I am always puzzled by folks like Sempronious who are for monarchy and established church, or aristocracy. Exactly where are you going to get that monarch? You cannot be for monarchy in general, only for a particular royal line. The last legitimate monarch in the English-speaking world lost his head long ago. Do you want the tacky little Germans and Danes who now uselessly drain the British? The Russian, Austrian, or Spanish claimants?
America was not founded by a monarchy or a central state of any kind. It was founded by brave, independent men—mostly younger sons of the gentry and yeomen—who risked their own capital and lives to settle a continent. The fall begins when they are replaced by the flotsam and jetsom and rejected authoritarians, revolutionaries, and socialists of Europe from the 1840s onward.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Dr. Wilson on the British monarchy
His reply to Sempronius at PJB's "Is Democracy Overrated?":
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
The forms of government on offer in the eighteenth century were essentially variations of monarchy and to the Founding Fathers the British model was far and away the most palatable. America’s adaptation of ‘elective’ monarchy and the borrowing of British procedures and ceremonial suggest just how deeply indebted the young republic was to its colonial past. As Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache put it, Americans created a constitution before they ‘had sufficiently unmonarchized their ideas and habits’. And he added: they ‘dismissed the name of king, but they retained a prejudice for his authority. Instead of keeping as little, they kept as much of it as possible for their president’.
Post a Comment