Yes Kings

Reject Modernity. Embrace Monarchy

Yesterday, America witnessed an awesome spectacle- the greatest expression of mass cringe faggotry seen this century. This was the No Kings movement, dedicated to fighting the authoritarianism of the now fully operational Drumpfenreich. Across the nation, or at least in the blue cities, hundreds of earnest protestors and thousands of third-hand Soros employees marched around waving signs and chanting slogans so lame that even Antifa was too embarrassed to show up and torch dumpsters per their custom. The whole thing lasted a few hours, whereupon everyone went home and waited for some result to manifest.

While as a fitness program for active seniors No Kings was a great success, it’s still unclear exactly what the organizers hoped to accomplish politically. The protests were largely limited to areas already overwhelmingly hostile to President Trump, where logistics demanded in turn they be located within power-walking distance of the retirement communities where a significant proportion of the geriatric protesters live. Presumably, the loss of the USAID charter bus budget forced some unfortunate restrictions on the programming; they seemed to have been scheduled to end in time for a participants to enjoy a 4:30 PM dinner and an evening of NCIS. But at any rate, they were wholly preaching to choir, though that sermon entailed little beyond dislike of the President’s political program.

Something of the actual goals of the movement can be gleaned from perusing social media, the actual audience for the spectacle. Over and over again was the same refrain: Orange Hitler was watching and alternately seething with rage and vomiting with terror at the crowds of Gen-Z gigwork color revolutionaries, NeverTrump relics, and elderly lesbian Episcopalians.

“You don’t have to take my word for it, just ask Harry Sisson.”

For his part, the president- who against all evidence is universally assumed by projecting progressives to be both thin-skinned and emotionally incontinent- seems to have simply laughed at the buffoonery on hand. He posted clips of himself donning a crown, which led to speculation concerning the recent theft of Napoleon III’s crown jewels, and followed that up with another short video of himself piloting a jet in order to bomb the aforementioned Sisson with feces. The people who’d spent the day cheering on dancing dotards and transgender communists in inflatable costumes were naturally mortified by the president’s manifest unseriousness. Like the Grinch, they expected immense emotional gratification from their intricate planning and hard work, and were similarly taken aback by their victim choosing joy instead of anger. Unlike the Grinch, they learned nothing and their hearts shriveled further into desiccated lumps of coal.

In fairness, some of the coal is exogenous.

Some decided to pivot from the claim that the message was intended for Trump- alternately indifferent and mocking of the whole thing, and instead argued that No Kings was a wake up call for MAGA as a whole. The point conveyed here is that American fascists- by which they mean normal Americans- are on notice that they will not be tolerated by the forces of decency, of which progressive liberalism is the only acceptable manifestation.

You’re on the right track, but perhaps also try some light jogging against fascism.

The latter point noted in the last tweet is an important one. It goes to something I mentioned in a note a couple of days ago:

There is this notion implicit among progressives that people as a whole are somehow dependent on their leave to hold certain opinions. The women (and that’s not a coincidence) in the tweets seem to feel that once they’ve made it clear that certain notions will not be tolerated, as the proper permissions have not been granted, those holding unapproved ideas must cease their advocacy- or else. Freedom itself is at stake.

This in turn dovetails with a strange and to my knowledge wholly uninterrogated assumption throughout most contemporary Western thought. When I was in graduate school for political science, I read endless books and papers which devised methods for quantifying (paging Guenon) how ‘democratic’ a country was versus how ‘authoritarian.’ This framing of the two concepts as opposites necessitates that one cannot be the other; in other words, a democracy qua democracy cannot itself be authoritarian. It equates a form of government with a particular tendency, which is odd, like contrasting ‘theocracy’ and ‘corruption’ as mutually exclusive phenomena.

None of this would have occurred to premodern thinkers. Aristotle classified democracy as a degenerate form of government, fickle and ephemeral. For the Founding Fathers, democracy was mostly a hate-word, particularly among the Federalists. They had the chaos and failures of the Classical model as their example, but the novel philosophy of liberalism was taking shape just as the American frontier was proving a fertile ground for democracy’s resurgence. The Founders lived among liberalism in its incipient form, less an ideology than a slowly cohering collection of tendencies born of the Enlightenment and its assumptions about human nature, but for all their embrace of it they took for granted that certain pre-liberal social forces would need to continue for the new order to work. Thus democracy as a form of government and liberalism as its modern animating ideology only gradually came together into a global force so pervasive as to be as invisible to us as the sea is to fish.

