The Technological Republic is a two-hundred-page exercise in horizontal thinking about some of America’s greatest challenges and opportunities, endeavoring to ask the big questions necessary of our shared American experiment. The book covers a potpourri of topics from war, both cultural and kinetic, to the unique moments in history that supported the foundation of global enterprises based in Silicon Valley. The authors lay out a broad horizon with multiple valleys for future discussion, diving into more depth vertically. I do hope that Alexander and Nicholas’ work leads to more discussions and work on thinking within those verticals as the nation desperately needs these deeper discussions. 

The crux of The Technological Republic is a call for renewing the American experiment around values such as pragmatism and a common code of ethics and behavior. The focus on a shared sense of morality and ethics is a refreshing approach to a national project as so much of our daily lives, in both corporate and personal capacities, is occupied by compliance and the rule of law. The authors dare Americans to ask “why” they are doing something rather than focusing on the rote actions of compliance and relying on institutional inertia to carry things forward. Left unsaid is that the leaders of America’s adversaries are not daring to ask “why” and are imbedding themselves in the institutions of international trade, culture, and commerce established by the West.         

While reading The Technological Republic I read in parallel a 1950 Army War College textbook entitled Economics of National Security. The textbook deals with the process of demilitarization of the American economy after World War Two and the threat of a Cold War turning hot, requiring a much larger professional military than the United States historically had maintained. Economics of National Security notes that, “[e]conomic power is an aim of national security policy and is a major pillar of modern military power.” The thinking of this time was that the organization and guidance of the private sector in support of national security, is a responsibility of government. Clearly this role of government is a concept that we have lost in the subsequent decades and if the West hopes to prevail in the face of its adversaries it is a skillset the government must learn again. 

The Technological Republic’s biggest shortcoming was in bridging the gap between what the authors call “the engineering mindset” and the construction of a national consensus and culture in opposition to the left’s experimentation with post-nationalism and moral relativism. While the authors extol the unique qualities of corporate organization in Silicon valley as allowing the freedom and flexibility to create and unwillingness to conform, the question of how this tendency toward nonconformity would be reconciled with fighting for something “singular and new” in a collective American identity. Perhaps it would be best to delineate the responsibilities of the engineering mindset as one of problem solving while the civic religion of the nation is for matters of morality and ethics, supporting Einstein’s presupposition that science without religion in lame while religion without science is blind. 

Within weeks of one another in 2023 in remarks in Washington and Moscow former national security advisor Jake Sullivan and President Putin agreed that the Washington Consensus was over. When it ended, whether it was when China surpassed the US in manufacturing, the Global Financial Crisis, or when Russia invaded Ukraine, is a matter for future historians to argue over. What is clear is that American institutions and the international institutions established by the West in the wake of World War Two are dysfunctional or unfit for purpose. Alexander and Nicholas have laid out a broad horizon for Americans reading their work and at its conclusion they declare that it is time to “build something.” I couldn’t agree more.