Monarchy Is Not On The Menu
Anti-democracy forces know they will lose. For now, they're coping.
Fascists want one thing and it's fucking disgusting: A daddy to tell them what to do.
We saw this deep yearning for a disciplinarian – and abusive – father in the waning days of the 2024 election, when weird conservatives portrayed Trump not as a politician or even a national leader, but an angry father coming home to discipline his unruly children, the American people.
As fascism normalizer Tucker Carlson said in October, “You’ve been a bad girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking.” No one has ever needed therapy more urgently. Therapy for conservative men will be federally mandated after the revolution.
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Read about the most wild-eyed fans of 20th century authoritarians and you’ll find people – men particularly – who ache for an omnipotent father to tell them what to do, how to live. Life is hard, they cry out. Please take away my agency, my responsibility, and allow me to live the life of an automaton being controlled and manipulated by someone who knows what’s best for me, what’s best for us all. It’s why, as masked secret police round up American citizens, the libertarians among us demand for daddy to tread on their imagined enemies harder, ever harder. They are afraid. They live with constant fear.
The desire for a god-king resides at the center of the right-wing heart. I suppose it can be found in some left-wing hearts too, since life is indeed hard and consciousness can feel like a curse.
The right’s king fetish explains why their reaction to the nationwide No Kings protests last weekend was to declare victory in moving the Overton window away from the faltering project of multiracial democracy and toward monarchy. They watched as millions and millions of Americans – mostly normies alarmed at the first real threat to democratic self governance in the country’s history – gathered in towns and cities large and small and said in one voice that we do not have a king and we will never have a king in the United States, despite the best efforts of John Roberts, the Great Overseer of American authoritarianism.
Mostly ignored by mainstream media, the No Kings protests were unprecedented in scope. They may have breached the threshold of what constitutes a true anti-authoritarian movement. The No Kings action was perhaps the most important development of the second Trump term, if not the past decade of grappling with a major political party that has degenerated into fascism, a sort of anti-politics that desperately seeks the void.
Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop! Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels
— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) 2025-06-15T11:10:18.027Z
American conservatives watched this outpouring of pushback against the Trump regime’s (mostly) unchecked authoritarian impulses and they said hey look, monarchy is in the range of outcomes now. These folks gathering in solidarity across the country rejecting the idea of an unaccountable, all-powerful ruler are confirming my priors! They watched the political engaged and unengaged alike say no to the idea of a king and they said this is actually good for my backward, anti-human politics.
The right’s reaction to No Kings also betrayed their astounding ignorance of the history of monarchy and the blood-soaked struggle against the unchecked power of one man determined to dominate all others. We can now confirm that no one on the right has ever read a single book, history or otherwise.
The most generous interpretation of this idea, that we would have Nice Things like healthcare and a strong social safety net if only we had a king, is that pro-monarchy dullards truly believe this to be true. Maybe they really do think King Charles wields real power and sits atop the English government and dictates what folks can and can't have, what political actors can and can't pursue. And if they think this – if we want to be generous here – they were crushingly ignorant in ways that can't be corrected, only ignored.
They are either intentionally or unintentionally missing the entire point of representative democracy. A dignified life is not one in which you hope and pray to any god who will listen that the king is kind enough to give you healthcare and a decent job and a good education for you and your children. A dignified life is having a say in who represents you in the halls of power and pressuring them to do what's best for you and your community. There is no wishing in the latter scenario, there is no hoping that you will be blessed by the benevolent king, as my grandfather had advocated to me as an impressionable teenager.
Denny Carter
No one in the history of civilization has enjoyed a system in which their material lives were determined by a monarch's mood. Catch him in the wrong mood – maybe a hangover, maybe indigestion, maybe an imagined message from god – and you could find yourself roasting on a pyre, or enslaved for no reason but your ancestry. The ghosts of the untold millions who have died at the hands of kings would do well to haunt the shit out of right wingers on the X platform formerly known as Twitter posting happily about the potential for an American monarch. Three ghosts will visit you tonight. They will all tell you that you are a dumbass.
The Pro-Monarchy Bros Know They Will Lose
In this moment of democratic decay made possible by the systematic elimination of any and all limitations on capital, it's no surprise that someone like Curtis Yarvin has risen to the top of the fascist thought-leading hierarchy. He wears a motorcycle jacket so you know he's a Bad Boy. He has tousled hair. Don't mess with Curt.
Yarvin has long been a techno-fascism advocate who has deployed all manner of bad-faith arguments to advance his ideas: That democracy is inefficient, that democracy has run its course, that the Great Men can conduct a superior system of governance that will advance humanity into its next stages, which – in the right-wing imagination – sound bleak as hell. Yarvin has gone as far as using Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps the most important figure in the history of American democracy, to push the idea that Donald Trump needs – even deserves – king-like powers to make the radical changes necessary for a Glorious Future (In what might be the single grossest comment ever made, Yarvin once argued that Trump was "biologically suited" to be the country's first king). In Yarvin’s telling, FDR was an erudite version of Trump seizing the presidency and promising vengeance for anyone who stood in his way to make America great again (make sure working people had a little food to eat, in FDR's case).
It was Yarvin who years ago called for the next right-wing administration to shut down Ivy League schools and for Elon Musk to be appointed head of the executive branch, a plan that came to fruition for a while before imploding in all the most predictable, drug-fueled, egomaniacal ways.
Yarvin told The New Yorker in June that he's disgusted by the Republican Party's refusal to go all the way with the dissolving of American democracy and the implementing of an American monarchy. He dismissed the second Trump term a "vibes coup" and said Trump lacked the discipline to end the American experiment once and for all. Yarvin, an advocate for eugenics who seems to know he is on the wrong side of history, quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”
“If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” Yarvin wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.”
Yarvin knows the regime does not have the consent of the governed to carry out an actual coup – not that it matters to a corroded soul like Yarvin. Only the most pathetic Trump fanboys are going to fall to their knees and beg for a god-king to be their savior and help them deal with their lifelong daddy issues. You might feign shock over Yarvin's own father issues: Daddy Yarvin ruled his son "with an iron fist," according to "someone with close knowledge of the family." Curtis rejected that claim. His dad, he said, was a "good manager." A more loveless thing I've never heard.
The No Kings protests demonstrated that the American public is in no way ready to concede its republic to an addled old man and his court of surgically-altered fascist jesters. Right wingers might look at that outpouring of fierce opposition and cope by saying monarchy is now on the political menu for the United States. But like Yarvin, they know it's not. They know in their blackened heart of hearts that their cause is doomed, that we will have no king.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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