Dictator, no King
A clarification of terms made necessary by careless confusion in the media.
Anyone who has willingly endured the masochistic pleasure of paying close attention to the news coverage of the past two months has undoubtedly witnessed a through-line in much of the commentary critical of the Trump regime. Drudge Report links have repeatedly run with the line “King Donald”, scattered references to Trump acting in a fashion comparable to a stereotyped ‘king’ across myriad editorials, John Stewart and John Oliver reuniting to sarcastically celebrate America’s supposed return to monarchy. Even the man in question has quoted Napoleon I and retweeted critical Time covers proclaiming “Long Live the King”. In equal measure, many others in both official publications and in general discourse have instead referenced the new regime as an aspiring Dictatorship, with either Trump himself or his handler in Elon Musk as the dictator in question. Comparisons to the rogue’s gallery of 20th century villains, accusations of fascism, and not unfounded allegations of sympathy for the brutish warlord Vladimir Putin, have likewise typified the reaction to the Trump regime.
It is, sadly, a consequence of America’s own national mythos – hazy as it is in the minds of many – that we are all too often willing to conflate these terms of monarch and dictator as though they are synonymous. They are not, but between poor education and the need to maintain some sense of unifying myth in the face of ideological diversity, we as a people are want to speak of these kinds of governments as though they are equals in composition, intent, and tyrannical tendencies. This is made all the more frustrating by the fact that the preceding decades of mismanagement, apathy, short-sightedness, and even treachery on the part of the political class have made it abundantly clear that America is in need of a monarchy precisely to prevent the dictatorial tyranny we now find ourselves faced with. And yet, despite this fact being apparent to those willing to accept it, our fetid regime has nonetheless continued to gestate the spawn of tyranny until this dire point, when this cursed offspring threatens to destroy its very mother.
It is out of love for this, our dear mother-country, and for its many children who look on now in horror at their nurturer’s suffering, that we patriots have taken up the cause of monarchism. We have been led to the conclusion that America is in need of a monarch out of our love of the liberties prescribed in the Constitution, and an unsalvageable loss of faith in the government described in the same document to adequately protect such against the tyranny we now face.
It is for this reason that we write today to in some small measure correct the erroneous narrative exacerbated by great misunderstanding that the tyranny of the current regime in some way constitutes as monarchy. Not only is a through-line of virtually all modern dictatorships that they continue to wear the trappings of republicanism even when engaged in abject tyranny, but in a more profound sense, this regime could not ever be considered a monarchy. In form, function and future, this regime is most decidedly not a monarchy, but instead on the clear road to dictatorship.
Explained in brief, a monarchy is, like any good and legitimate government, one where powers are understood to be derived from a separate force or institution and conferred upon an individual for the keeping of order, promulgation of law and protection of the realm. Whether the belief in the ancients of god-kings and pharaohs being the literal embodiments of supernatural forces, the conferral of legitimacy by Popes, Patriarchs or faith in the Mandate of Heaven, the elevation or election by Aristocrats from among their own, or the popular acclamation of an entire people which has legitimized rule from the time of King Saul all the way to modern cheers of “God Save the King”, monarchy and its powers are understood to be granted from another entity, not stolen away by a single individual.
The modern dictatorship (distinct from its Roman antecedent from which we derive the term), is by contrast the grim embodiment of a society that has lost its ability to confer legitimacy upon any government. From the French Revolution onwards, dictatorships have been regimes whose rule derives not from legitimacy granted by consent, but that taken by force and held thereby. They emerge where those forces that might have given legitimacy to any regime, monarchial or otherwise, have either been so damaged from without or so poisoned from within, that they neither possess power to give nor have the authority to legitimize the same by their consent.
Interwar Europe and the Soviet Union, post-colonial Africa and Asia, Central and South America in the wake of Bolivar and Iturbide, all of these were the breeding grounds for dictatorships precisely because they were places where society, and the institutions that sustained it, had lost any power of their own to confer upon a legitimate government. In such a vacuum, poisonous charisma and brute force served as the only things to sustain these illegitimate governments and their parasitic hold on the State. It is precisely this lack of legitimacy which has repeatedly ensured the inevitable downfall of these regimes, for virtually no modern dictatorship survives its inheritor.
The decay of our public institutions, the very crisis which has led us to our present circumstances, leaves our country with few forces that could legitimize a rightful monarch, and points to the clear emergence, either in Trump or another, of imminent dictatorship. Considering then that any regime may become a dictatorship when it lacks legitimacy, we are then left to ask who or what, if anything, in our suffering country might legitimize any true government, republic or monarchy?
Congress?
In a better world with a better man to take up the crown, maybe. But the institution has neither the trust of the very people they claim to represent, nor the moral courage to stand as a united body against the tyranny of anyone be they king, dictator, oligarch, or a president merely overreaching their authority. Partisan to the point of unworkability, bought and sold by the same corporate interests who have now fixed their golden collar upon even the presidency itself, they can barely legitimize their own individual fortunes, let alone the elevation of anyone to an office which would reign above them. The republicans, having cut their deal with the devil to avert their eventual extinction, have raised up a tyrant they are too spineless to resist. The democrats, having been whittled down by years of half-hearted resistance and hyperbole against the more minor of the regime’s infractions, now find themselves tired and bereft of any energy left to fight. An aged and feckless gaggle of millionaires eager to rubber stamp anything that further empowers their party and the regime, they sold their legitimacy for profit and security, stealing the very same away from the people they continually claim, without evidence, to serve.
