerged less as an argument than as an observation — a pattern I had come to recognize through the study of the ancients, through the writings of Jefferson and Madison, and through my own experience in politics over the preceding two decades. It was not a defense, nor an apology, but an attempt to describe a structure often misunderstood, even by those who inhabit it.
We, as republican (small-r) minded, do not perceive political life through the same lens as the Democrats, or the democratic minded more broadly. Issues, for us, are not intersectional in the modern sense — they do not interlock into a seamless ideological fabric. Republicanism is not woven. It does not aspire to be.
Rather, the foundation of republicanism — and of our republican government — rests not upon a singular, coherent philosophy, but upon a series of pillared coalitions. These pillars stand adjacent, sometimes aligned, sometimes in tension, but never dissolved into one another. This distinction is not incidental — it is structural. A philosophy demands coherence — an internal consistency that can be traced, defended, and expanded. In such a framework, contradiction is failure. But American republicanism is not constructed to win the game of coherence, and when it attempts to do so, it misunderstands itself.
A coalition of pillars requires a different architecture altogether — one older than system, less refined but more durable. It is practical rather than theoretical, contingent rather than totalizing. Its endurance depends not on the elegance of its logic, but on the strength and independence of its supports.
It is here that my concern with the activity within the California Republican Party begins to take shape. A coalition-style party cannot be sustained as though it were a philosophical school. To attempt this is to substitute abstraction for structure, and in doing so, to weaken the very foundation upon which it depends. What such a party requires is not greater coherence, but stronger pillars — something more attuned to the realities of political life.
A pillar, in this sense, is not an abstraction but a discrete political commitment — one capable of standing independently of the others, requiring neither reinforcement nor validation from the whole. It does not demand assent in total. One need not subscribe to every pillar for the structure to hold — the integrity of the system presumes otherwise. Acceptance of two or three pillars — even accompanied by the rejection of the rest — is sufficient to sustain the larger edifice of the Republican voter bloc. The structure does not collapse under disagreement — it anticipates it and gives it strength.
Thus, a voter may accept three pillars and reject two others, and still find themselves firmly situated beneath the Republican Party’s roof. This is not a contradiction — it is the design. The architecture allows for divergence without disintegration, for variance without exile (in theory).
For example: fiscal restraint, restricted immigration, energy independence, deregulation, opposition to abortion, lower taxes, law and order, school choice, protection of religious conscience, and, in some factions, a preference for tariffs and consumption taxes over income or property taxes as the mechanism of public finance. If the top two “pillars” of a voter intent on lower taxes and law and order, they are a likely Republican voter in California. There are also single issues: a pro-life person, where that is their singular top issue, are likely to vote Republican in California without considerations of any other pillar of the Republican Party’s platform.
In theory, such a system should grant the California Republican Party a remarkable durability — indeed, an exceptional one. Its resilience lies precisely in what it does not require. It does not demand conversion en whole, nor the surrender of prior commitments in exchange for entry.
These pillars, moreover, are not formed in abstraction. They are defined — and continually redefined — by cultural norms, shaped as much by time and circumstance as by doctrine. They do not stand outside society, fixed and permanent, but emerge from within it, adapting as the contours of public life shift. It is here, perhaps, that we find an explanation for a development that would have seemed improbable — if not inconceivable — in earlier decades.
The Republican Party in California, once sharply bound in its social composition, has opened itself to populations that, in the 1990s and early 2000s, stood in clear opposition to it. Homosexuality, once a point of sustained political conflict, and even those aligned with First Amendment abolitionist tendencies — both examples of positions the party once resisted with considerable force — now find, if not full incorporation, at least a place within the broader structure. The same could be said of the Hispanic community after Proposition 187 (1994, “Save Our State”) — now, there are many Hispanic-Americans who find certain pillars of greater importance than that of their ethnic identity.
This is not, strictly speaking, a transformation of principle so much as an adaptation of structure. A coalition built on pillars rather than a single philosophical line possesses a certain elasticity. As cultural norms evolve, so too do the pillars — not uniformly, and not without tension, but sufficiently to allow new alignments to form. When the platform is slow to react to cultural shifts, the California Republican Party will wane. With a nimble platform that may once have required exclusion, it can, under a different arrangement, be accommodated without requiring full agreement.
Such developments do not signal the abandonment of the past so much as a reconfiguration of its terms. The same structure endures, but the composition of its supports shifts, reflecting the changing realities of the society from which it draws its strength. Rather, it asks only that a newcomer — or a No Party Preference voter — take hold of enough pillars to help bear the weight of the roof. The threshold is not total agreement, but sufficient participation.
And in practice, this produces an outcome that, to those outside the structure, may appear paradoxical. Two Republican voters may share the same three pillars, differ on the others entirely, and yet arrive at the same conclusion — casting their vote for the exact same candidate. What appears, from a distance, as inconsistency is, from within, a reflection of the system’s design: a coalition not of uniformity, but of alignment where it matters most. This is how the American Federal government was built by Jefferson and the other founding fathers — now, fifty experiments, each with their own constitutions, laws, norms that ebb and flow with their regional cultures. And it is this capacity for partial entry — for selective commitment without expulsion — is what gives a pillared coalition its exceptional durability.
This is why Jefferson understood the Constitution as a living document — it is always evolving based on the priorities of geography, culture, and politics — the republican logic embedded within the constitutional design itself. In fact, he noted this in his struggle against slavery in the early American republic, observing that “a good cause is often injured more by ill-timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies.” Indeed, Jefferson knew that, at times, social and cultural movements required patience to become law and that the abolition of slavery would demand a “revolution in public opinion,” and this was “not to be expected in a day, or perhaps an age; but time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.” Not ironically enough, Jefferson, one of the primary architects of the Constitution, would see a political faction emerge in the name of republicanism — the Republican Party emerged to abolish slavery.
Federal republicanism’s architecture of overlapping interests — as should be foundational to the Republican Party — factions, Madison called them, which he did not praise but accepted as the irreducible material of free government. Madison was precise on this point: the causes of faction “cannot be removed,” and relief is only to be sought “in the means of controlling its effects.” His remedy (applicable to internal party Republican politics) was not to eliminate faction but to multiply and diffuse it across a sufficiently large republic (arguably here, the California Republican Party) — so that no single interest could consolidate into a tyrannical majority. The pillar system is, in this sense, federalism translated into electoral practice: it does not suppress competing interests but channels them into a structure large enough to contain them.
What gives the pillar model its significance is its practical force — is that it moves (theoretically) with the cultural ebbs and flows. The pillars of American conservatism in 1860 bear only a passing resemblance to those of 1964, and those of 1964 are not the pillars of 2016 or 2026. Free soil, hard money, and Union gave way, over generations, to anti-communism, social traditionalism, and supply-side economics, and then gave way again to economic nationalism, skepticism of foreign entanglement, and the defense of speech that the party spent the 1990s trying to police. Each transformation reflected a real shift in what the coalition’s constituents feared, valued, and felt themselves to be losing. The pillars do not move arbitrarily. They move with the culture, and with the particular anxieties of a particular historical moment. This is not weakness. It is the system functioning as designed.
Bibliography | Notes
Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to James Heaton, May 20, 1826. In The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, edited by J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, Being a Collection of Essays Written in Support of the Constitution Agreed Upon September 17, 1787, by the Federal Convention. Introduction by Edward Gaylord Bourne. Vol. 1.