Would American be better if it kept a King and the maintained the British System?
.. They kept a king and built democracies.
We rejected a King and built an Imperial Presidency. They kept the King and built democracies.
The countries that came out of the same American Revolution, the same revolutionary period, and did not throw the king overboard, turned over the same two and a half centuries into some of the most stable democracies in the world.
So what, we might ask, was that American experiment again?
Imperial Presidency
Imperial presidency is a term describing the modern presidency of the United States. It became popular in the 1960s and served as the title of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.‘s 1973 book The Imperial Presidency, addressing his concerns that the presidency was uncontrollable and had exceeded its constitutional limits.[1]
According to political science professor Thomas E. Cronin, author of The State of the Presidency, the term “imperial presidency” describes the danger inherent in the American constitutional system’s letting a president create and abuse presidential prerogatives during national emergencies,[2] based on presidential war powers that are vaguely defined in the Constitution, and on secrecy which shields a president from checks and balances by the government’s legislative and judicial branches.[2].
.. Peter Baker wrote in The New York Times that the second Trump presidency had “established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency”.[3]
Book
A Resistance History of the United States, by Tad Stoermer
DETAIL:
Transcript: Gemini
QUESTIONS:
What are your thoughts on the “Imperial Presidency”?
If you had to choose between the more recent “Imperial Presidency” and a British-style King and Parliament, which would you pick?
I’ve heard that a Parliamentary system is more vulnerable to capture by a demagogue. Which system do you believe is more resistant to demagoguery?
The British system doesn’t have a Bill of Rights. If you could keep the American Bill or Rights, would you favor the American System with a less Imperial Presidency, or do you favor a more Powerful Presidency?
Is the imperial presidency necessited by the American “Empire”? Could the US reduced the power of the President if it shed part or all of the “Empire”?
Transcript:
Speaker: Todd Sturmer, Public Historian
0:02 In the wake of what happened on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton and the subsequent calls that a bunker is now absolutely necessary for the president under the White House, the British King Charles III has arrived in Washington to mark the 250 years since America declared independence from Great Britain.
0:17 So, the Wall Street Journal is calling the visit a charm offensive, an effort to salvage Britain’s badly fraying relationship with the United States.
0:25 But I think of it instead as a kind of wellness check, a check-in to see how the United States is doing on its own.
0:32 So, let’s see how the great great great great great grandson of America’s last king might find the old place. Hey folks, I’m Todd Sturmer. I’m a public historian and a scholar of American history at the University of Southern Denmark and Johns Hopkins and I’m the author of A Resistance History of the United States.
0:49 Charles III’s in Washington right now and this is a peculiar moment for the republic that broke from his ancestors empire. The visual alone is a dark joke, right? You have a 77-year-old hereditary monarch neutered by centuries of constitutional duct tape shaking hands with a 79-year-old president who has shown just how much of the American system depends on electing people who just choose not to burn the whole place down.
1:12 The last part matters because the United States was not, as we all know, founded as a democracy. It was founded as a republic by men who feared democracy more than they feared monarchy. Daniel Shays scared them more than George III ever did.
1:26 So by the summer of 1787, the men in the Philadelphia Convention watched in terror as farmers in Massachusetts followed the example of the resistance patriots to take up arms to alter or abolish their own state government, which had become as abusive as the British government had seemed 10 years before.
1:42 That was the context for the constitution they wrote and the arguments they used to support it. The documents mostly designed to keep the people away from power. An electoral college so that people would not directly choose the president. A senate appointed by state legislature so the people would not directly choose senators. A federal judiciary appointed for life and answerable to no one. A high bar for amending the constitution. A higher one for removing the president.
2:08 So they built this sprawling machine of fear, hoping ambition would check ambition, property would check people, that people in institutions would defend their own power, and virtue would rule over it all.
2:21 So the guardrails against a restless democratic public were structural, durable, and explicit. The guardrails against an executive who decided who was the state were vague, polite, and resting on the assumption that no such unvirtuous, ambitious person would ever be elected.
2:38 More than 200 years later, the structural guard rails against the people are mostly intact. The polite ones against the executive are absolutely not.
2:47 The presidency was always the especially weak point in the no-king story of that founding. The Federalists rejected monarchy in their pamphlets and their constitution went ahead and created something much like one. Anyway, they vested executive power in a single person, made that person head of state, head of the government, commander-in-chief, gave him the veto, the pardon, the appointment power, the authority to negotiate treaties, and command an army that he could deploy against the people.
3:14 The anti-federalists noticed all of that. They argued that the proposed American president would hold powers exceeding those of the actual British King who by then had been operating inside a parliamentary system for a century and could not raise an army or spend money without that parliament say so first.
3:30 The Federalists waved the objections away. But two and a half centuries of war, empire emergency and nationalist mythmaking doing its work proved that the anti-federalists were absolutely right.
3:41 Arthur Schlesinger called the result the imperial presidency in 1973 and the 50 years since then have been a story of how the office has continued to grow under presidents of both parties and now of course all of that’s exploding under Trump into something older and uglier than 1776—personal rule—not Charles III, Charles I.
