Larry Wilson: Trumpies lean toward an American monarchy

EDINBURGH — Cities such as this one, the elegant, disheveled, uppity, cultured, ancient, whisky-soaked, touristy-but-with-good-reason capital of Scotland, are living proof that most other advanced (and unadvanced) countries in the world spent most of their existence under the rule of a king.

Or a queen.

Or czar, shah, emperor, grand poobah, nabob, whatever.

We didn’t, in America, not for our nearly 250 years of existence,  except when we were a colony of  this very Great Britain, for which the Scots deserve little blame, as they will be glad to tell you about the English, who once ruled them as well, and partially do to this day.

Anyway, the main drag here is famously the Royal Mile, a cobbled big street leading down a long hill from the imposing Edinburgh Castle to Holyrood, the residence of the king (or queen) when the monarch happens to be in town. Royal. Mile. They have a people, an aristocracy and then, above that, a Your Royal Highness-ocracy, made up of ordinary human beings who lucked out in the genealogical lottery and get to pretend, as their subjects do as well, that they are a different breed of cat from you and me.

Along the way, these democratic days, the Royal Mile also is home to the Scottish Parliament, not to be confused with Westminster, the Parliament of the United Kingdom of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, which is still very much in London.

The Scots do have a kind of self-rule, and their representatives democratically yell at each other, quite often about the question of Scottish independence as a sovereign state separate from the UK.

But for now, along with reps in both parliaments, they also live in a nation with a Royal Family  — and a king, these days — as their head of state. Unlike our democratic republic. Which has never had a monarch.

And why would we ever want to change that?

Ever since George Washington adamantly refused the offer of his comrades in arms to essentially become King of America after their successful revolution, we Americans have entirely rejected the idea of living in a hereditary monarchy.

Because the very idea of it is just — weird. Maybe you have one good guy — an FDR, say — who you want to be head of state for an extended time during some crisis.

What on Earth could possess you to think that after his death the best person to take on the job next would be his son, his grandson, great-grandson, on down the line?

Lousy as our democracy may clearly be, given the increasingly decrepit last president, Joe Biden, and the appallingly authoritarian current president, Donald Trump, at least it beats handing down the boss-with-the-sauce job to — who? Hunter? Don Jr.? I’d much rather throw a dart at a selection of Midwest mayors to choose our next prexy than let those bums take the job.

But you know who, after a quarter of a millennium of pretty good presidents of the United States of America, is actively promoting creating a monarchy in the U.S.A.?

Trumpian tech bros, that’s who.

Not being a reader of reactionary blogs, I’d never heard of the joker who is mainly behind this plot against America. But Curtis Yarvin, it turns out, is a big anti-democratic hero to the likes of not only crazed Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel — but also to failed venture capitalists like J.D. Vance, the vice president of the United States, his good friend, who greeted him at a Trump-Vance inaugural party, presumably half-jokingly: “You reactionary fascist!” For almost 20 years, according to a new profile in The New Yorker, Yarvin has called for a “reboot” of the social order, proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to what the magazine’s Ava Kaufman calls “a C.E.O.-in-chief.”

“This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison ‘decivilized populations,’” she reports. Though he resents being called a “techno-fascist,” he doesn’t mind at all being known as a royalist. His current wife “first encountered Yarvin on YouTube, where she watched a video of him arguing against the legitimacy of the American Revolution.”

And so, as they say, it begins.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.