I don’t consider myself anything other than a general reader of TheRepublic, but I’ve never understood why it is regarded as any sort of manifesto for an actual political community rather than a theoretical study of an ideal society and the implied roles of humans inhabiting it .

So this discussion is welcome both in its emphasis on the time-bound nature of actual institutions and the extension of the argument into the implications of polytheism in the political sphere. I’m not sure that I have absorbed the totality of your argument but it provides much food for thought.