The Perils of Single Person Rule

Our Republic was built to resist single person rule in the guise of monarchs or cults.  We go to medieval England and meet Henry III then move to the present to illustrate this point.  

Transcript

The Perils of Single-Person Rulership 

January 2025

My feeling about anything, is that the more it tends to become a cult, the more I want to call it into question. 

Bill Keller

Royalty is completely different than celebrity. Royalty has a magic all its own. 

Philip Treacy
 
 The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. 

H. L. Mencken
 
 

On social media, there are a group of staunch medievalists. Some follow the Byzantine Empire or the Eastern Roman Empire in their telling.  Others focus on Spain, Italy, or France.  But given our mutual language, English is the most oft-spoken language; thus, that tongue gets the most attention.  Richard the Lion Heart is featured. And John of Magna Carta receives his fair share of the spotlight.  Before the conquest of 1066, Harold Godwinson was a hero to these people.  But never once, in all their medieval lore, does Henry III of England, also known as Winchester, become their subject. 

I am currently reading David Carpenter’s Henry III.  Henry was one of those Plantagenet kings, like his father John or his grandson Edward II, who do not receive many historical accolades.  It also did not help Henry that his son, Edward I, is considered one of the greatest medieval monarchs in history.  As noted by Carpenter, “After coming to the throne aged just nine, Henry III spent much of his reign peaceably. Conciliatory and deeply religious, he created a magnificent court, rebuilt Westminster Abbey, and invested in soft power.”  

That is the pro version, which can result when an author becomes enamored with his subject.  Henry also gave his supporters vast patronage, especially Hubert De Burgh, angering his barons with his apparent preferences. Not once, but several times, saw Henry, like his father, face his barons in war.  His efforts to restore the Angevin empire, including his grandfather’s birthrights, such as Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, and Maine, were met with near disaster.  The only reason he held onto Gascony was because his Capetian rivals in France were more interested in Italy and the Crusades than in finally uniting the French Kingdom.  

Then, in 1258, the king faced a great revolution. Led by Simon de Montfort, the uprising stripped him of his authority and brought decades of personal rule to a catastrophic end. In the brutal civil war that followed, the political community was torn apart in a way unseen again until Cromwell.” His grandfather was the most powerful monarch of the age, ruling half of Western Europe.  His uncle was the greatest warrior of his time, which was a clear signal of strong kingship.  His son conquered Wales and nearly Scotland, uniting the British Isles.  And Henry prayed a lot.  

Alexander Faludy, in a piece in the Catholic Herald entitled “Henry III, A Forgotten King,” notes, “Being neither a “bad” king like his father John nor a “great” one, like his son Edward, Henry didn’t enter the canon of popular entertainment. John got a Shakespeare history play. Edward was a featured character in both Braveheart and The Outlaw King.” Henry’s grandson, Edward II, is the stuff of legend if for no other reason than the rumors surrounding his untimely demise. One included being rammed up the backside by a white-hot poker.  It was said to be his queen’s revenge for his sexual proclivities.  Henry III he was that rare king of medieval England to die in his bed of natural causes.  

I cannot detail all of the Plantagenet ups and downs except to say that the dynasty’s inception began in the 1150s and ended (truly ended in 1485). Some may argue 1399, but for me, despite being called by those names, the Yorks and the Lancasters were still direct descendants of Edward III and, therefore, still Plantagenets. The Tudors were something different.  

My point is the litany of British kings is often summed as good or bad, depending on the writer or reader:

Found Henry II – good

Richard the Lionheart – I think he was bad because of his profligacy and lack of focus, but for warriors, he was fantastic.

John – lost the Angevin Empire and the Magna Carta so bad

Henry III – generally bad

Edward I – good 

Edward II – very bad 

Edward III awesome 

Richard II was bad again and lost his throne.  

With apologies to my listenership, I now come to my point.  Monarchy is dumb.  Royalty is a fiction.  Do we need to visit two contemporary brothers to get to that point?  William Windsor, who became William V upon the death of his father Charles, seems like he will be a good king, though that definition is entirely different from Henry’s Day.  His brother Harry is being led around the nose by a C-class actress and A-class narcissist.  

I now want to share the anointing of a British ruler.  The anointing of the British monarch is a sacred ritual that symbolizes God’s blessing on the new sovereign. It’s a central part of the coronation ceremony and is considered a moment between the monarch and God. 

In other words, these people are very different from you and me.  The simple accident of birth conveys a unique compact with the heavens.  And this, too, is dumb.  If God exists in any form belonging to this type of belief, then someone explains King John, Richard III, or Henry III, a character unable to ever learn from his mistakes.  

