Obviously, we couldn’t call whoever it ends up being a “king”; that would be unacceptable to our republican principles. We need a title more fitting, more American. How about “Commander-in-Chief”? Or maybe just “First Citizen”?
Of course, if we wanted to go with your “co-monarch” idea, it’s sort of based on the assumption that America’s too big for one man to govern alone, isn’t it? Let’s cut the country in half, right along the Mississippi; one half can be the Western American Republic, the other half can be the Eastern American Republic, each with their own president and vice-president. Once that’s been set up, I think we can allow the two halves of the American Republic to decide together which of them is going to be overrun by barbarians from the northern forests and which by barbarians from the southern deserts.
Cultural appropriation? (The indigenous Americans have chiefs – sorry, joking). I think it would be a good idea to separate the head of state role from the governing role. (One of the things I don’t like about the Democrats dragging Trump through the courts is that he is a former head of state of the U.S.A. – a little respect please). But they hate him as a former, and maybe future, president. You want an apolitical head of state.
If the Americans had our sensible Australian rule of judges retiring at 70 years old, the President could nominate (Congress to approve) the head of state (5 year term) from retired Supreme Court judges. Or the field could be former heads/chiefs of the army, navy or air force because they have led lives of service, so respected, and aren’t usually overtly political. A broader field would be former state governors – more political, but experienced.
To avoid any status competition with the President, let’s just call the person The Head of State.
The US Civil War was an attempt to divide the USA and we know how that worked. BTW, the USA is much more integrated now than in 1861. If you want to improve the USA politically, let’s ban lobbying and only allow campaign contributions from US citizens, not corporations, unions, and non-profits.
At least there is historical precedent for a younger son being shipped off to be a monarch somewhere else, although my personal favourite favourite way of acquiring a monarch is what the Swedes did when they got Marshal Bernadotte to be their king.
The USA already has a King: George Soros. He basically owns the Presidency. But maybe Harry and Meghan could be Court jesters? Oh wait… That won’t work either – they have no sense of humour.
You nailed it 100% – NY Post noted that Soro’s son, Alex, had been to the WH more than 20 times. How many members of Congress, State Governors, and other elected officials have that record? BTW, Geo. Soros stated in a circa 1998 CBS interview, that his objective was to make money, and he didn’t care who was hurt in the process – how many citizens of the UK were financially hurt by Soros’s financial machinations when he shorted the Bank of England? Soros is an anti-democratic, anti-western individual who’s out to destroy the USA and the West in general.
There are far more conservative Kings (aka billionaires) in the United States. What are you going to do when Soros—the Jew— dies? Are there any other boogeymen out there?
You mean like Jeff Bezos, Marc Zuckerberg, the Google chiefs, and all the Wall Street/finance types who overwhelmingly support Democratic policies and candidates?
Yeah, really conservative folks./sarc
Marc Ambler
5 months ago
With deep fake and AI, not only America, but the whole world, could have one king, telling each individual citizen what they most want to hear, eliciting their worship. This is what social media feeds essentially already do. While the embedded international technocrats get on with creating their globalist utopia. What to call him? He has already been titled – ‘Beast’, ‘Antichrist’.
Entrenching the two party system is a terrible idea. I can see the case for a ceremonial presidency, but one president is enough.
A D Kent
5 months ago
Interesting suggestion, but they could replace the President with The Terminator, the re-animated corpse of George Washington or (my personal favourite) K-9 off of 1980s Doctor Who, but as long as it remains a corrupt oligarchy nothing significant will change. Which means things will continue to get worse for everyone there and elsewhere.
Tyler Durden
5 months ago
The American political system was always imperial with the character of ancient Rome and some of the same separation of powers. It’s why the President is military commander-in-chief ruling like an emperor with slightly more modern checks and balances.
Campbell
5 months ago
Sorry, but I couldn’t get past the first paragraph without commenting…”all-powerful economic wizard and social engineer, in addition to being a media celebrity”…this American (52, descendant of colonists & 19th Century immigrants) regards the POTUS as the head of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Nothing more, nothing less. He or she doesn’t need to be my friend, popular, good-looking, ambidextrous, tri-lingual, tall, and/or devoid of flatulence…competence and the ability to walk up a flight of stairs un-aided would be great. Putting the fear of Allah in our enemies would be nice. Encouraging our people to teach their children how to read, write, and do arithmetic would be a bonus as well. I’ll get back to the article now…
Honestly, our monarchs don’t engineer anything. They bring in foreign tourists, and old ladies at home and abroad like to read about them. I suppose, for some, they’re a symbol of national unity, like milky tea and fish and chips, but they’re much less central to British life than Americans imagine.
