Suffer Not the Old King Under Any Name!

Howso' great their clamour, whatsoe'er their claim,

Suffer not the old King under any name!

Here is naught unproven—here is naught to learn.

It is written what shall fall if the King return.

He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,

Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.

He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware;

He shall change our gold for arms—arms we may not bear.

He shall break his judges if they cross his word;

He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord.

-- Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue

Monarchism has returned to America, a sad development for a nation founded on revolt against monarchy and all it represented. Worse, modern American monarchism is of the Old Europe variety: backward looking, dynasty oriented and focused on protecting the political order so as to hang on to power, much as were the monarchists of Old Europe up to World War I. 

In times past, the American Right ("conservatives") was the defender of the status quo. Conservatives were seen, rightly or wrongly, as valuing social stasis above all, resistant to change and holding on to old ways far after their uselessness had been demonstrated. Conservatives were accused of siding with big business against the laborer, of privileging capitalists over unions, of large institutions against the individual. And there was some truth to all of this.

The Left ("liberals"), on the other hand, was seen as champions of the little guy, advocates of dispossessed and disadvantaged. Liberals were understood to stand for the dignity of the individual over the impersonal and depersonalizing forces of corporatism and government. Liberals championed individual rights against the state. And there was some truth to all of this.

Then the Left and the Right, liberals and conservatives, changed places. The Right went Left and the Left went Right. Or something like that, since political characterizations from America's olden days don't work very well anymore. When did this happen, and why?

I think the switch started during, and because of, the civil rights movement that began after World War II and reached its zenith in the 1960s. As late as the 2000 Republican primary there was a media tempest because of the Confederate flag flying atop South Carolina's state house, which candidates Bush and McCain were being pressed to denounce. Unmentioned by the media was that the flag was placed there in 1962 with the signature of Governor (later Senator) Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, the 31st Democrat governor of the state in a row since 1876.

During the 1950s and early sixties, it was the Democrats, presumed liberals all, who held offices across the South and defended the institutional racism there. It was the presumed conservative Republicans who led the way in turning back Jim Crow. It was Republican President Eisenhower whose attorney general drafted the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which was passed only after being considerably diluted by Congressional Democrats, led by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. LBJ fought the bill tooth and nail, even leaning on Georgia Senator Richard Russell to speak against the bill because it (get ready) violated the principle of states rights, the old apologetic of the South's Lost Cause!

After LBJ became president, he took the 1957 bill's original drafts and made them the basis of the 1964 Civil Right Acts and 1965's Voting Rights Act. Yet the entirely necessary and just ending of unequal rights for black Americans came to convert the Democrat party to an American version of European conservatism because, as Johnson knew, fewer than one in five blacks voted before the 1960s. Johnson openly calculated that his goal was less civil rights than gaining a new, enormous voting bloc and using it to keep his party in power. It worked, but at the cost of making Democrats dependent on the new status quo they created. Hence, they have become the core of America's political class, our version of Old Europe's monarchists. Not all American monarchists are Democrats, of course. Just consider Lisa Murkowski (and no few of her Republican fellows).

What is heartening about the rise of the Tea Party movements of the last two years is that they hopefully form the leading indicator of the fall of American monarchism. The place switch between the old Left and the old Right is nearly complete. Today, it is the Left that looks to preserve the past, defending the power of government and the privileges of the political class against the rights of the people. Meanwhile, the Right has become liberal as "liberal" used to be conceived - defending the rights of the individual against the ravenous power of the state. 

Case in point: The TSA's "naked body" airport scanning and near-sexual-assault patdowns. The monarchist mind of Homeland Security Secretary Janet "Antionette" Napolitano is revealed in her dismissal of Americans' concerns and protests. If people don't want to submit to scanning or groping, she said, they may "travel by some other means, of course that's their right." Thank you for that concession, highness. You should instead understand that the furor reveals that America's traditional anti-monarchism has returned as much as it protests sexual assault in the name of national security. 

Let us therefore bring forth a new American Enlightenment, looking forward to renewed liberty and prosperity by the people sovereign and the government serving. The Old Issue will go down fighting, of course, but go down they must. American monarchism cannot stand if the people are to be free.