How does this apply to our Republic when we elect our leaders?  Two of the last three presidents have shown a proclivity to creating the type of executive that more resembles monarchy.  This is the true the true role of the job, faithfully executing laws THAT CONGRESS passes and approves by the judiciary.  That’s it. 

Believing in a single person to save our Republic is akin to believing that somebody, simply because they are the son or daughter of a ruler, is somehow imbued with magical powers to continue ruling.  

Our presidents, contrary to what many say, are not to “run the country,” one of my most despised common phraseologies for the position. Not to use as a role model or invest one’s personal hopes and dreams.  The person driving that is the one in the mirror, or so true conservatives still believe.  

Cultish Trump depictions range far and wide. There is Trump as Superman, a super soldier, and even a messiah complete in Jesus-like robes.  Most of these are silly and treated as such by a vast majority of Americans.  Yet there. In all of those, Trump features a physique that peak 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger would covet. Even in his youth, Trump was tall but not exactly bodybuilder material. Today, he looks like a portly 78-year-old.  But that does not change a prevalent thought in the Republic that a president can solves peoples troubles.  

In a piece by Ben Goldsmith & Lars J. K. Moen on the cult of personality around Trump, the authors note, “In new research, we argue that there is an identifiable hard core of extremely loyal Trump supporters that comprise his personality cult. Members of such a cult show unquestioning loyalty to a strong leader, such as Argentina’s Juan and Eva Perón or Italy’s Benito Mussolini, whom they perceive as infallible and truthful. Their devotion has religious parallels as they consider their leader a savior with the unique ability to protect society against internal or external threats. Trump has himself embraced such a status in relation to his followers in statements such as “I am your voice” and “I alone can fix it,” both of which he declared at the 2016 Republican convention.”

As my truism illustrates, the left acts and the right reacts; this is not something that began with the GOP.  Obama “walks into a room, and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” George Clooney gushed to Charlie Rose. “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make [Obama’s] pathway clear,” Halle Berry recently told the Philadelphia Daily News, “I’ll do whatever he says.” Chris Matthew, the host of a show called Hardball, once stated to Obama that he felt a “thrill going up my leg” after hearing Obama speak. If that is hardball, I am scared to contemplate what Matthew’s softball looked like.

Obama did little to tamp down this concept: 

In 2008, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Barack Obama, upon winning the Democratic nomination for the presidency, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Here is a Fun fact from the great Kevin Williamson: Celestine V, the hermit priest whom the Cardinals pulled from obscurity and poverty to run the church under the concept they needed an outsider, helped to create a word we know well. Celestine was nominated to the papacy by Cardinal Latino Malabranca Orsini, nephew of Pope Nicholas III, and one of the reasons we talk about nepotism or nephew-ism. 

Let’s assume for a moment that Obama and Trump are all that.  Obama could make the tides recede, which even another medieval monarch, Canute, claimed was beyond his power.  Let’s assume that only Trump can fix it.  Once those assumptions are locked in, then the power to do so becomes part of the presidency.  As Edward II followed and Edward I, or as was seen with Henry III, power is accrued into the hands of someone incapable of wielding it properly or even dangerously incompetent.  

The reason the founders omitted monarchy (even though they had a ready-made constitution king at hand in Washington) and the reason the Constitution makes getting things done hard is to curb this power.  

As I write this, nearly certified lunatic RFK Jr., the man who confessed that his brain is worm-eaten (I am not making this up).  Is being considered for HHS Secretary.  He is pro-choice. Pro single-payer, pro-government intrusive, and a rabid environmentalist. Everything I am not. 

But we would not even know who this insane person is, only for his name.  The Kennedys boasted about the patriarch who got rich through bootlegging.  Another thought was that the president was a notorious womanizer.  Another killed a young woman by drowning.  Arguably RFK Jrs. Father was the only non-rotten apple in the bunch, but somehow, through the auspices of media, historians, and a gullible public, that name carries meaning.  

We have probably had too many Bushes, and now there are tales of Donald Trump positioning himself for office.  We rejected nobility 230 years ago for many good reasons.  

The fact that both Democrats and now Republicans cannot see the danger of cult of personality or conferring achievement solely through a name is a very bad thing and will yield dangerous results (and not some far-off catastrophe like climate change). We may see President Gavin Newsom or President Tucker Carlson taking (and then violating) the oath of office as soon as 2028.  This is illustrative of how badly our educational system, the media, and our recent leadership have failed to tell the truth to the benighted American people.  Royalty, family ties, and cultish worship are dumb and too often end badly.