In many ways, Americans are far more monarchist than us. After all, your political “dynasties” actually wield power.
I agree that is the proper role for our Presidency, but alas, the description given in the article is how the Presidency has come to be regarded by American culture at large. This is a problem, and while I very much like the American Founders’ original design for our republic, the deformations to that design created by the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the creation of a massive administrative state thanks to Wicker v. Filburn turning the Commerce Clause from a limit on the Federal Government’s power into carte blanche for the Feds to regulate every aspect of our lives on the plea that they “influence interstate commerce”, along with Congresses since at least the 1940’s refusing to legislate and instead simply empowering the administrative state to make regulations with the force of law, has rendered the head of the Executive Branch far more like an Emperor than the Founders ever intended.
Nathan Sapio
5 months ago
Anathema. Restore the president to simply executing laws passed by the deliberative body, force Congress to step up to its necessary role that it has not been fulfilling for 20 years.
Make Congress great again, make the president the functionary he’s supposed to be, free of cult of personality wishes.
To your point, the constant implementation of executive orders by one president that are then reversed by the next president is no way to govern a country. So that futile exercise should be stopped. If something is really important, put it to legislation. Next, adopt term limits for members of Congress. I believe these two changes would make a significant, positive difference.
Richard Ross
5 months ago
Given the UK’s current governmental situation, this may not be the best time to urge that the US emulate the British model.
David Lindsay
5 months ago
Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, has endorsed the former Meghan Markle’s obvious ambition to become President of the United States, but it is little Lilibet, who was also born in the United States, who will be 55 in 2076. What a way to mark the Tricentenary, by electing a President whose first cousin was King George.
And notice that even half a century hence, that would still be assisted no end by a name as WASP as Sussex. Rather than one that bespoke the 45 million members of America’s largest ethnic group. Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, say. Or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Or Oldenburg. Or Wettin. Or Markle.
willy Daglish
5 months ago
The most important thing is to separate the two, very different and incompatible, jobs – Chief Executive and Head of State. Nobody can do both well so even the best fall between two stalls, neglecting one to concentrate upon the other. Even on Wall Street, it is generally considered bad for a company to combine the roles of CEO and Chairman of the Board.
The Chief Executive will, necessarily in a democracy, be a politician. As such, he will be divisive, never having the support of moch more than half te citizens.
The Head of State, by contrast, must be a unifying force with fairly little serious opposition. Think our late Queen Elizabeth II. This is what we British have slowly achieved over centuries.
A word of warning, however. The HofS should be someone who doesn’t want the job! If you hold an election for the job, that person becomes a politician even if they were not to start with. Thence all the divisiveness remains.
Create a special “Electoral College” of all living University heads, retired generals and admirals, retired senior judges (not from the Supreme Court as they are all political). Aim for 1000 of them, lock them in a room and don’t let them out until they have agreed on one of their number getting the job.
Steve Jolly
5 months ago
Just…. no. As an American, this is absolute nonsense. I’ll admit to being an admirer of the British people, but part of that is because they’re not like Americans. There is no way this would work. The differences are too great. Some of the polarisation is over superficial issues but some of it is very real and results from the divergence of culture and economic interests that occurs in all large nations/empires. A parliamentary government that could rule unilaterally just by getting 51% of the vote would quickly come to represent the coasts and the population centers and the resentment from the rest of the country would get even worse than it already is. Had this been tried, the US would have long since broken up into who knows how many independent states who would probably fight each other constantly. That’s just the nature of Americans. They’ll start shooting rather than be ruled by people they didn’t elect thousands of miles away. I’d have thought you folks over there would know that better than anybody.
The founding fathers could have made the American government an exact copy of the British parliament. They didn’t, because they knew better than that. They hadn’t spent all that time, effort, and blood rebelling against a government that ruled them unilaterally from far away just to recreate the same system. They tried to do better, and since the US is still here and still mostly democratic despite its huge size, I’d say they mostly succeeded. I’ll grant that the American government is slow, cumbersome, inefficient, and difficult to manage. I can obviously see how it seems utterly dysfunctional to outsiders, but what you have to remember is that the USA is not the size of the UK. It’s the size of all of Europe. It’s not like governing the UK, or France, or Germany, or Poland. It’s like trying to govern them all together all at once in a single system. You can already see how difficult this can be by looking at the present day EU. If I’m not mistaken there was a vote several years ago where one of those EU countries even voted to leave it because they didn’t like the idea of being ruled by bureaucrats thousands of miles away. Who was that again? At any rate, if the EU is still around in two and a half centuries to be able to claim to have lasted as long as the USA has, it will probably be because of a lot of difficult choices and compromises were made along the way that tweaked the structure and nature of that government to prevent a collapse or address some problem or another, and that EU government will probably be just as arcane, just as inefficient, and just as unsightly for outsiders to look at as the American government is today.
