By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, February 20, 2026
I just finished recording the solo Remnant, and
when I emerged from my cave, I saw the news about the tariff ruling. I haven’t
had time to read much about it, and I wouldn’t write about it before listening
to the Advisory Opinions “emergency podcast” on it, which has not
dropped at the time of this writing. But I am very glad for the ruling, though
not a little dismayed that it wasn’t unanimous. Also, by the time this comes
out we might be at war with Iran. (Alas, there will be many, many G-Files—perhaps
thousands—before Congress rediscovers its role in declaring war). So I’m just
gonna clear out my mental junk drawer.
Let’s start with the news that the guy formerly known as Prince
Andrew was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office (he’s had the
title revoked, if you missed the point). Those suspicions were raised by the Epstein files.
I’m not a big royal watcher, and I really don’t want to write about Epstein.
But this is a big deal. The last time a member of the royal family was arrested
was more than 400 years ago, and that ended with Charles I’s head being
separated from his body, and the monarchy—the “head” of England—being separated
from the country. It was a big moment for parliamentary supremacy. Of course,
the monarchy was eventually restored—after the brief rule of Oliver
Cromwell—but the monarchy was forevermore restrained within a constitutional
order.
Andrew won’t be beheaded, of course. But maybe we’ll get
some updates on those old prank phone call jokes.
“Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”
“No, but can I interest you in Prince Andrew?”
Thank you, thank you. Please tip your server, and try the
fish and chips.
Like a lot of people, I’ve been intrigued by the fact
that the revelations in the Epstein files have been wrecking more careers in
Europe than in America (Nick Catoggio had a good newsletter
on this recently). I don’t think there’s just one reason why this is happening,
but there is one that interests me. I’ve observed on TV and on some podcasts
that I think this is partly because Europe is Americanizing and America is
Europeanizing. When I’ve said this, people have looked at me like I said, “And
that’s why the Federal Reserve should require we all put ferrets in our
rectums.”
So I’m going to explain what I mean.
I’m reminded of a passage in Hannah Arendt’s The
Origins of Totalitarianism:
According to
Tocqueville, the French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more
than it had ever hated them before, precisely because their rapid loss of real
power was not accompanied by any considerable decline in their fortunes. As
long as the aristocracy held vast powers of jurisdiction, they were not only
tolerated but respected. When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the
privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without
any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither
oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment;
wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can
understand why it should be tolerated.
Like a lot in Arendt’s work, I’m not sure every argument
she hangs on this insight is true, but it is interesting. And Tocqueville did
indeed make this observation:
“It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into
revolution. … Feudalism at the height of its power had not inspired Frenchmen
with so much hatred as it did on the eve of its eclipse. The slightest acts of
arbitrary power under Louis XVI seemed less easy to endure than all the
despotism of Louis XIV.” (Though my Kindle version of The Old Regime and the
French Revolution translates the same passage this way: “Revolutions are
not always brought about by a gradual decline from bad to worse. Nations that
have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming
oppression, often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to
grow lighter.”).
Anyway, the point is that when royals are actual rulers
they can get away with a lot, because in ages of aristocracy and monarchy,
aristocrats and monarchs have a lot of power, and the system that gives them
power confers different rules upon them than upon the little people.
Tocqueville writes a good bit about this in Democracy in America. He
points out that in feudal Europe, “Certain actions that dishonored a noble were
therefore indifferent on the part of a commoner; others changed character
according to whether the person who suffered from them belonged to the
aristocracy or lived outside of it.” Nobles had to settle quarrels with lances
and swords, while commoners just used sticks. The rule, according to
Tocqueville, was “villeins [commoners] do not have honor.” But he adds, “This
did not mean, as one might imagine in our day, that these men were
contemptible; it signified only that their actions were not judged according to
the same rules as those of the aristocracy.”
Things worked differently in America. One of the best
things the founders did was forbid titles of nobility (it would have been great
if they had followed—or had been able to follow—the egalitarian logic behind
this decision to its rightful conclusion and banned slavery as well). In
America there was, certainly in principle and in many respects in practice, the
belief that no one was born inherently inferior to another. “When men who live
in the heart of a democratic society are enlightened, they discover without
difficulty that nothing limits or fixes them and forces them to content
themselves with their present fortune.” You can, through dint of hard work,
elevate your status above the station you were born into. Maids didn’t resent
their employers, because their employers worked too. Work was the basis of the
democratic, egalitarian spirit.
This made some kinds of moral double standards a kind of
sin against the fundamental assumptions of the regime. The idea that simply
being richer or having a “better” bloodline gave you special license to behave
immorally was quite simply un-American or un-democratic as Tocqueville
understood the term. This might give you some insight into why I find the new
right’s infatuation with “heritage Americans” to be so grotesque.
Today, the British monarchy doesn’t have a lot of power.
Yes, it has more power than average citizens, but its function is mostly
ceremonial, mythic, or vibes-based. It’s great for tourism, Netflix series, and
gossip pages. But King Charles III can’t order any executions or invasions, and
if he tried, the monarchy would almost certainly be abolished. In other words,
today’s royals don’t have a lot of old-fashioned “privileges.” Instead, being a
royal is a privilege granted by the people. And Andrew abused his
privilege by being a member of the Epstein entourage.
Tocqueville did warn about aristocracies of wealth, or
“aristocracy of manufacturers” (he used both terms), in America. The Epstein
story is probably not exactly what he had in mind, but it’s close. The idea
that the super-rich and the super-connected have exempted themselves from
bourgeois morality in their private lives while preaching it in public is at
the core of a lot of populism these days. Some of it is understandable and
defensible. Some of it is absolutely bonkers (think of all the QAnon nonsense).
