Whatever happened to (small-r) republicanism?

One of the most engaging essays of GK Chesterton's classic, What I Saw in America, "The Republican in the Ruins" addresses the fall and failure of the hopes of the Age of Reason.  He notes that America is the embodiment and the product of ideas of a certain age, an age that has long gone.  The other products of the age, the other experiments, such as Fredrick's Prussia and Peter's Russia, have gone the way of the age that spawned them.  Only America still stands, a living fossil of the Age of Reason.  But America itself is only has a shell of the ideals of the age that spawned it, the content of the American political culture has long since left its roots.

Some of the things that has been lost, such as the Enlightenment Deism of many of our founders, I will not take the time to mourn.  There are other ideas, however, who's loss is something rather sorrowful.  One of these ideas is the heart and soul of 18th century republicanism: the idea of the citizen.  The citizen was supposed to be an active participant in, and responsible for, the actions of the state.  He would be educated in the classical sense, and from his own realm of expertise help shape and form the state he lived in.  In Continental Europe, his obligations to the state were mandatory education, followed by mandatory military service, followed by a lifetime of political involvement.  That man (unfortunately only men at this point) was a full and equal citizen under the law, and rightfully so.

This sense of citizenship is almost completely gone in America's current political climate.  Both sides of the political divide talk about the citizen as if he were an entirely autonomous individual who's only considerations and obligations are to himself.  They only differ in how and where this autonomy should be curbed.  The result is maddening, as if a bunch of self-interested gluttons tried to govern themselves, a description which may be too close to the truth than we know.  The idea of a citizen is one that we have unfortunately shelved, and it is an idea that would help us greatly today.  I know that we are rather impoverished without it.