You’re right, and BTW, Canada is experiencing precisely this issue, i.e., that Ontario and Quebec control the Canadian Parliament, leaving the Atlantic, Prairie, and West Coast Provinces resentful of their hegemony.
“That’s just the nature of Americans. They’ll start shooting rather than be ruled by people they didn’t elect thousands of miles away.” I’m afraid that’s going to happen anyway, unless we ashcan the Electoral College, consider ranked-choice voting, rethink the allocation of two senators to every state regardless of population, and otherwise reform how we choose our elected representatives. As it is, too many Americans already feel — justifiably — that their votes don’t matter, that they are, in fact, “ruled by people they didn’t elect thousands of miles away.” It’s now much easier to imagine those bullets flying — and the nation breaking apart into opposing factions — than it was a generation ago, or even a decade ago.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your comment, but personally have less faith that our current, increasingly dysfunctional system is capable of long enduring.
What we really need is for some of the power of the federal government to make policy to be delegated down to the states. Let Texas arrest illegals and send them to California. Let Arkansas ban abortions and California pay for any woman to have one. Agree to disagree and let people have their own self determination. That’s the only way out of our present dilemma that doesn’t involve, as you say, a lot of violence.
It’s a catch 22. If the Senate were population dependent the rural states would be ignored fat more than they already are. If the electoral college was eliminated no candidate would campaign in flyover country. Power, unlike economics, is a zero sum game. It can be split different ways but there’s only so much and you can’t give to some without taking away from others. There’s no moral or culturally acceptable guidelines for how power is distributed that anyone can agree on, particularly in a large and diverse country. The only thing to be done is reach a practical compromise, which is what the Constitution always was, a compromise. The issues of small state vs big state and urban vs. rural are literally the same arguments that Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams argued over in 1789. Both sides had to compromise or they’d have got nothing and there would be no USA. They foresaw these types of disagreements.
What they didn’t foresee was how technology would change or how history would unfold. They didn’t foresee the concept of total war and how much national coordination it would require. They had only a vague idea of how global economic forces worked and limited monetary theory.
This is one of those issues where there is no compromise that will satisfy everyone. The post WWII era where everybody mostly agreed culturally and the economy was thriving enough to smooth over yhe differences is over. It was an anomaly. The present dynamic is the default state for the USA and far more representative of American history in total.
Part of our present dilemmas truly is psychological. We are not accustomed to the acrimony, the division, the polarization and thanks to the Internet, TV, social media, etc., we are bombarded with it daily from all sides. It seems frightening because it’s very different than what most of us grew up with, but if we closely examine history, we find that the present levels of division are closer to normal than the post WWII era was. America can and has endured worse. If we can get past the shock, the anger, and the disillusionment to accept that the system isn’t perfect and lower our expectations from the national government, it will help a lot. If stubborn people instead resort to trying to force a level of conformity, things can go bad very quickly. I don’t know what will happen. There are reasons for fear but there are reasons for hope as well.
No, no, a thousand times no! The Electoral College and 2 senators per state are guardrails against a tyranny of the majority. Ranked choice voting, “jungle primaries” and other “innovations” will accelerate the coastal enclaves ruling over the interior. We need to get back to letting states be laboratories of democracy within a framework of federalism.
The Founding Fathers had a knowledge of the Bible, Greece, Rome and European history. Consequently they created a constitution for the benefit of emotionally mature responsible independent adults who understood that degree of self control was needed to put in more than take out of a system. The constitution is for a people blessed with common sense and backbone,not a feckless, indolent, venal and cowardly. It would appear that the USA only has a minority of people who have the qualities of the Founding Fathers and those in the 18th century.
The size of the US as a single entity is ameliorated by it’s Federal system of governing.
Something the UK should have done rather than the disaster of Blair’s UK Labour party putting in place devolution, which has only increased divisions in those regions that devolved.
