The Monarchy of the United States

Sometimes it occurs to me just how much like our political ancestors we really are. For instance, for all that we purport to be a democratic state, there are shocking political similarities between our current government and the early modern English absolute monarchy. There are many reasons why I find this profoundly disturbing.

Yes, we could find ourselves with a glorious monarch *ahem* president whose golden reign - er... term - will last for many harmonious years.

But.

(A good word, that.)

But. Absolute monarchs are no walk in the park. Even if it is St. James'.

Glen Burgess - in Politics of the Ancient Constitution - describes the dual prerogative of the Stuart monarchy beginning in 1603, lasting until 1649, when Charles lost his head. Literally.

Between the competing sides in the imposition debate there was substantial theoretical agreement. Everyone agreed that the common law protected property, within England at least, and that the king could not infringe upon property rights without his subjects’ consent. Most agreed also that the king had both an ordinary and an extraordinary (or absolute) prerogative, the latter properly used not to contravene the common law (through which the king exercised his ordinary prerogative) but to supplement it. It provided a basis for royal action in areas where the common law had no force, whether geographical (possibly the high seas) or institutional (possibly the church). The dispute was not primarily theoretical at all, but more about whether impositions were in fact properly a matter for the absolute prerogative and thus of no concern to the common law.¹

Okay, you may ask, that's all very well and good, but what does it have to do with King George II (you know who I mean)?

The idea of absolute prerogative grants, ostensibly, the power to the monarch to issue commands, statutes, and dictates above and beyond the purview of the common law. While common law in seventeenth-century England was drastically different from American law today (for one thing, it wasn't written down), I think the notion is still applicable. Our ruler - a.k.a. President - is able to, in particular circumstances, issue directives above and beyond the law. Fine. Makes sense. But there's a problem, and it's the same problem we saw with Charles I, the same problem foregrounded in Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II.

Nobody told the king.

When absolute prerogative functions to allow the monarch to functionally create a precedent for something outside common law, it's lovely. When a monarch - or President or Prime Minister or whatever - uses absolute prerogative to overrule or alter common law, then we have a problem. When, hypothetically, the sovereign authority decides to ignore the Bill of Rights. Or confiscate property from a law-abiding citizen.

The intellectual elaboration that it underwent in the early-seventeenth century was made possible by the tools provides by civil law jurisprudence; but the elaboration was not at first fundamentally inconsistent with accepted common-law thinking. That inconsistency would not arise until the king’s power outside the law came to be used (it was more a matter of use than of theory) as a power over the law. This was a feature of – as Oscar Wilde might have said – the general carelessness that lost Charles I three kingdoms (and a head).2

This "carelessness," boys and girls, is what the very astute early moderns call "tyranny." It's what happens when our rulers and leaders forget that they - like the rest of us - are human and subject to the same laws (like gravity) as the rest of us. When they assume that the power they've been granted by vote or blood makes them better than the ordinary woman or man. Why do they forget? Because not only do we let them, we encourage them to forget. We encourage them to think themselves better than we are because we want them to be. We want our leaders to be great heroes, demi-gods whose blood is somehow purer, greater, more than ours. And that is a very natural, very dangerous thing. It leads to corruption, to the abuse of power and prerogative, and - as we are reminded by our good friend Shakespeare - to tyranny.

And what happens to tyrants? Well. Look up 1649. Look up Richard II or Edward II. I can tell you it isn't nice.

We in the U.S.A. happen to be lucky enough to have this thing called "term limits." We have an out that doesn't involve fire pokers. And a good thing, too. We also have a very nice First Amendment that lets me write this with little to no fear of having my head chopped off because I can't recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin. I'm not saying we're living in an unenlightened age. I'm simply saying that perhaps we aren't quite as enlightened as we think we are.

Or, maybe, that Shakespeare and company weren't living in an age of barbarism.

But perhaps we're all barbarians. Perhaps we will remain so as long as we enjoy bloodsport and American Gladiators. Perhaps enlightenment - in the truest, Buddhic sense - will elude most of us permanently. Perhaps an alien race will come upon our little blue and green planet, shudder in disgust, and blow us all to smithereens.

Or perhaps we'll go on as we always have, living our little lives with passion and confusion, both loving and hating every breath with all the vitality our unimportant souls can muster.

I don't think that would be so bad, do you?

1 Glen Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (University Park: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 142.

2 Ibid., 167.