Monarchy as Government

I have, for some time, wondered if perhaps the first fatal mistake that was made in American government was when George Washington declined the offer to become king rather than president. A recent post at The Monarchist blog makes some good points about monarchy and America.

You can get rid of a monarchy, you cannot ever get rid of the reason for monarchy. Part of that reason, somewhat lamentably to traditionalists, is the glossy-magazine aspect. There is a great swath of the people, even in the most advanced nations, that seek to live vicariously through the tabloid media. This is nothing new, though the nature of modern media has made the process far more rapacious. The peasants gossiping about their monarch’s personal affairs was not then a vast and profitable industry.

It is one of the beneficial features of monarchy, especially one so well established and conservative as ours, is that it can direct this rather prurient interest toward, generally, more worthy objects. In the American Republic the fascination with the rich and famous tends to settle on Hollywood celebrities, among the most vapid creatures ever to draw breadth upon creation. There is not in that soulless place a stern matriarch calling her progeny, with varying degrees of success, back upon the path of relative decency. Hollywood: Nothings seeking to be exalted above the nil in a vast nowhere.

The great dig against the monarchy is that its operatives, if we may call the Royal Family that, have not earned their position. True. They have at the very least been taught how to behave like civilized human beings in public. A behavioural trait that is frequently missing among the “earned” elite of the modern media. Breeding isn’t everything. Neither is a specious understanding of merit.

(Emphasis mine)

I have often thought that a Constitutional Monarchy is a superior form of government to what we have now in America. What we have now is something slightly more civilized than mob rule – but not by much.  We have legal protections – in writing – but they are routinely and increasingly ignored, much as they were under the old Soviet Union.

Here in American, we pretend that a nation is made up of geographical boundaries and laws. There is no mention of and no protection for that which truly defines a nation – the people and the culture of those people. Having a monarchy does not, of course, prevent a culture from losing its identity. The once-great England is a prime example of how to have a monarchy and still destroy a nation. England has ceased to exist as a nation – it is now over-run with immigrants who bring with them their own cultures that are at war with what used to be English culture. I am not familiar enough with the political system of Britain to even start to understand where things went wrong, but if the monarchy had taken seriously their responsibility to maintain the culture instead of wanting to be liked by Marxists, I am confident that things would be quite different there now. A constitutional monarchy is certainly not without its own set of problems, but it is a system that has the potential to be the best form of government possible when it comes to governing  a nation containing fewer and fewer men of moral courage, wisdom, and a fear of God.

The Old South, with its aristocratic traditions, would have been far more sympathetic to a constitutional monarchy – or at least a clear recognition of the importance of culture and the people that make up the Southern nation. I am quite confident that had the Confederate States survived as a political entity, mass immigration would not have been permitted as it has under the Kennedy-led assault on American culture beginning with the Immigration Act of 1965.