The mistake you make is in suggesting that a democracy requires “symbolic “ head of state. This is wrong. The president is not above the law, as we are seeing. The president does not have any hereditary bloodline it is protecting. Does the president actively work for the people, or passively look on? You want to introduce a nonproductive spectator into a modern democracy? It’s just reactionary in case you’re wondering.
J Boyd
5 months ago
Yes, the Americans saddled themselves with a Constitution that is fundamentally unworkable.
For the English, it’s like watching your adolescent kids make a pig’s ear of everything just to try to prove you wrong.
Bless them….
It’s fundamentally unworkable but is working for hundreds of years. Enjoy your social immobility and title of subject. Liberty in the UK? No where near it.
It was supposed to be unworkable, except in time of crisis. “He governs best who governs least,” embodied in a document setting up procedures of governance. What you are regarding as bug is actually a feature.
Steve Hamlett
5 months ago
I’ve been pushing an American Constitutional Monarchy to my small and shrinking Facebook following for a while now. My would-be monarch is basketball star LeBron James. Sure, he made a few bonehead moves as a youngster but has matured into a pretty reasonable adult. That’s not easy in the NBA. A big plus is that nobody hates LeBron James. (Except maybe a few dedicated enemies of the LA Lakers.) That’s also not easy in the NBA. Finally, the man is 39 years old. One of the best players the game has ever seen, he can’t play too much longer. He’s gonna need a second career, beyond being a talking head on the subject of basketball. He needs something bigger, greater, to challenge him in the second half of his life. They already call him ‘King James.’ Why not?
Fafa Fafa
5 months ago
These are all atavistic ideas. What the US needs is a god-like AI, plugged into every source of information in the world and have a general (“god”)-API able to hook into any software architecture, write fair laws free from bias and enforce them free from bias. Somebody somewhere may already be writing the code.
And we’ll call it “the Beast”, and everyone will be required to have a chip with a neural interface connecting their brains to it, conveniently implanted in their forehead or right hand (users’ choice). The idea will catch and spread to the whole world.
Charles Hedges
5 months ago
The Glorious Revolution took place because the Stuarts( due to French influence ) replaced rule through consultation and consent ( Anglo Saxon ) with Divine Right of Kings and did not consult Parliament. The English King had consulted Parliament over taxation since 1300. Elizabeth I had no conflict with Parliament- read her speeches.
All the USA needs to do is heed JFK’s inauguration speech and that on MLK on character. In 1960 the vast majority of Americans understood the emotional maturity needed to accepting the responsibility in being the defender of the Free World, today very few Americans.
Harold Wilson said Wedgewood Benn grew immature with age, so it would appear does the USA.
Richard Calhoun
5 months ago
A ‘Monarchy’ for the USA would be such a bad idea, the President cannot be judged by Trump or Biden.
Probably the most successful US President in the last 70 years was ‘ Ronald Reagan ‘
He wasn’t considered an economic wizard or a social engineer, he just talked and acted on commonsense.
The West could do with a dose of commonsense in it’s politics right now.
Justin S
5 months ago
Most Americans do not understand what we have in the UK by way of a monarchy.
We are immensely fortunate that over several hundred years, we have – and this is really important to start with – cut the head off a king.
It is vital that you first cut the head off a king. That is a lesson that needs to be learned by everyone who comes after. We the people own the axe.
Now once that is established, you can get down to the business of taking away all of the Kings political power, and all of his political and civil service patronage.
Then you give him lots of ceremonial duties, and posh coats and gold and shit, and you cover the job in RESPECT.
Now you are getting the idea.
3 centuries later and the monarchy are nicely neutered and tamed and they know their place. Now they are magically useful.
Why? Well because they have no power at all. They are the nominal, the pretend ultimate – while in reality all power lies with the 1) the civil service, and 2) political power in parliament.
Yes the civil service is the real power in Britain. No political party truly controls Britain. They nudge and push the civil service and the bureaucrats go along with and co-operate only with what they decide. The fact they are mostly currently infiltrated by socialist marxists means in Britain we are in essence a soft socialist country ruled by the left wing, ‘woke’ blob.
Like a monarchy? Way, way less accountable and way less removable. The woke blob controls all the levers of power. It controls the media – who agree with the woke blob, and both entities seek and intend to control all thought and all action.
Main Edition
US
FR
“Why America needs a monarchy”
Make America Great Britain Again?
Great wit! Very good!
Obviously, we couldn’t call whoever it ends up being a “king”; that would be unacceptable to our republican principles. We need a title more fitting, more American. How about “Commander-in-Chief”? Or maybe just “First Citizen”?
