No Kings, Two Kings, One King?

In the last year or two, we have had many reminders of monarchy. There were the No Kings riots or protests this year and last: seven million protesters in the USA last October, 3,000 protests this March, and so on. Some of it was completely farcical, with Jane Fonda and Bruce Springsteen getting involved. Then the White House, in the spirit of irony, during the visit of Charles III to Washington, sent out a post entitled ‘Two Kings’. And, of course, there is that One King. Who just went to visit the One President.

And it is apt, all this, because it reminds us of the most basic things in all politics. Consult Aristotle, Book III of the Politics. Or consult the Bible, the Book of Samuel. Kings are the fundamental elements of politics.

To King or Not to King, That is the Question.

Let’s go through all three enumerations of the title.

1. One King is the simplest ideal of all politics. This idea unites Alexander the Great, Justinian, Dante and Charles V. This is the idea that all the world, or all of the world that counts, the countable world, is or should be under one king. This is because there is one world, and should therefore be one order, one law, and these under one god and one king. Everyone knows about Alexander the Great. Justinian was responsible for the Code that reminded everyone that the emperor was dominus mundi, lord of the world. Dante wrote a book called De Monarchia which said that, indeed, one king should rule one world. And this idea only faded out in the time of Charles V, though some men, like his secretary Gattinara, still hoped that he might rule the world. 

Once, all the world was ruled by kings. Everyone was optimistic. One king here, and, if we were lucky, our one king would defeat all the others. But now we only have a few monarchies (this is a very good map): in Spain, Holland, Sweden and some other places, but on a large scale only in Arabia and in wherever the King of England is still Head of State. So Charles III is an important figure: more or less keeping the flame of monarchy alive, and preventing it from declining into Byzantine or Ottoman conspiracies of the Kashoggi sort, bowstrings and whatnot, and also preventing it from becoming an oft-denied appurtenance of official democracy, whereby we have de facto elective monarchies. True monarchy is not de facto, it is de jure: it is established in law. And a king, like Charles III, is a great reminder of how a king can be in law. This is a paradox: since the king is above the law, also below it. ‘Paradox?’ you ask. Paradox, say I: but since all politics is paradoxes this should not dismay us. 

Perhaps it is a strange fancy but I imagine that everyone in the world looks on England with respect only because we have managed to maintain the mystery of monarchy. The Papacy is first in status. But the Emperors are gone (no Kaisers, no Tsars, no Krals) and we only have one King left. And I suspect that Trump, Macron, Erdogan are envious: since they, too, would like to be a true monarch and not an apparent or momentary one. There are mysteries here, and everyone will be sadder when the mystery of monarchy lacks a manifestation, when it becomes nothing more than an idea. We cannot do without it. Thinking we could do without it was the mistake of the No Kings people.

2. Two Kings is a joke, of course. It is a title given to a picture of the King and the President standing next to each other. It is ironical. But the irony was missed by people like Gavin Newsom, who said, “One is the King of the UK, the other is the King of Bulls***.” On the other hand, Trump himself, chastised the CBS reporter Norah O’Donnell, saying: “I’m not a King, if I was a King, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.” From a strict dominus mundi point of view there can only be one King, so it is convenient for the UK that the US does not have one: but one sees how the President, ever since the days of George IV (Washington), has served as a sort of surrogate king: a vulgar king, a bullish king, a bookish king, a priapic king – you know, all those Johnsons, Roosevelts, Wilsons and Kennedys. The American Pseudo-King is a very odd fish. Not very constitutional, unlike our King. Our King had his wings trimmed in 1649, 1660, 1688, 1714 etc. Remember how even Anne chaired Cabinet. The Civil List solved the real problem of the king, which had always been insolvency. The only kings who were solvent were Henry VII, famously extractive, and Henry VIII, who benefited from his father’s extractions, and then his own, dissolving the monasteries and so on. Elizabeth was like Blair for a time, but became Brown after agreeing to support the Netherlands against Spain, and the Stuarts had no chance in hell of balancing the books. They simply could not do it, and London would not let them do it. Remember: Charles I fell out with Parliament, and Charles II took secret salary from France. Over the Atlantic, the President began as a sort of Whiggish wing-trimmed bird. But he escaped the cage of constitutionalism in two ways: one by taking part in grotesque and gaudy and positively Eatanswillish electioneering, and the other by holding in reserve the capacity to engage in a fairly free foreign policy. That is American politics: on its persuasive side, it is brash and vulgar; on its authoritative side, it is extremely dignified, official and military. British politics, by contrast, is duller on both fronts. Think a Major or Starmer accent. But we held onto our King.

