While it is easy to point out the underlying themes and arguments that abound in The Radical and the Republican, in many regards, the book eschews symbols and motifs for direct quotation and historical fact. Oakes does not couch anything in this book in terms of the abstract. Rather, he offers the reader everything at face value so that they might meet the issues, already complex and convoluted enough, head-on and without future obfuscation.

However, one may argue that the Constitution of the United States of America is the one and only symbol present in The Radical and the Republican. The foundational document of the United States Government, the Constitution sets out the rules and regulations by which the government can and must operate. It enshrines the citizenry with certain freedoms that the government cannot infringe upon and it limits the powers and actions of each government branch so as to prevent one from becoming more powerful than the other. Despite this, while the intent of the Constitution might have been clear to its framers and the Founding Fathers of America, through time the meaning and nuances of what is both written and not written in the document has led to much debate between scholars, lawyers, and politicians alike, for the way in which this document is interpreted leads to the way in which government will act in the future.