Of course, if we wanted to go with your “co-monarch” idea, it’s sort of based on the assumption that America’s too big for one man to govern alone, isn’t it? Let’s cut the country in half, right along the Mississippi; one half can be the Western American Republic, the other half can be the Eastern American Republic, each with their own president and vice-president. Once that’s been set up, I think we can allow the two halves of the American Republic to decide together which of them is going to be overrun by barbarians from the northern forests and which by barbarians from the southern deserts.
Maybe one half will survive for a thousand years longer than the other, like the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople.
Or the putative Third Reich?
How about “Chief”?
Cultural appropriation? (The indigenous Americans have chiefs – sorry, joking). I think it would be a good idea to separate the head of state role from the governing role. (One of the things I don’t like about the Democrats dragging Trump through the courts is that he is a former head of state of the U.S.A. – a little respect please). But they hate him as a former, and maybe future, president. You want an apolitical head of state.
If the Americans had our sensible Australian rule of judges retiring at 70 years old, the President could nominate (Congress to approve) the head of state (5 year term) from retired Supreme Court judges. Or the field could be former heads/chiefs of the army, navy or air force because they have led lives of service, so respected, and aren’t usually overtly political. A broader field would be former state governors – more political, but experienced.
To avoid any status competition with the President, let’s just call the person The Head of State.
Oh! I’ll play — who gets to be Saladin?
The Emperor of America
The US Civil War was an attempt to divide the USA and we know how that worked. BTW, the USA is much more integrated now than in 1861. If you want to improve the USA politically, let’s ban lobbying and only allow campaign contributions from US citizens, not corporations, unions, and non-profits.
First Citizen, i.e. Princeps, from which Prince was derived, and which was the formal title used by some Roman Emperors.
I’m sure Prince Harry would make a fine king of America and Meghan would ADORE being Queen. Go for it America, what have you got to lose?
At least there is historical precedent for a younger son being shipped off to be a monarch somewhere else, although my personal favourite favourite way of acquiring a monarch is what the Swedes did when they got Marshal Bernadotte to be their king.
And Bernadotte ended up siding against Napoleon, who put him there, when he decided Russia must be invaded.
so good!
The USA already has a King: George Soros. He basically owns the Presidency. But maybe Harry and Meghan could be Court jesters? Oh wait… That won’t work either – they have no sense of humour.
You nailed it 100% – NY Post noted that Soro’s son, Alex, had been to the WH more than 20 times. How many members of Congress, State Governors, and other elected officials have that record? BTW, Geo. Soros stated in a circa 1998 CBS interview, that his objective was to make money, and he didn’t care who was hurt in the process – how many citizens of the UK were financially hurt by Soros’s financial machinations when he shorted the Bank of England? Soros is an anti-democratic, anti-western individual who’s out to destroy the USA and the West in general.
There are far more conservative Kings (aka billionaires) in the United States. What are you going to do when Soros—the Jew— dies? Are there any other boogeymen out there?
Oh dear, not that old chestnut. I’m Jewish myself – so I can say what I like about Soros. Sorry.
You mean like Jeff Bezos, Marc Zuckerberg, the Google chiefs, and all the Wall Street/finance types who overwhelmingly support Democratic policies and candidates?
Yeah, really conservative folks./sarc
With deep fake and AI, not only America, but the whole world, could have one king, telling each individual citizen what they most want to hear, eliciting their worship. This is what social media feeds essentially already do. While the embedded international technocrats get on with creating their globalist utopia. What to call him? He has already been titled – ‘Beast’, ‘Antichrist’.
just call him Bezos.
Beastos?
Entrenching the two party system is a terrible idea. I can see the case for a ceremonial presidency, but one president is enough.
Interesting suggestion, but they could replace the President with The Terminator, the re-animated corpse of George Washington or (my personal favourite) K-9 off of 1980s Doctor Who, but as long as it remains a corrupt oligarchy nothing significant will change. Which means things will continue to get worse for everyone there and elsewhere.
The American political system was always imperial with the character of ancient Rome and some of the same separation of powers. It’s why the President is military commander-in-chief ruling like an emperor with slightly more modern checks and balances.
