The New American Royalism
Or, why Trump is not exactly an authoritarian
Thank you to all who have been reading and sharing Civic Fields. The work is ours, but its growth over the last couple of months is entirely yours. As a way of saying thanks, we are going to try to grow the content of the newsletter just a bit. Most weeks from here on out, at the end of each post, you’ll find a few brief “Field Notes”—links, comments, and other tidbits related to our political life together. Meanwhile, I’ve really enjoyed hearing from you. Feel free to email me at ned@civicfields.org with comments, recommendations, or questions. And please take a minute to think about who else you know that might enjoy this newsletter and share it with them.
There is one film I wish every American would watch right now. Ironically, it comes with subtitles from France. It is the 1996 film Ridicule.
Set in the 1780s, it is the tale of an enlightened French nobleman named Gregoire Ponceludon de Malavoy (played by Charles Berling). When we meet him, he has begun a compassionate quest to improve the lives of the peasants who live on and near his land. This was the age of Louis XVI, an infamously vacillating ruler, husband to the controversial Marie Antoinette, and the last king to reign over France before the French Revolution brought his life and a whole royal epoch to an end. While so much has been written about what went wrong in the French Revolution, Ridicule offers a probing look at what was right about this world-changing event.
Ponder a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of peasants are sick and dying, infected with disease from working in the mosquito-saturated marshes of France. But consider a humanitarian heart, the noble Gregoire, who wants to rectify the crisis. Thankfully, he has an engineer’s head. He draws up an elaborate plan to drain the marsh, drive off the mosquitoes, and improve the everyday lives of the people.
But there is one thing Gregoire does not have: money. A noble title in France did not always mean prosperity. In order to realize his humanitarian end, Gregoire must ride by horseback to Versailles, the court of Louis XVI, and petition the king for funds. Ridicule chronicles his misadventures at Versailles, casting a damning eye on courtly life, power, and politics.
I have been thinking a lot about Gregoire as of late, as I watch the Trump administration and try to puzzle out what’s going on in American life.
Part of what we are trying to do here at Civic Fields is to get at root political principles. So far, we have been digging mostly at two roots. The first is the principle that lasting political health begins with the basic moral commitment to the neighbor, the stranger, or the Other. The second is that genuine political power is built on trust, not fear.
Here I want to begin to dig at principles of freedom and servitude.
Ridicule is an important movie for our moment because it shows what it is like to live in a country where everyone, even the powerful, lives in servitude to a Man on Top. It is a movie about what the Italian political theorist, Maurizio Viroli, calls the “liberty of servants,” in contrast to the “liberty of citizens.”
The distinction between these two kinds of liberty is subtle but crucial. Looking at the ancient world helps clarify. In the Greco-Roman world, indentured servanthood and slavery were common. But servants and slaves could be, and often were, free to roam, to have friends, to eat, drink, and even be merry. What made them “servants” was not a lack of liberty, but the fact that their liberty depended on the arbitrary will of another man. They were therefore always living under domination, even if they did not feel it adversely (of course, many of them did feel it quite adversely).
The “liberty of citizens” was, by contrast, a different kind of freedom. It was a “republican” freedom. The citizens of a republic served, yes, but they served their fellow citizens free of the direct domination of any other man. They were subjected to a greater power, yes, but that power was law, not a man. Law is king. This was a starting principle of republicanism.
In the United States right now, we have a republican Constitution that is clearly and explicitly written for the “liberty of citizens.” We are to be subjected in our civic doings, economic activities, and foreign entanglements only to laws, rather than to a man or a group of men. But for structural and historical reasons, the United States has always had a hard time figuring out what to do with the executive branch. In the last century, as the executive branch of the federal government has consolidated more and more power, we have become increasingly vulnerable to the arbitrary will of the person in the executive office.
But no president has embraced this power like Trump 2.0. Something genuinely new is happening in the United States.
We are witnessing a form of American Neo-Royalism (my own term).
It’s American because it comes out of a mash-up of American messianism, hero-worship, celebrity culture, imperialism, and Constitutional ambiguity around the limits of executive power.
It is Neo-Royal because it centers on a form of courtly politics.
There’s been a lot of talk about Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts. I take this talk seriously. It is not an overreaction. But it is in important ways a misdiagnosis. The truer thing to say is that Trump wants to be, and in a certain sense already is, king.
To be sure, he has no throne. But kings don’t need thrones. The only thing monarchs absolutely need is a court, and that is what Trump has built for himself, first by dramatically transforming the power-dynamics of the Republican Party into a dynasty project and now by shaking the rickety bones of our republican Constitution to satisfy his unquenchable need to be at the center of things.
To be clear, when I say “court,” I am not referring to the Supreme Court or any other part of the judiciary. Rather, I am referring to a royal court.
Ridicule is a movie about this kind of court. It is a movie about how power works in a courtly political system. That’s why we should watch it. In a court system, everything depends on proximity to the king via his ministers, attendants, entertainers, and lackeys. Intrigue, jostling, favor-giving, bribes, backbiting, wit, flattery, fawning, sex, scandal—these are the tools by which courtiers gain closer and closer proximity to the Man on Top. (They are also the means by which a courtier can fall from favor in an instant.)
At the center of the courtly system is not just a man. The issue here is not “autocracy” per se. Rather, it is the particular way the man exercises his authority: not by wisdom, nor by trust-building, not even just by threats, but through the exercise of a conspicuously arbitrary will. Power here is the brute power to do what one will because one wills it. Defying this power produces rage in the monarch. Threats follow.
