by Charles Lyons on May 5, 2014

Mrs. Powell: “Well, Doctor, what have we, a republic or a monarchy?”

Dr. Benjamin Franklin: “A Republic, ma’am, if you can keep it.”

Time has proven, Dr. Franklin, that we cannot keep our republic. The American Right will find it difficult to consider the unthinkable: that perhaps the Founding Fathers were wrong. This seems paradoxical until we consider the element of time, and how philosophies naturally grow over that duration. The Enlightenment ideals espoused by our Founding Fathers formed the foundation of American conservatism since the beginning. Even today, if we were to reset our society back to the government our Founders gave us, most of us on the reactionary Right would be pretty happy with that situation. That society had it all: Limited government, a landed aristocracy to establish hierarchy, minimal suffrage, low taxes, hard money, federalism, and liberty! There’s much to like and little to dislike.

Enter time. Where would the United States be in another quarter millennia after the reset? Since one thing followed another last time, a similar development would occur. That would return us back to where we are at the present time, a progressive nihilistic disaster run by lumbering, debt-ridden, bureaucratic managerial state. With the Enlightenment philosophies as the backing for that early form of America, it would once again follow the path of whittling away at the intricate structure set up by the Founders. How are we to deny the vote to anyone, if all men are equal? How are we to avoid allowing the courts and legislature chip away at our social infrastructure with progressive ideals that themselves are descended from the same Enlightenment dogma? History would repeat itself.

And so we might ask, what is the point? That a few generations may enjoy the republic just to have their posterity suffer once again under progressive democratic socialism? We on the Right desire law, order, and hierarchy. Another sign of a true reactionary — and all conservatives, as those who desire reality over the inexorable human desire for greater importance to the individual and its desires, are reactionaries — is the desire for stable governance. Gentle reader, has the United States ever been a stable country since its founding? On the contrary, it has been an sequence record of conflict and government expansion. Thus, why reset to this point in time? Why not go back further? The biggest reason is that 1776 is all that we on the American Right really know. The idea of a monarchy is truly foreign to us.

During the Founding, one man in particular favored a monarchist-style government. That man was Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton proposed the idea of an elective-monarch who operated in the confines of a constitution. His idea was rejected. If Hamilton had his way, it probably would not have mattered anyway. The constitutional monarchies that exist today are often worse off in terms of the “progress” they have made than we are. Most of them have evolved into socialist democracies with universal suffrage. The monarchs in many of those countries are merely figureheads. The personal lives of the English Royal Family has become as equally vapid as the celebrity worship found in Us Weekly or People magazine. If we are to have a monarchy, it must be one without suffrage. Americans will have to get over their monarchophobia. We have seen how the mob behaves. Do we really want to put them back in the driver seat?

This leaves us in an unsteady position. With the knowledge of the past, we must craft the future. And yet, where the past was error, we must throw out those ideas and replace them with others. The question is then one of quality or degree. How far back do we go, and what do we borrow from the distant past? We are like astronauts on a new world, looking at guidebooks of history and attempting to adjust what we find there to work for our new — or renewed — colony.

It is clear that the United States Government (USG) will collapse. This will be broader than a Great Depression style collapse, most likely a full on dissolution of the USG and the Union itself. Once this happens, the nation will Balkanize into new nation-states, and we must begin reforming something that resembles civilization. This much is inevitable, given the decay seen already. As we go into the lead-up to this downfall, we on the Right must ask ourselves: is it the Republic we wish to restore, or something far earlier?

Tags: collapse, conservatism, recreation

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