Sorry, but I couldn’t get past the first paragraph without commenting…”all-powerful economic wizard and social engineer, in addition to being a media celebrity”…this American (52, descendant of colonists & 19th Century immigrants) regards the POTUS as the head of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Nothing more, nothing less. He or she doesn’t need to be my friend, popular, good-looking, ambidextrous, tri-lingual, tall, and/or devoid of flatulence…competence and the ability to walk up a flight of stairs un-aided would be great. Putting the fear of Allah in our enemies would be nice. Encouraging our people to teach their children how to read, write, and do arithmetic would be a bonus as well. I’ll get back to the article now…
Same
As though the British monarch doesn’t “engineer society “! Subjects?! Not a celebrity?! They are the biggest industry in the UK!
Honestly, our monarchs don’t engineer anything. They bring in foreign tourists, and old ladies at home and abroad like to read about them. I suppose, for some, they’re a symbol of national unity, like milky tea and fish and chips, but they’re much less central to British life than Americans imagine.
In many ways, Americans are far more monarchist than us. After all, your political “dynasties” actually wield power.
I agree that is the proper role for our Presidency, but alas, the description given in the article is how the Presidency has come to be regarded by American culture at large. This is a problem, and while I very much like the American Founders’ original design for our republic, the deformations to that design created by the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the creation of a massive administrative state thanks to Wicker v. Filburn turning the Commerce Clause from a limit on the Federal Government’s power into carte blanche for the Feds to regulate every aspect of our lives on the plea that they “influence interstate commerce”, along with Congresses since at least the 1940’s refusing to legislate and instead simply empowering the administrative state to make regulations with the force of law, has rendered the head of the Executive Branch far more like an Emperor than the Founders ever intended.
Anathema. Restore the president to simply executing laws passed by the deliberative body, force Congress to step up to its necessary role that it has not been fulfilling for 20 years.
Make Congress great again, make the president the functionary he’s supposed to be, free of cult of personality wishes.
To your point, the constant implementation of executive orders by one president that are then reversed by the next president is no way to govern a country. So that futile exercise should be stopped. If something is really important, put it to legislation. Next, adopt term limits for members of Congress. I believe these two changes would make a significant, positive difference.
Given the UK’s current governmental situation, this may not be the best time to urge that the US emulate the British model.
Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, has endorsed the former Meghan Markle’s obvious ambition to become President of the United States, but it is little Lilibet, who was also born in the United States, who will be 55 in 2076. What a way to mark the Tricentenary, by electing a President whose first cousin was King George.
And notice that even half a century hence, that would still be assisted no end by a name as WASP as Sussex. Rather than one that bespoke the 45 million members of America’s largest ethnic group. Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, say. Or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Or Oldenburg. Or Wettin. Or Markle.
The most important thing is to separate the two, very different and incompatible, jobs – Chief Executive and Head of State. Nobody can do both well so even the best fall between two stalls, neglecting one to concentrate upon the other. Even on Wall Street, it is generally considered bad for a company to combine the roles of CEO and Chairman of the Board.
The Chief Executive will, necessarily in a democracy, be a politician. As such, he will be divisive, never having the support of moch more than half te citizens.
The Head of State, by contrast, must be a unifying force with fairly little serious opposition. Think our late Queen Elizabeth II. This is what we British have slowly achieved over centuries.
A word of warning, however. The HofS should be someone who doesn’t want the job! If you hold an election for the job, that person becomes a politician even if they were not to start with. Thence all the divisiveness remains.
Create a special “Electoral College” of all living University heads, retired generals and admirals, retired senior judges (not from the Supreme Court as they are all political). Aim for 1000 of them, lock them in a room and don’t let them out until they have agreed on one of their number getting the job.
Just…. no. As an American, this is absolute nonsense. I’ll admit to being an admirer of the British people, but part of that is because they’re not like Americans. There is no way this would work. The differences are too great. Some of the polarisation is over superficial issues but some of it is very real and results from the divergence of culture and economic interests that occurs in all large nations/empires. A parliamentary government that could rule unilaterally just by getting 51% of the vote would quickly come to represent the coasts and the population centers and the resentment from the rest of the country would get even worse than it already is. Had this been tried, the US would have long since broken up into who knows how many independent states who would probably fight each other constantly. That’s just the nature of Americans. They’ll start shooting rather than be ruled by people they didn’t elect thousands of miles away. I’d have thought you folks over there would know that better than anybody.