The greatest theorist of early liberal democracy specifically disputed the notion that liberal democracy and authoritarianism were incompatible opposites. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in Democracy in America, offers two concepts -soft despotism and the tyranny of the majority- that shed light on the ways in which such a polity might prove more oppressive than even the most powerful monarchical tyrant:

No sovereign ever lived in former ages so absolute or so powerful as to undertake to administer by his own agency, and without the assistance of intermediate powers, all the parts of a great empire: none ever attempted to subject all his subjects indiscriminately to strict uniformity of regulation, and personally to tutor and direct every member of the community. The notion of such an undertaking never occurred to the human mind; and if any man had conceived it, the want of information, the imperfection of the administrative system, and above all, the natural obstacles caused by the inequality of conditions, would speedily have checked the execution of so vast a design. When the Roman emperors were at the height of their power, the different nations of the empire still preserved manners and customs of great diversity; although they were subject to the same monarch, most of the provinces were separately administered; they abounded in powerful and active municipalities; and although the whole government of the empire was centred in the hands of the emperor alone, and he always remained, upon occasions, the supreme arbiter in all matters, yet the details of social life and private occupations lay for the most part beyond his control. The emperors possessed, it is true, an immense and unchecked power, which allowed them to gratify all their whimsical tastes, and to employ for that purpose the whole strength of the State. They frequently abused that power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life: their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number; it was fixed to some few main objects, and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited…

[concerning America]…The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest – his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not – he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

Likewise, when a democracy turns its eye on something, there is little in the way to stop it from inflicting its will upon it. Kings are always in some way bound by faith and custom, as these are the fonts of their legitimacy, but liberalism, that tendency to rationalize all relationships and negate the transcendent, has only the will of the mass as its check:

The very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority; for there is nothing in democratic States which is capable of resisting it. Most of the American Constitutions have sought to increase this natural strength of the majority by artificial means.

Tocqueville is correct in stating that the will of the majority is the legitimating force in a democratic society, but this makes the majority the authority, not necessarily the power. In an absolute monarchy, the two are united in one person or office; in a liberal democracy, the state is the power that acts on the majority’s authority. In this sense, the government is a type of vizier that exists to enforce the will of the sovereign, but of course, this allows the ‘servant’ to control what sort of orders he’s actually given, as he decides what information reaches his master’s ear. Thus we have the modern spectacle of rule through the manufacturing of consent, where majorities for what would ordinarily by unpopular policies are created by propaganda and, failing that, the importation of new subjects to create the needed quantities for the legitimating mass.

It would thus be too much to say that democracy is the skinsuit worn by the professional managerial class. Certainly its desires and economic interests are transmuted into public policy through control of the media and the treasury. But this is not the same thing as saying their rule is unpopular or unjust by liberal standards. Indeed, as de Tocqueville noted, liberal democracy itself wills such a system into being, and people would fight to keep it. But this still does not fully explain those instances where the forms are obeyed yet those who claim loyalty to the system’ rules still rebel against undesirable outcomes.

There is a lot of talk along these lines on social media:

One could be forgiven for thinking these people spent the last year in a coma and missed the decisive victory of Donald Trump in a free and fair election, where he defeated his opponent through debate and persuasion, despite several people attempting to murder him along the way. The majority had its choice, and it chose our current president, who was wholly forthright about his planned policies, and had his previous administration as an example of how he would govern. So how is it that these people seeking to shut down the country feel justified given the mandate Trump received?

At its core, as Philip Pilkington and others have noted, liberalism is an attempt to rationalize and regulate all relationships and collapse hierarchies. This fails because in such a system there can be no appeal beyond the wish to exercise one’s will in such a way as to satisfy one’s desires; nothing transcendent can exist in a wholly progressive system. But apart from the collapsing logic of this supposedly logical system, there is in humans an instinctive longing for society to in some way approximate, incorporate, and mirror the divine. We have to have some model upon which to structure earthly order.

Get this book.

And here one sees most clearly the actual differences between traditional monarchy and liberal democracy, the animating spiritual force behind each. Monarchy is patriarchal and oriented toward the heavens. A king is a bridge between God and man, with the former the legitimating authority, the latter the actuating power. Notably, the roots of social order in the structure of the paterfamilias was recognized by sages as far afield as Aristotle and Confucius, Dante and Filmer and Evola and de Maistre. The Old Testament shows kings anointed by the prophets of God (though it does note that it would be better to submit to God’s rule directly) and the New Testament offers this bit of political philosophy:

οἱ γὰρ ἄρχοντες οὐκ εἰσὶν φόβος τῷ ἀγαθῷ ἔργῳ ἀλλὰ τῷ κακῷ. θέλεις δὲ μὴ φοβεῖσθαι τὴν ἐξουσίαν; τὸ ἀγαθὸν ποίει, καὶ ἕξεις ἔπαινον ἐξ αὐτῆς· θεοῦ γὰρ διάκονός ἐστιν σοὶ εἰς τὸ ἀγαθόν. ἐὰν δὲ τὸ κακὸν ποιῇς, φοβοῦ· οὐ γὰρ εἰκῇ τὴν μάχαιραν φορεῖ· θεοῦ γὰρ διάκονός ἐστιν, ἔκδικος εἰς ὀργὴν τῷ τὸ κακὸν πράσσοντι.

3For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. 4For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. - Romans 13:3-4

That word “διάκονός” means servant. It is the root of the English word “deacon” and a word Paul uses frequently to describe himself and other ministers of the Church. But despite the fact that he is here describing the pagan Romans-who are actively persecuting him- he does not hesitate to ascribe a sacral nature to their power, just as in the Old Testament the heathen Assyrian kings were instruments of God’s wrath no less than Zoroastrian Cyrus the Great was the prototypical messiah and liberator. Christ is of course the perfect model of ruler, the King of Kings on a heavenly throne. The first Christian Emperor, St. Constantine the Great, styled himself ‘bishop’ of his empire, his authority having the same source as the bishops of the church. The only democracy in the Gospels is Jesus losing a vote to Barabbas.

