The one thing this last few days of nonstop Queen’s funeral TV coverage has laid bare is this:
People in the USA want a monarchy. They see their own system, and *don’t* see themselves.
They have deified the office of the president, and mostly, they don’t recognize the problem with that.
Oh, sure: they say the politicians “serve” them. They’ll assert that those people are their “employees”. They’ll confidently tell anyone who will listen that their Founding Fathers based the system on classical civilizations like Athens and Rome.
But they don’t really believe that.
Sure – those bewigged and frock-coated signees to the Declaration of Independence were all classically educated, inasmuch as they were educated at all. And the forms and terms laid out do mimic what we know about how Rome’s Republic, for example, was set up.
But, in reality, they aped a constitutional monarchy, while giving the titular head of that monarchy a lot more power than most people, even at the time, thought kings ought to have. They did away with the hereditary aspect and added in an electoral process, but the Senate and the House are not much more than the House of Commons and the House of Lords with different names.
And they treat the office of the presidency with the same unquestioning loyalty and reverence that most of the English had for their kings. Maybe more.
In fact, like I said, an awful lot of Americans really want a monarchy.
They don’t really want to vote – it seems inconvenient. And they balk at the idea that people who arrived in the last few decades get to have the same rights as those who were already there do – always excepting those who came before any of their ancestors did, of course.
They want someone they can follow blindly.
They want someone to take on the responsibilities they cannot be bothered with.
Now, this isn’t much different than most other countries. People everywhere seem to have lost the desire to be free – or at least, they’ve lost the understanding that freedom entails some active responsibility outside of elections.
But the problem in the USA is that a significant minority has the ability to make these desires a reality, by fair means or foul, and the last few years has only cemented those desires.
Traveling Light 