The founding fathers could have made the American government an exact copy of the British parliament. They didn’t, because they knew better than that. They hadn’t spent all that time, effort, and blood rebelling against a government that ruled them unilaterally from far away just to recreate the same system. They tried to do better, and since the US is still here and still mostly democratic despite its huge size, I’d say they mostly succeeded. I’ll grant that the American government is slow, cumbersome, inefficient, and difficult to manage. I can obviously see how it seems utterly dysfunctional to outsiders, but what you have to remember is that the USA is not the size of the UK. It’s the size of all of Europe. It’s not like governing the UK, or France, or Germany, or Poland. It’s like trying to govern them all together all at once in a single system. You can already see how difficult this can be by looking at the present day EU. If I’m not mistaken there was a vote several years ago where one of those EU countries even voted to leave it because they didn’t like the idea of being ruled by bureaucrats thousands of miles away. Who was that again? At any rate, if the EU is still around in two and a half centuries to be able to claim to have lasted as long as the USA has, it will probably be because of a lot of difficult choices and compromises were made along the way that tweaked the structure and nature of that government to prevent a collapse or address some problem or another, and that EU government will probably be just as arcane, just as inefficient, and just as unsightly for outsiders to look at as the American government is today.
You’re right, and BTW, Canada is experiencing precisely this issue, i.e., that Ontario and Quebec control the Canadian Parliament, leaving the Atlantic, Prairie, and West Coast Provinces resentful of their hegemony.
“That’s just the nature of Americans. They’ll start shooting rather than be ruled by people they didn’t elect thousands of miles away.” I’m afraid that’s going to happen anyway, unless we ashcan the Electoral College, consider ranked-choice voting, rethink the allocation of two senators to every state regardless of population, and otherwise reform how we choose our elected representatives. As it is, too many Americans already feel — justifiably — that their votes don’t matter, that they are, in fact, “ruled by people they didn’t elect thousands of miles away.” It’s now much easier to imagine those bullets flying — and the nation breaking apart into opposing factions — than it was a generation ago, or even a decade ago.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your comment, but personally have less faith that our current, increasingly dysfunctional system is capable of long enduring.
What we really need is for some of the power of the federal government to make policy to be delegated down to the states. Let Texas arrest illegals and send them to California. Let Arkansas ban abortions and California pay for any woman to have one. Agree to disagree and let people have their own self determination. That’s the only way out of our present dilemma that doesn’t involve, as you say, a lot of violence.
It’s a catch 22. If the Senate were population dependent the rural states would be ignored fat more than they already are. If the electoral college was eliminated no candidate would campaign in flyover country. Power, unlike economics, is a zero sum game. It can be split different ways but there’s only so much and you can’t give to some without taking away from others. There’s no moral or culturally acceptable guidelines for how power is distributed that anyone can agree on, particularly in a large and diverse country. The only thing to be done is reach a practical compromise, which is what the Constitution always was, a compromise. The issues of small state vs big state and urban vs. rural are literally the same arguments that Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams argued over in 1789. Both sides had to compromise or they’d have got nothing and there would be no USA. They foresaw these types of disagreements.
What they didn’t foresee was how technology would change or how history would unfold. They didn’t foresee the concept of total war and how much national coordination it would require. They had only a vague idea of how global economic forces worked and limited monetary theory.
This is one of those issues where there is no compromise that will satisfy everyone. The post WWII era where everybody mostly agreed culturally and the economy was thriving enough to smooth over yhe differences is over. It was an anomaly. The present dynamic is the default state for the USA and far more representative of American history in total.
Part of our present dilemmas truly is psychological. We are not accustomed to the acrimony, the division, the polarization and thanks to the Internet, TV, social media, etc., we are bombarded with it daily from all sides. It seems frightening because it’s very different than what most of us grew up with, but if we closely examine history, we find that the present levels of division are closer to normal than the post WWII era was. America can and has endured worse. If we can get past the shock, the anger, and the disillusionment to accept that the system isn’t perfect and lower our expectations from the national government, it will help a lot. If stubborn people instead resort to trying to force a level of conformity, things can go bad very quickly. I don’t know what will happen. There are reasons for fear but there are reasons for hope as well.
No, no, a thousand times no! The Electoral College and 2 senators per state are guardrails against a tyranny of the majority. Ranked choice voting, “jungle primaries” and other “innovations” will accelerate the coastal enclaves ruling over the interior. We need to get back to letting states be laboratories of democracy within a framework of federalism.
The Founding Fathers had a knowledge of the Bible, Greece, Rome and European history. Consequently they created a constitution for the benefit of emotionally mature responsible independent adults who understood that degree of self control was needed to put in more than take out of a system. The constitution is for a people blessed with common sense and backbone,not a feckless, indolent, venal and cowardly. It would appear that the USA only has a minority of people who have the qualities of the Founding Fathers and those in the 18th century.
