Well, doctor, what have we got - a republic or a monarchy?

A republic - if you can keep it

The titles allude to the verbal exchange between Philadelphia socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin as the latter left the signing of the US Constitution in 1789, along the lines of the inquiry made at childbirth: Is it a girl or a boy?

So, what did the good doctor mean with if you can keep it?

Image: a Benjie, named after the person figuring on its obverse (Benjamin Franklin), a one-hundred dollar note (as per its stated name) or bill (as per what people call it). Like the US Postal Service is called the mail, and the UK’s Royal Mail is called the post.¹ Go figure: the largest denomination in general circulation, and it depicts the only non-president.

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If everyone can unite in saying one thing about Donald Trump it’s this: when he’s not being inconsistent, he is consistent. There can surely be no contest about that. Where the discussion arises is how people view consistency. The test for observers of the Trump administration over the coming period will be to distinguish the inconsistencies from the consistencies, and the surprising thing is that there are far fewer of the former than of the latter: people view Mr Trump’s inconsistencies as residing in what he does as opposed to what we have become inured to expecting a president to do; his consistencies lie in comparing what he does to what he has actually said and done.

For instance, he has been unrelenting in the contention that the 2020 election was stolen from him. I don’t know whether it was stolen from him. Ordinarily I would say he should know more than anyone, but, beyond that argument having been vehemently labelled by his opponents a lie for four and more years, Trump has never walked back his initial position. And he lent consistency to it, by not attending Joe Biden’s inauguration. Why would he attend the inauguration of a man who, he contends, stole his election? It’s just this: I wonder whether Joe Biden will attend his. Whether Joseph Biden will attend the inauguration of the man he has likened to a Nazi, the same Joe Biden who was hailed as the transitional man who would save American democracy from precisely the man being inaugurated, stating that Mr Trump needs locking up—before hastily adding politically. Just how do you lock someone up politically, Mr Biden? The same Joe Biden who swore he would never pardon his own son. And then pardoned his own son. And regular readers know already what I think about his Palestine policy—he swore to uphold democracy, and then used it to provide the physical means for an entire people to be decimated in the Middle East. That smacks of inconsistency.

Nor does Mr Trump very much like the press. With many in the press, he suffers a bad press, and either that means he is wronged by them, and they simply don’t understand him, or they’re out to get him whatever he does. Whichever of those it is, Mr Trump doesn’t pay vanity lip service to the press corps at the annual correspondents’ dinner. He simply doesn’t pitch up. He is very consistent. When he says he may send troops to conquer Greenland, then he may do that. Or he may not. That’s consistency. Mr Trump is utterly able to leave the whole world guessing about what he will and will not do next, whilst being very consistent in what he says and does.

Benjamin Franklin—the greatest president the US never had—was fearful for the republic he had just signed into existence. Why?

The US constitution sought to reconcile two opposing dynamics in constitutional theory: that a democracy tends to weaken, the larger it becomes; whereas a republic tends to strengthen as it becomes larger. So, the dilemma upon the US’s incorporation was how to have a large republic that was nevertheless a democracy. Small countries are best ruled as monarchies. Mid-sized countries tend to a hybrid form of authoritarianism tempered by a bit of democracy (like France), whereas superstates tend to be tyrannical (like Russia, Ethiopia, or Austria-Hungary). The US is a superstate that remains democratic; or, at least, that’s what we think. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said in his book Leviathan that the best form of government is an absolute monarchy, and he had his reasons for that. The problem with that (indeed, the problem with any government) is that you will have a good government if it has a good leader. And you will not, if it does not.

The Greek philosopher Plato viewed democracy askance. He argued that the freedom that was accorded to all subjects under democratic rule would, as human nature took its course, erode the equality that is a founding principle of a democracy’s bill of rights, to the point where inequality is an inevitability. This is precisely what has happened in the US, and many other countries around the world, to a gross extent, in the surreptitious neoliberal revolution that has been ongoing for several decades. One reason why this revolution has not been recognised as such until relatively recently is because, rather than seeking, as many revolutions do, to upend the mechanisms of lawmaking, the neoliberal revolution has sought to exert influence over (effectively: bribe) lawmakers, indeed to become lawmakers themselves, thus, rather than upending the mechanism of legislation, taking it over in its entirety, the way pirates steal entire ships, rather than just the cargo. The difference with piracy is that this is legal. In short, everything is legal, and it must now be recognised that legality is not what it has often been viewed as being: a causeway that, so long as a man keeps to it, will ensure his safety. Those are the words of Thomas More, an English lawyer and Chancellor to King Henry VIII. And, high-minded though they are, they were no more true when he spoke them than they are now.

