The Regal Presidency - Donald Trump And The Coming American Monarchy

There is no doubt that Donald Trump has imperial designs.  He is a secret admirer of Putin, Xi, and Erdogan, leaders who have made clear their desire to return to the czars of Russia, the Mandarin princes of a hundred Chinese dynasties, and the Sultans of Ottoman Turkey.  He has made it clear that democracy is an ill-conceived notion, and that the will of the people has turned the country into an inchoate, aimless, deformed rabble.

 

‘Hamilton warned us’, Trump has said, referring to the Founding Father who mistrusted the majority and insisted on the Constitutional creation of an aristocratic buffer to keep its unschooled, backwater notions from oozing out of the backwaters and infecting the state of the nation. The mob is not to be trusted with governance, Hamilton cautioned, and to do so would be to lead the new republic into a mob-ruled, undisciplined, and riotous place.  While not exactly championing the royal rule against which Washington fought, he was never completely dismissive of the idea of aristocratic rule.

Why should any government trust the unwashed? What was the point of listening to those of competing, narrow parochial interests – men who would never look beyond their own patch, never understand the affairs of universal, national governance, and who, if allowed, would turn America into a gabbling, brawling, head-banging place?

 

Look to Shakespeare, Hamilton, always the erudite sophisticate, said citing Jake Cade, the rabble-rouser  in Henry VI, the fickle mobs in Julius Caesar, and the Boar’s Head crowd of Henry IV.   Better still, look at history.  The Roman Empire was not the creation of democrats but emperors. The rule of the Caesars  alone enabled universal governance and the civil laws, jurisprudence, arts, administration, and infrastructure that made it possible. 

The reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, was one of ennobling greatness – the Palais de Versailles, the Louvre, the sponsorship of art, literature, and music, the establishment of the principles of royal governance – was but one of history’s many remarkable periods of cultural flowering.  The tenures of Peter the Great,  Alexander,  and Nicholas I were no different, nor were those of the Sultans, Shahs, Shoguns, and Kings, and Emperors of the East.

‘Make America Great Again’, the slogan of the Trump presidencies, has a particular resonance for American royalists.  While the restoration of America, given its long descent into a progressive miasma will be long and hard, it can be accomplished, but only if the ethos of regal rule is its governing principle.  Of course America has no thousand years of royalty.  There are no Bourbons here, no Medicis, no Yorks and Lancasters whose regency was well established, and the principle of divine rule never challenged.

 

Yet look at England whose centuries of monarchy were abruptly interrupted by Cromwell and his democratic reforms, only to be rejected with the Restoration of Charles I.  Monarchy supplanted democracy, and so it can be done here.  History is nothing but a perpetual re-invention of itself as human nature, that ingrained, unstoppable force which propels change but always in the same ways; so democracy can never be here to stay despite Churchill’s comment that democracy is the worst form of governance except for all the others.  The reigns of Putin and Xi alone should give inveterate democrats pause.

So, is the move to a radically conservative Right the first step to centralized authority?  Not necessarily.  American history militates against it.  We have no millennia of imperial history behind us, no foundation on which to build an American empire.  Putin and Xi are not just some fantasists, imagining past glory.  The roots of monarchy are still deeply planted, and dynastic and imperial rule is recent history. Our beginnings were anti-monarchical; Robespierre was our hero along with the minds of the Enlightenment.

The Left, in all its febrile myopia has branded Trump as an insurrectionist, an autocrat-in-waiting,  a dictator whose only purpose is the acquisition of self-perpetuating power, and whose only intent is to turn America into a Third World tinpot, big man rule.  The see the frat-boy antics of January 6^th as the beginning of an insurrection, a planned, orchestrated, determined attempt to storm the Capitol and take over the government. 

 

It is the nature of a political party so given to fantastical notions of pedestrian reform and intent on cleansing history rather than understanding it to misreading Trump’s real intentions.  The path to a ‘democratic monarchy’ comes from a restructuring of the architecture of American governance and the society which supports it.  Such structural change enabling wealth production, innovation, and extensive prosperity will permit the establishment of neo-imperial rule.

The post-Mao reformers of China – autocrats as powerful as Mao but with a different, capitalist perspective – reduced poverty, universalized wealth, and gave Chinese citizens what they wanted and needed – prosperity;  and along with it international preeminence.

These new Chinese rejected the brutal peasant-based ideology of Mao and developed the country into a capitalist engine of productive power.  Trump need only look that far to see what America could become.  Making America Great Again is not a matter of a few executive orders and a legislative turnaround.  It is the first step in creating a capitalist giant with universal wealth and unlimited geopolitical power and influence.

 

‘Never in a million years’ shout the same cornered, limited critics who cannot see the coming radical transformation of human perception and the concomitant revolutionary genetic engineering which will usher in the post-human era.  The same unthinkable creation of a new political order will follow the inauguration of a new race of human beings with limitless intellectual possibility.

The Left has absolutely no idea of what’s coming so mired in their absentminded focus on race, gender, ethnicity, and identity.  Hamilton certainly saw the modern Left coming since they are drawn from the same hoi-polloi that he mistrusted over two hundred years ago.  The Left has never been an innovative, creative lot, always more satisfied with nearsighted vision; so it is natural for them to misread the nature of the silliness of January 6^th and to ignore the real portent of the coming Trump Administration.

‘Hail to the Chief’ might not exactly be ‘Long Live The King’ but it certainly isn’t just whistlin’ Dixie.