The size of the US as a single entity is ameliorated by it’s Federal system of governing.
Something the UK should have done rather than the disaster of Blair’s UK Labour party putting in place devolution, which has only increased divisions in those regions that devolved.
Spot on, Steve!
The mistake you make is in suggesting that a democracy requires “symbolic “ head of state. This is wrong. The president is not above the law, as we are seeing. The president does not have any hereditary bloodline it is protecting. Does the president actively work for the people, or passively look on? You want to introduce a nonproductive spectator into a modern democracy? It’s just reactionary in case you’re wondering.
Yes, the Americans saddled themselves with a Constitution that is fundamentally unworkable.
For the English, it’s like watching your adolescent kids make a pig’s ear of everything just to try to prove you wrong.
Bless them….
It’s fundamentally unworkable but is working for hundreds of years. Enjoy your social immobility and title of subject. Liberty in the UK? No where near it.
It was supposed to be unworkable, except in time of crisis. “He governs best who governs least,” embodied in a document setting up procedures of governance. What you are regarding as bug is actually a feature.
I’ve been pushing an American Constitutional Monarchy to my small and shrinking Facebook following for a while now. My would-be monarch is basketball star LeBron James. Sure, he made a few bonehead moves as a youngster but has matured into a pretty reasonable adult. That’s not easy in the NBA. A big plus is that nobody hates LeBron James. (Except maybe a few dedicated enemies of the LA Lakers.) That’s also not easy in the NBA. Finally, the man is 39 years old. One of the best players the game has ever seen, he can’t play too much longer. He’s gonna need a second career, beyond being a talking head on the subject of basketball. He needs something bigger, greater, to challenge him in the second half of his life. They already call him ‘King James.’ Why not?
These are all atavistic ideas. What the US needs is a god-like AI, plugged into every source of information in the world and have a general (“god”)-API able to hook into any software architecture, write fair laws free from bias and enforce them free from bias. Somebody somewhere may already be writing the code.
And we’ll call it “the Beast”, and everyone will be required to have a chip with a neural interface connecting their brains to it, conveniently implanted in their forehead or right hand (users’ choice). The idea will catch and spread to the whole world.
The Glorious Revolution took place because the Stuarts( due to French influence ) replaced rule through consultation and consent ( Anglo Saxon ) with Divine Right of Kings and did not consult Parliament. The English King had consulted Parliament over taxation since 1300. Elizabeth I had no conflict with Parliament- read her speeches.
All the USA needs to do is heed JFK’s inauguration speech and that on MLK on character. In 1960 the vast majority of Americans understood the emotional maturity needed to accepting the responsibility in being the defender of the Free World, today very few Americans.
Harold Wilson said Wedgewood Benn grew immature with age, so it would appear does the USA.
A ‘Monarchy’ for the USA would be such a bad idea, the President cannot be judged by Trump or Biden.
Probably the most successful US President in the last 70 years was ‘ Ronald Reagan ‘
He wasn’t considered an economic wizard or a social engineer, he just talked and acted on commonsense.
The West could do with a dose of commonsense in it’s politics right now.
Most Americans do not understand what we have in the UK by way of a monarchy.
We are immensely fortunate that over several hundred years, we have – and this is really important to start with – cut the head off a king.
It is vital that you first cut the head off a king. That is a lesson that needs to be learned by everyone who comes after. We the people own the axe.
Now once that is established, you can get down to the business of taking away all of the Kings political power, and all of his political and civil service patronage.
Then you give him lots of ceremonial duties, and posh coats and gold and shit, and you cover the job in RESPECT.
Now you are getting the idea.
3 centuries later and the monarchy are nicely neutered and tamed and they know their place. Now they are magically useful.
Why? Well because they have no power at all. They are the nominal, the pretend ultimate – while in reality all power lies with the 1) the civil service, and 2) political power in parliament.
Yes the civil service is the real power in Britain. No political party truly controls Britain. They nudge and push the civil service and the bureaucrats go along with and co-operate only with what they decide. The fact they are mostly currently infiltrated by socialist marxists means in Britain we are in essence a soft socialist country ruled by the left wing, ‘woke’ blob.
Like a monarchy? Way, way less accountable and way less removable. The woke blob controls all the levers of power. It controls the media – who agree with the woke blob, and both entities seek and intend to control all thought and all action.