Many laws today do not form a causeway for Everyman; they form causeways for other men. Many of the laws and regulations that have seen a deterioration in the financial position, rights and security of ordinary workers and the great increase in the numbers of super-rich are probably utterly unknown to the average Joe and Jean: they concern the abrogation of regulatory laws restricting how industries may operate. Thereby, industry gets freer, government makes its civil servants redundant, or doesn’t recruit new ones, but ordinary folk don’t realise it. The inalienable rights that the US Declaration of Independence enshrines, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, guarantee, for each and every citizen, that they shan’t lose their life without due process (unlike George Floyd), that they shan’t lose their liberty without due process (unlike Robert Roberson III) and that each and every citizen may pursue his or her happiness.

Without getting embroiled in length, when one party pursues his happiness to the detriment of another, the notion of yielding to the second party’s rights to pursue his happiness is rejected, in favour of the pursuit of happiness by the first party; especially where it is the bigger player, has the more money or the more power. Thus, the inalienable right to pursue one’s happiness is the kind of thinking that admits of inequality ab initio, even though it is actually framed in terms of equality, because the underlying, commonly understood, widely accepted or, even, statutorily formulated limits on the exercise of that right have slowly been eroded to nothing: there is little to stop you being prejudiced if not prejudicing you restrains someone else’s right to pursue happiness, even if we’re talking about the happiness of a billionaire, or a joint stock corporation. It is not the only misleading institution of democracy in the United States that is anything but that for which it is called, leading The Economist newspaper to describe the US, rightly, I think, as a flawed democracy. Joe Biden vowed to uphold a flawed democracy. Well, that’s better than no democracy at all, isn’t it?

The US’s Constitution was framed in 1789 as the first great written democratic constitution in the modern age; it is now, at least perfunctorily, interpreted by the US Supreme Court as if they were the US Supreme Court of 1789, rather than the SCOTUS of 2025. That may sound surprising, but, so they argue, it was written then, so it should be interpreted as if we lived then. Except as regards the president’s immunity. This is a new development, evidence for which is scant, but which derives from a large degree of proselytising over contingent future events or non-events that might, might not or might never happen or, for all we know, might already have happened. It is, of all the supposedly judge-made law in America, the most egregious example. It is blatant, and it is precisely its brazenness that says much about what the world can expect from Washington, D.C. in the next four years.

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Each of us on our respective ways through the kitchen a couple of weeks ago, my cohabitant mentioned to me, “Two weeks from now, everything will change.” I looked at him. “Change? Like, what’s going to change? Are you going to paint the bathroom?” He focused on the ground for the change: “With Trump’s inauguration.” “Ah,” I answered. “You mean the fact that no one has been talking about anyone else for the past ten years is going to change when he comes back to the White House? Whoopee.”

As Oscar Wilde once remarked: there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. And, somewhere, I imagine, Mr Trump has one mortal fear in this life: that no one will be talking about him. But, regardless of who talks about him and on what grounds, I will pray to God to grant me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change (which are many), the courage to change those things I can (which are few), and the nonchalance to ignore the difference. What it is in some way hard to comprehend right now is that changing the de facto constitution of the United States of America is something that, far from requiring the serenity of acquiescence for its impossibility, will actually be achieved, by the courage … or call it what you will … of Donald Trump. That is what will sink in when we now pay proper attention to his consistencies.

However, Kurt is not wrong: what will happen on 20 January is that we—the US—will have lost the baby. It will have moved significantly away from being a republic and will constructively have started to transition towards being a monarchy, and it may well yet stay that way (hell to pay sounds like the whole hog, though that is wild speculation, I recognise). Legality was the safe haven that Thomas More placed his faith in in the 16th century: as long as he abided by the law, he could not be accused of treason. Well, Henry VIII changed the law, and pulled the protection of silence out from under More’s feet, who never lost his faith in it, even though it was the law that lost him his head.

Legality’s a dangerous notion when those who obey the law become those who, for a large part, dictate the law: the oligarchs in America who were given leave to arrogate to themselves our money have now arrogated to themselves the only means we have to stop them. It’s a situation not without its sideline interest, much like Russia 2002. Who will end up in prison, who will end up suffering a serious poison attack, whose airplane will inexplicably plummet from the clouds? Of course, America is not and never could be Russia. Could it?

I think that, if he were here, Benjamin Franklin might think again how to answer to our dear Mrs Powel, if only to warn her: big countries are not suited to democracy. Because of its size and institutions, keeping America democratic needs a supreme effort, like birthing a baby. You can’t just expect the baby to make its way into the world on its own. Joe Biden assumed that him being in the White House was his bit done. But it would seem it needed something more than that: pushing at the contractions.

1. By Bureau of Engraving and Printing - http://www.newmoney.gov/newmoney/files/100_Materials/100_GlossyFront_EN_WEB031210.pdf, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10086032.