3. No Kings is a storm in a teapot for blue-haired and blue-rinsed Late Anarchists. But it is actually very interesting that this protest against Trump, generalised to be a protest against ‘Populists’, was articulated using the language of kingship. ‘No Kings’ is, in fact, the great rival to ‘King’. If ‘King’, as I say, or ‘One King’, is the most fundamental politics in the world – Ozymandias, Sargon, Montezuma et al. – then ‘No Kings’ is the cause of the subtlest politics in the world. It announces the politics of the second stage. It announces the politics of doubt. I am not saying ‘No Kings’ is itself subtle. It is not. But it can be the cause of subtlety, trickiness, deviousness. And we should know all about it because the peoples, in the plural, who invented ‘No Kings’ and developed it into elaborate and rival systems are our cultural ancestors. 

‘No Kings’ was invented by the Greeks, Romans and the Israelites. The Greeks were open-minded and were not wholly opposed to kings, but not wholly for them either. Plato and Aristotle took kingship quite seriously. But of course the Greeks invented the grand opposite to monarchy in democracy. Instead of the rule of one, the rule of many: the kratos of the demos. ‘Power to the people.’ Democracy was heavily biased against hierarchy and superiority. Rulers were selected by lot. All citizens could be present at the assembly. The Romans, however, were darker in their hatred of monarchy. Not as positive as the Greeks, they threw out their kings in 509 BC after the rape of Lucrece, and decided never to have a king again. But all their institutions were negative. Instead of one king they had two consuls. Instead of ruling perpetually, they ruled for one year. This was kingship divided into two, twice, and also hemmed in by plebeian institutions and a habit of law. Over 400 years later, Caesar said he was no king, and was assassinated because no one believed him. Augustus, as you all know, said that he had restored the republic. Finally, the Israelites were extremely reluctant to have Kings. Read about Gideon in the Book of Judges. Finally, they prevailed upon YHWH to let them have one, like everyone else, and the Bible is, from one point of view, a satire about the entire failure of kings to act in a kingly way. The true king, as Gideon said, was God, and Jesus demonstrated the truth of this by saying his Kingdom was Not of This World.

So the ‘No Kings’ riots and protests, though stupid and exasperating to watch, and almost illiterate in their suggestion that Trump is a ‘King’, come out of a long tradition of hostility to kings. Of course this modern ‘No Kings’ stuff is also filtered through Enlightenment Anarchism: that is, the innocent belief that humans are good by nature and should be ruled by blue-haired and blue-rinsed reason. This is, plainly, one of the silliest things that humans have ever thought. But it is alive and strong in the dim-watted mental bulbs of the ‘No Kings’ people and their many Intellectual Wizards.

I hope you don’t mind all this historical backwash, but I think it is good for us all to contemplate the long past. There is no way we can make sense of our foolish latest political slogans without seeing that they come from very deep and ancestral anxieties about the right way to be political. 

And all of this reminds us that, in the end, and in the beginning, our major political axis is between the extreme point that we should have One King and the extreme point that we should have No Kings. Most of us, in practice, are content to live somewhere in between.

Oh, did you see that very amusing, ‘No Kings, Just Vaccines!’ protest at the NIH headquarters? That’s how silly and determinedly wrongheaded the entire ‘No Kings’ business is. For a start, it makes clear that those daft enlightened folk know nothing about vaccines. But better the devil they don’t know, since they hate Trump so much. 

‘No kings’ is one of the most fatuous and empty political slogans of all time: an admission of the lack of profundity of our aggrieved adolescent and senescent protesters, who appear to know nothing about the history of the world or the origins of political order, and who lack the few traditional beliefs that could fill the gaps in their understanding. We need kings, in fact, we want kings. History should have taught us this. But I am glad that the ‘No Kings’ talk about ‘Kings’ as this could be the beginning of political wisdom for them. As we saw, we have a history with political wisdom in it.

• The Israelites taught us that kings are inevitable but that they are most dangerous when they become idols. 
• The Greeks taught us to hope that kings shall be wise. 
• And the Romans taught us that saying we do not want kings only forces our kings to pretend not to be kings while remaining – kings. 
• Oh, and the English, one mustn’t forget the English, have taught us that kings can be constitutional. The United Kingdom, for all its faults, remains exemplary in suggesting that what we should do about kings is, first and foremost, frankly admit that we have one.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.