Here, the contrast with authoritarianism becomes clearer. Five distinctions can be drawn:
An authoritarian rules with an iron fist. He is systematic, cold, calculating, and ruthless. But a king rules by his arbitrary will. He is volatile and capricious, sometimes generous, sometimes cruel.
Authoritarians rule by law. They rarely publicly deny the principle of “rule of law.” They use violence and threats of violence to get laws enacted by weak legislative bodies and see to it that they are enforced by compliant judges. Authoritarians thus use law itself to discipline a population into submission. Kings, by contrast, act as though they are above the law. They even say so. They enforce submission not to laws, but to their own will and whim. They always remind us that it is they who are in charge.
Authoritarians are rulers for life, but kings are dynastic, thinking in terms of generations rather than mere decades. Kings, therefore, are nepotistic. They put a great deal of emphasis on the family name.
Authoritarians have cabinets of henchmen committed to enforcing the power of the State. Kings have cabinets of courtiers committed to flattering the monarch so as to protect and preserve their own proximity to power.
Authoritarians govern, albeit brutally. The king’s central function in a court system, by contrast, is not in fact to govern. This is a gross misunderstanding of monarchy in these contexts. Rather, the king’s central function is to regulate the economy of benefits and threats within his court, which is an entirely different thing from governing a people.
I think the distinction between authoritarianism and royalism is an important one to draw because it helps explain what “domination” means in the United States right now. There are, to be sure, immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who are living under a severe authoritarian thumb in our country at present. We should not minimize the authoritarian elements of the current regime. But the majority of the country is not being subjected to police surveillance; the press is still relatively free; and as far as I know, there have not been any show trials in the judicial system. Therefore cries of “dictatorship” sound overwrought to many people. A lot of folks just don’t see it.
Nevertheless, I think anyone who is paying attention can see that in our civic doings, economic activities, and foreign affairs we are being daily subjected to the arbitrary will of one man.
This is Neo-Royalism.
This is how Trump governs. We are seeing it loud and clear in the tariff policy, or lack thereof. There is no policy here, only the exercise of power. Whatever the effects of the tariffs on the economy, and whatever rationalizations the Trump administration offers on any given day, the great advantage of tariffs for Trump, and the reason he’s been so consistently drawn to them, is that they allow him to distribute benefits and threats. They serve his power because they are arbitrary, not in spite of it. They create the culture of courtiers that Trump not only enjoys, but that is consistent with his perverse view of power.
“The most important reason for a court’s existence,” Maurizio Viroli writes, “is the practice of servitude.” In a court system, everyone is a servant because everyone depends on the economy of deference, favors, and flattery. The practice of servitude is what Trump is trying to build these days out of law firms, universities, news organizations, cultural institutions, and indeed out of us.
We are all now in his service. He’s making sure of that. We are among the more fortunate in the country if this just means paying more for household purchases. If things continue as they are now, for many it will also mean closing small business, shutting down farms, losing jobs, poorer health, less access to higher education, and immigrant neighbors living in fear.
But, to be clear, I am not making a consequentialist argument against the liberty of servants, as if it is bad only if things go bad. I am not making an argument about efficiencies or the right approach to effective government. Rather, I am making a principled argument. Even if things go well for many under Trump’s actions and inactions, we will remain under him, and that’s the core problem.
I first watched Ridicule decades ago. It taught me to hate courts. It shows how the courtly system corrupts everyone who comes within its orbit, no matter if they are clergy, military officers, financiers, or humane noblemen. This includes Gregoire, who goes from being an earnest and noble neighbor to a full-on courtier, capable of conniving, cruelty, and betrayal.
But I should have been paying more attention to my own country’s history, particularly its founding. When the American republic was formally founded in the late 18th century, “republicanism” signified one and only one thing to most ears: a state without a monarch. And to be without a monarch was to be rid of the court.
In a probing study of that founding period that should inform any Constitutional originalist interested in questions of executive power, the historian Kathleen Bartolini-Tuazon looks at what was the very first great debate in the history of Congress. The topic? What title to give to that executive officer created by Article II of the Constitution?
There were a few people, still bound to royal culture, who wanted to give the executive a title like “His Excellency” or, in one case, “His Highness the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties.” These folks feared that the executive might not be respected by the world’s monarchs without such grand honorifics.
But Bartolini-Tuazon shows that the vast majority of Americans in the early republic, including the likes of George Washington himself, not to mention James Madison, hated this idea. The executive was not a king and should not be treated like one.
So they settled on the diminutive title of “President,” an ascription at the time designating a person who “presides” over matters of government, but does not dictate them. It was a title meant to free Americans from the court, a title suited to the liberty of citizens.
Field Notes:
Speaking of Neo-Royalism, the Wall Street Journal (gift link) had a piece last week on Elon Musk’s harem, which is managed by a devout Mormon. Go figure.
The center-right New York Times columnist David Brooks, author of Bobos in Paradise and other books, is now calling for mass uprisings (gift link) in opposition to Trump’s “effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power.” This really is a remarkable call coming from the infinitely staid Brooks. Will the center-right listen?
If you have not read the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals’ April 17 ruling on the Garcia case, it is quite worth 10 minutes of your attention. The best of the conservative legal tradition is on display here. Will the Trump administration heed the persuasive appeal being made in the 4th Circuit’s denial of their legal appeal?