4:03 So that’s what makes the royal visit useful for thinking about. Charles III is not arriving as the monster the mythmakers want you to believe America escapes in 1776.
4:13 He’s arriving as an executive whose authorities have been stripped away, ritualized into ceremony, fenced into celebrity, and only of real political consequence when and if parliament says there. He can’t raise revenue, can’t declare war, can’t pass a law or block one. He can’t pardon, can’t appoint, can’t fire on his own.
4:32 He gives a speech once a year that someone else writes, opens parliament, signs what he’s given to sign, smiles at the cameras, meets with the prime minister once a week, and then just otherwise stays out of the way. He’s an impotent king, which is to say, he’s exactly the kind of head of state the men who wrote the Constitution swore they would never tolerate. And the men who opposed the Constitution said was the only real guarantee of the rights of the people.
4:52 And here’s a part of the American story that the nationalist historiography has spent two and a half centuries refusing to allow you to look at directly. The countries that came out of the same American Revolution, the same revolutionary period, and did not throw the king overboard, turned over the same two and a half centuries into some of the most stable democracies in the world.
5:12 Britain itself kept expanding voting rights and reforming the powers of government. Canada was transformed by the tens of thousands of loyalists who refused the new republic and went north with their own ideas about representative government. And then they began dismantling slavery as early as 1793 and became the bulwark of freedom that enslaved Americans ran toward.
5:33 New Zealand gave women the right to vote 27 years before the United States did. All of them, including Australia, evolved over the same two and a half centuries into strong democracies.
5:44 Power sits where the founders of the American Republic refused to let it sit: with the people, exercised through parliaments and cabinet governments that answer to them, can be recalled by them, and can be removed by them. A vote of no confidence can bring a whole government down on a Tuesday afternoon, and an election can remake it.
6:02 The system has produced stability and freedom together, and the steady expansion of rights that follows from them, including the kind of universal healthcare that Americans are still debating whether to call a right at all.
6:12 Now, none of them have innocent histories. None of us get out of that. They are settler colonialist societies built on stolen indigenous land and they carry the violence of their founding the way every settler society does. And they bear the modern responsibility for fixing that, repairing that as settler societies must do.
6:29 But the political systems they built on top of that violence have proven more democratic, more responsive, and more durable than the ones the American founders designed. They kept the crown and built democracies underneath it. The country that threw the crown overboard built a republic. And the republic has been struggling since 1865 to become a democracy and now by any honest measure is struggling just to remain a republic.
6:52 So just what Charles III might ask: what was that American experiment thing again? Because if the hypothesis was that a self-governing people could do without a hereditary monarch and govern themselves through a constitution of their own design, then the control group is sitting in London and Ottawa and Canberra and Wellington. And the control group is doing better.
7:16 That’s the suppressed footnote of 1776. The real story, maybe the real spirit, the story of the loyalists. And it’s not a counterfactual. It’s a real alternate reality, an actual what-if which then actually happened somewhere else, just a border and some oceans away.
7:33 In October 1779, and this one I love, a Virginia loyalist named John Randolph, then in exile in London, wrote to his cousin and old friend Thomas Jefferson, and asked him a question we might all reflect on.
7:47 “Would it not be prudent to rescind your Declaration of Independence and be happily reunited to your ancient and natural friend and enjoy a peace which I most religiously think would pass all understanding? Your laws and regulations will be established on the solid basis of the British Constitution, and your happiness will be attended to with all the solicitude which belongs to an affectionate parent. Reflect, I beseech you, on what I have said.”
8:12 Now, pretty absurd to say that in 1779, but not quite so absurd for us to use today. What the 250th anniversary should be doing is the thing Jefferson never had the chance to do because the letter never reached him.
8:23 But we can reflect on what Randolph said against the backdrop of a hollowed-out Congress and an executive that keeps learning how little will stop him. Against the democracies that emerged from the empire America left. Against the fact that Britain, compromised and brutal as its abolition was, passed emancipation and brought it into effect across most of its empire a full generation before the United States.
8:43 Yes, Britain bought off the enslavers. Yes, emancipation came with coercive apprenticeship and imperial hypocrisy. But what Britain purchased was an end to slavery without paying the price of the catastrophe the United States required: Civil War, destruction, and more than 700,000 dead and still an incomplete settlement.
9:02 And against the simple embarrassing observable fact that the countries that remained within the British constitutional world have over the same two and a half centuries often been better at the thing the American nationalist historians insist the founders invented.
9:19 So Charles III arrives as a kind of wellness check—not for Britain, but for us. He stands in the photographs as a historical prop, a reminder of the path not taken and the danger we’ve refused to name.
9:31 Britain kept the crown and contained it. America rejected the crown and built an executive that kept swelling to fit one. We fled a king and built an imperial president. They kept a king and built democracies. Reflect on that.
Final thought: We rejected a King and built an Imperial Presidency. They kept the King and built democracies.