Joe Doakes, formerly of Como. Park, emails:
Visited a different church this weekend, and heard a new song. The musicians on stage played and sang. The congregation was instructed to shout, “That’s My King” when appropriate. Like all modern churches, they have giant tv screens hanging above the stage showing the words. I’ll skip to the part of the song that I found interesting:
That’s my God
That’s my shepherd
My protector
That’s my king
That’s my rock
That’s my anchor
My defender
That’s my king
Most Americans think of “king” as a picture on a playing card, not a part of the government. We mistakenly believe Our Precious Democracy is the ultimate form of government. I think that’s simplistic and dangerous. The Seventeenth Amendment, the effort to pack the Supreme Court, the demand to abolish the electoral college, these all move us away from checks-and-balances and toward absolute rule by whomever counts the ballots.
One need only look to the French Revolution to see why pure mob rule is a terrible idea. Elections aren’t everything – Hitler, Castro and Putin won their elections, too. Ben Franklin quipped: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.” Robert Heinlein wrote: “A king is the people’s only protection against tyranny . . . especially against the worst of all tyrants, themselves.”
Throughout history before the Constitution, the most common form of government was kingship, partly because Might Makes Right, but also partly because Stability Brings Order. The subjects owe allegiance to their king, sure, but as the song from church points out, kings have a responsibility to their subjects, to protect them from enemies foreign and domestic. When there’s a vacancy on the throne, there’s chaos in foreign relations and confusion in domestic politics. That’s one reason some Founders wanted George Washington to agree to be king. He was a natural leader and a gracious gentleman whom ordinary people could admire and respect.
Looking around at the chaos caused by the vacant Rose Garden Throne in America today, and considering the two contestants for the office, only one strikes me as the sort of leader who can inspire people to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and get busy restoring this nation to greatness. Only one of them is fit to be king.
Joe Doakes
Some historian – I forget who – described the British monarchy of myth, from its origins until probably the 1600s, as the old-world equivalent of Mafia factions duking it out for the position of Capo di Tutti Capi, only with no FBI to prevent slop-over to the wider society. It took over 400 years, from the Magna Carta to the bitter end of the English Civil War, to turn the British monarchy into the most relatively small-l liberal significant monarchy (shaddap about Denmark) in the modern world.
And the greatest glory of the American experiment was that we were able to not only short-circuit that 400 years of dynastic tree-pruning and blood-batheing, but do it via elections and an orderly process, and implement it in 15 short years and keep it running smoothly for almost 250.
Who’s the best choice to try to keep that record going?
I can’t disagree with Joe at this point .
More tomorrow.