But that is not the only attitude out there. There are
also a lot of people who like this new aristocracy—if it aligns with
their brand of populism or serves their political agenda. With the remarkable recent
exception of Sen. Jon Ossoff, progressives who rail against “the
billionaire class” do not include George Soros in their blistering
denunciations of the “billionaire class.” Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick, and, duh,
Donald Trump are largely exempt from the indictments of right-wing populists.
Donald Trump’s defenders often acknowledge
(if inadvertently) his apparent corruption, but they say it’s fine because it’s
out in the open and he’s being “transparent.” Caligula was transparent and out
in the open, too. That’s not a defense of Caligula. In 2016, Trump quite
brilliantly defused charges of corruption by essentially admitting
to being in on the corruption in the past, giving him the expertise to fight
for the forgotten man.
“And I will tell you this, I know the system far better
than anybody else and I know the system is broken…” he said
in one typical exchange during a 2016 primary debate, “because I know it so
well because I was on both sides of it, I was on the other side all my life….”
A decade later, he held up that promise—if by “the
forgotten man” you mean Donald Trump.
Trump’s second presidency is nothing if not a relentless
exercise in promoting his cult of personality and settling affronts to his
exalted status. Just yesterday, his subalterns unfurled a
banner of his face on the Department of Justice. He has pushed to use the
instruments of government to punish those who have offended him. Like Napoleon
III’s effort to turn Paris into an “imperial city,” he is trying to redraw
Washington along similar lines, down to drenching the Oval Office in gold and
constructing a massive White House ballroom. Like 18th-century
monarchs, he has blurred the distinction between the nation’s honor and his
own. Crossing him, he often says, is treason, because Trump is—in his mind—l’état.
Or just look at his beloved tariff powers that he claimed
were absolute, until today. Forget the economic objections, or the
constitutional ones. The thing that he likes most about the tariff power—like
other emergency powers—is that he can (or thinks he can) use them unilaterally,
based on his own personal feelings and whims. That’s a regal power, not a
presidential one.
This stuff is orders of magnitude more grandiose than
anything we’ve seen in living memory from American presidents. But the
temptation to confer a kind of royal status upon presidents is not new. I don’t
have room to run through a lot of examples, but I’ll offer two. It wasn’t Trump
who invented the idea that “when the president does it, that means that it is
not illegal.” That was Richard
Nixon (or maybe Andrew Jackson or maybe John Adams). Second, during the
Monica Lewinsky saga, President Bill Clinton unsuccessfully argued that his
Secret Service detail could not be compelled to testify against him because it
was in effect a praetorian guard. At the time, many of Clinton’s defenders
celebrated the novel theory.
Being a royal is not quite synonymous with being an aristocrat
anymore. It’s a role for ribbon cuttings and nostalgia, because there is no
real power behind the title. This is what I mean when I say Europe is becoming
Americanized. The idea that one is exempt from the rules of the liberal order
just because one inherited a title arouses rage. Royals are in some respects
employees now, stage actors assigned a part to play. And they can be fired for
moral turpitude.
In America, where offense at royal privilege and
aristocratic arbitrary power seems like an ancient hang-up for American
revolutionaries, some people have grown enamored with the form of such
privilege, and in some cases—Curtis
Yarvin and Adrian
Vermeule come most immediately to mind—they even argue for the formal
reconstruction of such rule. Others ransack anti-liberal Catholic doctrines
from the European past in the hope of slapping them onto the American system.
Many other normal Americans don’t go so far, but they
nonetheless subscribe to a kind of neo-royal thinking when it comes not just to
the very rich and the very powerful, but the very famous as well. They like the
soap operas of sex tapes and other forms of salaciousness. They don’t expect
the Eloi to follow the rules of
the Morlocks—at least not the Eloi they like.
I’ve been rewatching Yellowstone, an utterly
compelling fictional soap opera about the Dutton clan. It is remarkable how
much the show fits this slice of the zeitgeist. The whole show works on medieval
notions of morality. The Duttons will talk of evil, but often evil is
defined the way Trump defines treason—trying to take what is theirs. No one
more than Beth, the daughter of the family patriarch and avowed follower of Nietzsche,
typifies the moral logic of this neo-royalist nihilism.
“I care about you, I care about Kayce, I care about Rip,”
Beth tells
her father.
The father, the good king, responds, “Well, if you care
about them, then you need to care about having some morality in the way you
fight.”
Beth replies, “There's no such thing. Not in a kingdom.
And that's what this is. There is no morality here, Dad, none. There is keep
the kingdom or there is lose the kingdom.”
Later, even the good king, John Dutton, comes to a
similar conclusion: “Let me tell you what fair means. Fair means one side got
exactly what they wanted in a way that the other side can't complain about.
There's no such thing as fair.”
Look, I like the show, despite all of this stuff. But I
don’t like this “stuff” in American politics. Of all the myriad problems with
this multi-pronged effort to import the rules and thinking of the ancien
régime into American politics, the most relevant one is that the
reactionaries have forgotten the point about aristocracy. For all of its
hypocrisies and injustices, the aristocrats did have a conception of honor that
constrained them. The need to be virtuous or at least appear virtuous was taken
very seriously, and the doctrines, customs, and traditions that went into
notions of honor were developed over centuries. The neo-royalists skip over
such constraining notions of honor and simply go straight to power. Recreated
royalism—by whatever name you call it—is royalism without roots, without
context and custom. It’s just an argument about power leeching off nostalgia
and ignorance to pretend to be something more. It’s Nietzschean logic in the
costumes of Medieval Times or a Renaissance Faire.
When a reporter asked Donald Trump whether there were any
checks on his power on the world stage, he replied,
“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing
that can stop me, and that’s very good.”
No comments:
Post a Comment