No Kings! was the meme of the recent anti-Trump protest, a hastily confected, airy thing concocted by opponents of the President who have been at sixes and sevens since his victory. The Left, flummoxed by his decisive reforms and scrambling for a legitimate, policy-oriented response, have come up with nothing but nostrums - nothing of any substance to counter the President's moves to reduce the size of government, remove every trace of DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusivity), refocus the military on muscular defense and soldierly warfare, energize the private sector, close the borders, and promote a Machiavellian nationalism.
Instead, the harping, wheedling, and whining continues, toy arrows shot from children's bows, insignificant, harmless sallies against a strong, defiant, and unbowed president; and the demonstrations intended to expose his supposed anti-democratic, arrogated royal concentration of power have been seen by opponents and defenders alike as a gasping, childish attempt at 'veracity'. The truth of this monarchical bigot must be known, and the king toppled.
Now, if the truth be known, the idea of monarchical rule has its appeal. The assertion of concentrated power and authority has been history's rule for millennia. The world would still be a Paleolithic veldt had it not been for kings, queens, shahs, emperors, and shoguns. Louis XIV, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Suleiman, and Cyrus the Great were not just imperial puppets, but masterful, determined, visionary men who extended empire and high culture, created wealth, learning, and art, and are examples of the best of human intelligence, will, and ambition.
The empires of Europe, Persia, India, China, and Japan are the result of such kingship, monarchy, and supreme rule; and those countries which remember their past cultural history and still hew to its imperial principles have avoided the divisive, chaotic, impossibly ungovernable situations of the Europe today, awash in anti-establishment immigrants determined to undermine the very foundations of Christian liberalism.
China is unapologetically imperialist, Confucian, capitalist, and authoritarian and is soon to become the world's unchallenged politico-economic power. Russia, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary have turned to their imperial pasts for inspiration and defiance against the flaccid democracies of the EU and the West; and the conservative opposition in France, Britain, Italy, and Germany has made clear their intentions to return their countries to Christian, European, traditionalist roots.
Shakespeare wrote scathingly about Jack Cade, the peasant turned would-be revolutionary in Henry VI, Part 2. He was a caricature of the ignorant, willful, venal, and brutish peasant. He and his like knew nothing – could never know anything – about affairs of state, high culture, and courtly sophistication. For better or worse – and Shakespeare pulled no punches when he described the inanity of the petty causes and feeble justifications for the War of the Roses – the aristocracy was the foundation of England.
The aristocracy provides an important cultural anchor to society. It embodies the unbroken history of its culture. The Queen of England was the inheritor of Empire, Enlightenment, parliamentary democracy, and a long tradition of the unification of Church and State. The ancestors of the present Conte de Villiers de Rochambeau Artois fought the Infidel in Jerusalem, sat at the court of The Sun King in Versailles, and fought against the Scots.
The ancestors of Emmanuel de Miramon Fargues rode in the Third Crusade. He was the last in a long line of French aristocrats who had fought for Christianity, suited up in the wars against usurping English kings, fought Henry V courageously at Agincourt, survived the Jacobin Reign of Terror, defied the little Corsican Napoleon in his predation and murderous wars of vainglory, were advisors to Louis XIV, and arbiters of high French culture for centuries.
Getting rid of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was easy, but not so the aristocracy. Even the most patriotic Frenchman understood that the post-Revolutionary period was far too bloody, vengeful, and above all chaotic for the new Republic, and eventually welcomed back the aristocracy which could provide the social order that France had enjoyed for centuries. Emmanuel's family was one of those celebrated and revered and quickly regained its position and social, cultural, and moral authority.
French greatness, said Emmanuel, was thanks only to the aristocracy. Yes, the peasantry had tilled the land, worked the mills, and fought in the trenches in foreign wars, but it was the dukes, counts, viscounts, and other well-bred members of the court who patronized the arts, promoted and preserved French culture, and continued to serve as the anchor of a great nation.
Alexander Hamilton disagreed with Jefferson's populism and promotion of majority rule. The mob could not be trusted with the fate of the nation, and at the very least a body representing a more temperate, broad, intelligent view of governance should be created to mitigate the necessarily self-interested, venal, and uneducated views of the many. The English system, regardless of its colonial rule over America, was a masterful combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and democratic institutions, room for all as long as the central, historical, cultural ethos was not disturbed.
The American society that Donald Trump inherited from his successor, Joe Biden, is a chaotic, divided, culturally rudderless nation. Progressive policies have encouraged cultural separatism in the form of race, gender, and ethnicity. The ethos of America as written in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, is Christian, individualist, patriotic, and respectful. This ethos was intended to be and always remain central to the Republic. America might be a pluralistic nation, but all should gravitate towards the center, pull for the same objectives, live according to common principles.
There would be no need for a king, said Jefferson, because the fundamental intelligence of a democratic people would prevail. Hamilton disagreed, and his vision of a nation descended into a chaotic version of governance has come true.
So if Donald Trump has kingly intentions, they are not of the Caligula variety - the brutal, savage, oppressive rule of tyrants - but of Victoria, Tai Zong, Xerxes, Peter, and Chandragupta I. Trump understands that a country so far gone in centripetal politics, the fragmentation of culture and society, and the morass of sectarian fighting cannot survive against the imperial will of China and Russia. He cannot become king, but his attempts to restore an originalist core to the nation is kingly.
America shares this ambition with much of Europe, whose conservative leaders have seen the same descent into chaos, the same loss of a central ethos, and the resultant ungovernable, weak, inchoate society and have decided to do something about it. They are not apologetic about their respect for the Christian, imperial, highly cultured world of the past and hope to restore at least some of its influence.
This contemporary era is a political watershed - the times are changing, and the democratic free-for-all is over. Order will be restored and all citizens will march to the same drummer. A call to Orwellian autocracy? Far from it. Only a return to originalist values, a cultural, spiritual, and philosophical center around which culture can diversify and proliferate.
No kings? Shortsighted, historically myopic, and hopelessly vain. The centralization of Donald Trump is not a concentration of federal power but a concentration of citizens around a central, ethical core.