If monarchy is patriarchal and heavenly, liberal democracy is matriarchal and chthonic, though not without important qualifications. One of the most important political goals of the Enlightenment was the elimination of fatherly authority in the respective persons of king and priest, and the subsequent homogenization of the formerly respective roles of men and women. This was of a piece with wider social changes- economic, technological, and cultural- that necessitated the increasing fungibility of what were once the two sexes. What we have today is the legacy of that, power that is faceless and diffused, where responsibility for decisions is never bound up with any one person, where accountability means the addition of new rules rather than punishment, save in cases where an example needs to be made of someone challenging the power of the managerial longhouse. Transcendent spiritual authority under monarchy is explicit and public; in a liberal democracy, it is implicit, hidden, but no less pervasive or powerful in its compulsions for it being coded feminine. Chesterton, anticipating the changes that would result from enfranchising the women, noted the following:

There is a sort of underbred history going about, according to which women in the past have always been in the position of slaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always been in the position of despots. They have been despotic because they ruled in an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to be constitutional. You cannot grant a constitution to a nursery; nor can babies assemble like barons and extort a Great Charter. Tommy cannot plead a Habeas Corpus against going to bed; and an infant cannot be tried by twelve other infants before he is put in the corner. And as there can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension of feminism means that there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state than there are in a nursery. The woman does not really regard men as citizens but as children. She may, if she is a humanitarian, love all mankind; but she does not respect it. Still less does she respect its votes. Now a man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is a danger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science being made the excuse for every trick of tyranny and interference. Anybody who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed. In other words, it is a danger of turning the policeman into a sort of benevolent burglar. Against this protests are already being made, and will increasingly be made, if men retain any instinct of independence or dignity at all. But to complain of the woman interfering in the home will always sound like complaining of the oyster intruding into the oyster-shell. To object that she has too much power over education will seem like objecting to a hen having too much to do with eggs. She has already been given an almost irresponsible power over a limited region in these things; and if that power is made infinite it will be even more irresponsible. If she adds to her own power in the family all these alien fads external to the family, her power will not only be irresponsible but insane. She will be something which may well be called a nightmare of the nursery; a mad mother. But the point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The results will be interesting; but at least it is certain that under this softening influence government of the people, by the people, for the people, will most assuredly perish from the earth.

Once you understand that this is de Tocqueville’s “vast tutelary power” in action, much of modern political life makes sense. Our government has millions of eyes and millions of hands, and it is everywhere furiously busy applying them to you for your own good. We are all so brainwashed that we imagine this is freedom, that the rise of liberal democracy does not perfectly coincide with a growth in the size and scope of the state unprecedented in human history. We are so asleep that we do not wonder that the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence are but pale imitations of normal features of modern life.

It takes a village to raise a child. The village is Washington. You are the child.

-P. J . O’Roarke

But as I stated earlier, there are important qualifications involved. Whatever the case in Chesterton’s day, calling contemporary liberal democracy ‘matriarchal’ is at best an imperfect description. While its origin is certainly feminine, and while the most manifest characteristic of the current regime is its support on the part of women, this is coupled with a pervasive drive to destroy everything feminine about those who uphold it. What was once driven by clearly feminine sensibilities is now a machine that destroys marriage, fertility, and even normal relations with men. There has never been a mechanism in history so thoroughly hateful toward female happiness, even as it owes its power to their disproportionate support. It’s not a matriarchy so much as a queerocracy, or rather, a teratocracy- rule by monsters.

The Civil Rights Movement’s next logical step, just ask The Atlantic

The people who are out there resisting fascism in the name of freedom as expressed through liberal democracy are the same people who wanted to arrest people for visiting their elderly relatives during the Covid lockdowns, who drive men from their careers for not mouthing the proper pieties, who seize children from parents in order to chemically alter their sex, who declare themselves and their favored clients above the laws that govern others when it comes to immigration, and who seek to use any power at hand to eradicate any traditional manifestation of faith, family, heritage, gender norms, or artistic expression. The state is less a boot on the neck than a ruler rapping against the knuckles- bruising, bloodying, and humiliating. These warped creatures march proudly beside other monsters who wave the flags of the worst and most murderous tyrants of the 20th century. Monsters that they are, they are the enemies of civilization, and have no place in any natural order. They are the devourers of human beings, and when they feel safe, they will happily express their murderous desires, and act upon them.

And when men rebel against this order through the means deemed lawful by the system, the system in turn deems them the new face of tyranny, because despite its best efforts to obscure it, there really is a spiritual order behind liberal democracy. If, as Patrick J. Deneen notes, liberalism is about removing arbitrary barriers to the exercise of the will, then the ultimate religious expression of this is the worship of the self, and the political practice will be the imposition of one will upon others that one’s desires can be gratified. There is of course a name for this: