# Republicanism & liberalism in the united states In 1776, the United States of America was born. Interestingly enough, it was built on top of ideas of BOTH republicanism and liberalism. Not the caricatures of these words which are our political parties of today, but the actual ideals themselves. In reading about the American Enlightenment, which is fantastically interesting and truly inspiring, I realized something surprising: true republicanism and liberalism have a ton of overlap. Below I'm going to pull from Wikipedia the definitions of these two terms, and then we can compare them and see how truly similar they are. # Republicanism >The values, ideals and concept of republicanism have been discussed and celebrated throughout the history of the United States. As the United States has no formal hereditary ruling class, republicanism in this context does not refer to a political movement to abolish such a class, as it does in countries such as the UK, Australia, and Netherlands. Instead, it refers to the core values that citizenry in a republic have, or ought to have. > >Political scientists and historians have described these central values as liberty and inalienable individual rights; recognizing the sovereignty of the people as the source of all authority in law; rejecting monarchy, aristocracy, and hereditary political power; virtue and faithfulness in the performance of civic duties; and vilification of corruption. # Liberalism >Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality and equality before the law. Liberals generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. > >Liberals sought and established a constitutional order that prized important individual freedoms, such as freedom of speech and freedom of association; an independent judiciary and public trial by jury; and the abolition of aristocratic privileges. Liberals have advocated gender and racial equality in their drive to promote civil rights. Other goals often accepted by liberals include universal suffrage and universal access to education. # Comparing the two So in reading these two, the biggest takeaway for me is the emphasis on the rights and freedoms of the individual, and at the end of the day, it seems like that's mostly what we all want in modern times as well. I personally don't think the ideals of republicanism and liberalism are very far off. In fact, we're probably much closer together in what we want as individuals than we think. The problems we're facing today in the world are very real, don't get me wrong. But we need to be able to first agree on what we all commonly believe as the citizenry of the United States of America before we move into the nuance of what we disagree on. Otherwise we're heading towards a civil war which nobody should want. When we start by understanding what we share, we can rehumanize the individuals we're debating with. Things should not be as polarizing and extreme as mass/social media outlets and platforms would have us believe. Those entities are incentivized by profit to push us further away from one another. We cannot keep going down this path in America that we are on of constant infighting or we will destroy ourselves. Let's take a moment, get on the same page, and push forward as a nation, united.