In view of the “No Kings” disturbances, I had better begin this post by making clear that I was not thinking of Mr. Trump when I wrote it.  It has no more to do with him than with Mr. Biden, or any other recent president, or, for that matter, any recent president’s handlers.

Let’s get on with it.

I’ve noticed a small but surprising increase in sympathy for kingship as a form of government among some thoughtful young people, mostly online.  Although this is still very much a minority tendency, it has become common enough that one young man whom I know in another English-speaking republic claims to have many friends who are out-and-out monarchists.  Here in my own counttry, I come across persons of monarchist outlook only rarely (in four decades of teaching, I’ve met only a few explicit royalists), and I suspect that there is something unusual about his circle of friends.  Or perhaps it has something to do with the Hispanic political traditions of his country of birth.  But still, something else may be going on too.

Just to be clear:  Though young progressives these days claim not to share the nostalgia for kingship, large numbers of them are attracted to totalitarian oligarchies, which are far, far inferior to old-fashioned monarchies not only because they don’t want to share power (a characteristic of most kings too), but because they want to control everything.  But that’s not my subject at the moment.

Of course sympathy for kingship is nothing new.  During the ages of civilization, government has usually been monarchical, if not mildly tyrannical.  I don’t say that all monarchies admit to being monarchies.  Long after the rise of the Caesars, the Romans kept up the pretense that their government was still a republic.

In our own day, too, there is a strong drift toward concentration of power in the executive and away from the legislature.  Here in America, it has taken a long time, perhaps because the original impetus for the United States was legislative – it began with the Continental Congress.  In Europe, the process has been happening much more quickly, probably because the motor of European unity is not legislative, but bureaucratic.

Envy of monarchies is nothing new either.  In one of the most famous incidents in Scripture, the elders of Israel demanded that the prophet Samuel appoint a king so that Israel would be “like other nations.”  Samuel, displeased, prays to God, who tells him warn them of what having a king will really be like.  So Samuel does:

These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you:  He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants.  He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants.  He will take your menservants and maidservants, and the best of your cattle and your asses, and put them to his work.  He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.  And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.

Since the elders insisted on having a king anyway, they were given one – and under most of the following kings, the experience turned out to be just as bad as they had been warned it would be.

Preachers of the American colonial era took this story as the last word on kings.  It proved, they said, that kingship is always bad, God is against it, and Israel before this had been “a perfect republic.”  Not so fast:  Things are more complicated than that.  Even a good republic has what might be called a monarchical element, insofar as someone is at the head of things.  As Thomas Aquinas points out, Moses had been a sort of king.  However, his rule had included aristocratic and democratic elements too:  Aristocratic because wise persons assisted in government, democratic because these wise persons were chosen both from the people and by the people.  This might be called a mixed monarchy, though perhaps the Framers would have called it a mixed republic.

Like Aristotle, St. Thomas himself thought that in most times and places, the mixed form of government is the best form of government.  Yet even he didn’t consider it a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of the best regime.  He held strongly that because human beings are created free and morally responsible, they are best ruled not like slaves but like free men, having “something of their own” in their government.  Yet on the other hand, echoing St. Augustine, he held that if the people become so corrupt that they no longer consider the common good in choosing those placed over them – for example, if they habitually take bribes for their votes – then the right to choose their own rulers must be taken away and given to those with greater moral competence.

This approach has always made sense to me, although it presents obvious difficulties of its own.  Some populations really are too corrupt to support a republic, but how is this to be decided, and how are those who do not succumb to corruption to bring about an alternative which is not even worse?

Back to those thoughtful young people.  Many of them are of the sort who would find a thinker like Thomas Aquinas congenial, so let me pose questions to them in Thomistic terms.

■  If you would like to have a monarchy instead of a republic, then you are obviously not proposing a monarchy with republican elements.  You must be proposing either an absolute monarchy, or a blend of monarchy with aristocracy.  Do you really imagine that either of these would be an improvement over what we have now?  Things are dreadful, I admit.  But even dreadful as they are, they would have to be very much worse to justify giving up what shreds of a republic we still retain.

■  If your argument is that because of legislative incompetence, we need to have a stronger monarchical element within the republic – an arrangement sometimes called a “crowned republic” -- we have been going in that direction for a long time, and it has not improved the long-term health of what we whimsically persist in calling our constitutional order.  You might like it that Mr. Biden (or those who acted in his name) reversed everything Mr. Trump 45 did.  You might like it that Mr. Trump 47 is reversing everything Mr. Biden did.  But you cannot reasonably like the prospect of an endless succession of see-sawing administrations, reversing, reversing, reversing.

■  If you think the republic can no longer be sustained because the people no longer have the requisite level of virtue, then who do you think does have it?  Democracy is not direct rule by “the people” as a whole -- how could everyone rule everyone? – but a majoritarian check on elites.  Do you really suppose that our present elites are more virtuous than the rest of us, so that the check should be weakened or given up?  The best argument for putting up with the merely average is that doing so may protect us from those who are much, much worse.  As William F. Buckley Jr. once wrote, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”  He wasn’t endorsing mediocrity as such, for he went on to say, “Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance.”  Unfortunately, intellectual arrogance has become almost the defining characteristic of our current elites.

■  If what you want is to be ruled by different elites, then by which elites would you prefer to be ruled?  Where are you going to find them, and how are they to be placed in power?

Antirepublican monkeying with our form of government is not going to solve its problems.  For it to work, the most pressing need is that we all become better people.  Me too.

And that is not strictly a political problem.

Reminder:

My new book, Pandemic of Lunacy:  How to Think

Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy, will

be released in February and can be pre-ordered now.