The Supreme Court?
More abhorrent than the decay of Congress has been the rot which has beset the Supreme Court, those highest arbiters of the law, that thing as close to sacred as the secular can produce. With every little element of our modern lives submitted to them for approval, taking advantage of the inability of our society to moderate itself and its own actions, they have become arbitrary legislators in their own right. It is no small surprise that the fights to bring members of one’s party into their ranks have dominated our politics in the past several decades, for they have become mightier and more overbearing legislators than any monarch that might haunt their nightmares. Even presidential immunity, recently a subject of some concern stemming from the majority’s ruling pertaining to Trump last year, has been made subject to the Court’s consent and none other. Rather than upholding the law for the sake of its importance, the Court has, through both the machinations of faction and their own willing consent, become complicit in the law’s subversion and trampling in the name of the State’s ever-increasing control over the lives of the people.
Leaders of Faith?
It is already difficult enough in a nation as religiously pluralistic as ours for any creed to singularly legitimize anything. Yet the Evangelicals who have made a golden calf of an orange sinner and who now so devotedly surround this man could never conscious a monarch. They extol Our Lord as the King of Kings, but as true to the Puritan model in their politics as their theology, they would not suffer there being any King on Earth for He in Heaven to reign over. They are the inheritors of Cromwell’s legacy, happy to employ a dictatorship of the ‘elect’ out of fear that a monarch might tolerate those yet to drink their poisoned imitation of communion wine. Politics has, in the hearts of many a believer, replaced God as their highest love. The State has become an idol to too many believers, its powers to enforce and regulate seen as mightier and more necessary than God’s power to convert and guide. That their faith has been placed in a man who clearly does not care for the truth of the Gospel and acts accordingly, is all the more an indictment of their inability to give true legitimacy to any regime. They elevate sinners, punish the poor, give excuse to evil and permission to avarice. If we are to be known by our fruits, then the tree of this faith in America is well and truly rotten, its sickness increasingly spreading to Catholics and others who have likewise elected for Mammon over God.
Then there are the Oligarchs who, true to their nature, respect only wealth, its creation, and protection from such outrageous wastes as charity, altruism, or the commonweal. They sold out the middle class, destroyed the lives of millions across the world, prioritized foreign nations over our own care only for their own aggrandizement and dominance and, still unsatisfied, have now taken such influence in the government that they threaten to trample the poor, the working class and even much of the middle class into dust. They, more than any element of government or society, are who truly control this country, and like everything else in their lives will be content to sell it and its people off to the highest bidder.
Never satisfied, not with wealth nor power nor prestige, walking shells of ego and pride masquerading as human beings, they will abandon our nation as easily as they abandoned their own humanity. They would never raise a monarch above them, one who might challenge both their prestige and usurp their misbegotten authority. A figure who embodies the law and who directs such to the betterment of all Americans would be an intolerable burden to them, threatening the stranglehold they have on America and its people. Better instead a pliable dictator who might be oriented to serve their ends, and who in turn receives security from the repercussions of his actions behind the well-guarded, golden walls of his puppet-masters.
One of these oligarchs in particular, Elon Musk – a man who like a cockroach is as menacing in the dark as he is repulsive in the light – has fixed his gilded leash upon the desperate, senile lapdog who holds the formal power of the executive pen. Some cry afoul of Trump explicitly as a scheming dictator possessed of a psychopath’s cunning, patience and intellect. Those with eyes to see, who have paid attention to what elements of his speech are even comprehensible to intelligent ears, have known for years that the man knows little of either statesmanship or policy. He has only ever wanted power and recognition, and the office of president was simply the logical place to go once he had grown tired of property and television. Now, growing as old and tired as the predecessor whom he so often derided as such, he cowers behind the wealth and ambition of his younger collaborator, willingly handing the country over to those who, guided only by their own vanity, will happily destroy the very country which made their existence possible.
It being clear that none of those things which might bring about a monarchy are either interested or capable, we are then left to confront the fact that it is definitively a dictatorship, not a monarchy, with which America is threatened. Even if, as has rarely occurred since 1800, this dictator was to try and paint themselves as a monarch, it would be a pathetic façade intended to mask the utter lack of legitimacy that they, and our government as a whole, now suffers from. The machinations of the wealthy, the weakness and inaction of the Republic, and the apocalyptic preaching of the idolatrous, have led us further away from a legitimate government than ever before.
This regime believes its power is derived from nothing else but itself and its own self-aggrandizement. It does not, and will never, care for the basic liberties made most explicit in the Constitution, and those who self righteously champion the coming dictatorship of the elect fail utterly to see through the Devil’s veil. The rule of law, that thing which legitimizes all good regimes be they monarchy, republic, or otherwise, is going to be dismantled. And with that, any hope that this republic, out of whose decaying corpse this dictatorship has arisen, might right itself withers and dies.
Those liberties enshrined in our Constitution, having been failed by the Republic which once stood to defend them, are now jeopardized as its guardian rots away. Columbia, that old symbol of our dear nation, is wounded and defenseless. Across our nation, She cries out for someone to save her from the leering eyes of the proud, covetous, gluttonous and avaricious. A new guardian behind whose shield She may be forever safe and in whom she might trust the future of Her children. It is up to us Patriots, we whose love of our dear mother-country is greater than any lingering loyalty to a regime that has betrayed Her, to find Columbia her new protector.
—Diaris
