Eric Nelson, Professor of Government at Harvard University, will be appearing at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, on Thursday, 10/23 at 7PM to discuss his new book The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. I spoke with Professor Nelson by phone to ask him how his revisionist account relates to our government today.
Brookline Hub: The premise of The Royalist Revolution is that the founding fathers of the United States were not rebelling against the British monarchy—they were rebelling against parliament—the congress of England. What parallels can we draw to today’s disaffection with our U.S. congress? Do you think we’re heading toward another revolution?
Eric Nelson: No, I don’t think there will be a second revolution. But if you trace the trajectory of the American Revolution, it does have lessons for how we can think about our current difficulties in government. What we are experiencing now is actually a typical pathology of a mixed monarchy — and that in fact is the sort of government the revolution was fought to secure for us.
If you rewind to the period before the two parliamentarian revolutions of the seventeenth century you had the King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, each of which had its own independent prerogatives and each of which was required to agree in order for law to be made. But in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, the king had been subjected to parliament. The U.S. founders felt that the Lords and Commons had usurped the power of the monarch. They felt the colonies were the King’s to govern, and, in essence, they wanted to return to the Stuart constitution of the seventeenth century. The Constitution of 1787 was the final result of their labors.
So in our mixed monarchy, just as in the English mixed monarchy under the Stuarts, there are effectively three constituent parts of the legislature (President, House of Representatives and Senate) that must agree in order for the law to be made. Crises develop when any of these constituent parts strain their prerogatives. It is, for example, not unconstitutional for the House to refuse to pass a budget or for the Senate to refuse to confirm all nominees of the executive branch–but if either did this, the results would be catastrophic. Our system relies on norms and prudential restraint.
But then we have problems such as Congress refusing to raise the debt ceiling until Obamacare is abolished. This is structurally rather like the English constitutional crisis of the 1630s and 1640s: the House of Commons refused to grant Charles I the funds he needed to defend the kingdom from invasion unless he agreed, among other things, to abolish the Church of England. This provoked Charles to try to rule without Parliament, which required him to strain his prerogative powers in increasingly exotic ways (most famously, by raising “ship money”), which then further antagonized the Commons. Similarly, in recent months, the President has responded to Congressional intransigence by attempting to rule without Congress, through dubious recess appointments, executive orders, and so on. It’s a familiar, and very toxic, dynamic of a mixed monarchy.
The difference (between the U.S. government today and the British monarchy) is we can throw the bums out. The electorate can step in and vote them out. We have a mechanism to hold their feet over the fire and break the impasse. That’s what happened, for example, with the 2008 election.
BH: If Hilary Clinton is elected president in 2016 we will have had either a member of the Bush family or the Clinton family as head of the U.S. government for more than 20 of the last 28 years. How is the country any less dynastic then it was when it was formed in 1776?
EH: It’s not a new story, actually. You had the Adams family in the 19th century (John Adams, 2nd President of the United States, and his son, John Quincy Adams, the 6th U.S. President.) We also had two Roosevelts and could have had two or three members of the Kennedy family if Robert Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated (other brother Ted Kennedy ran and lost the nomination to be the democratic presidential candidate in 1980 to the incumbent President Jimmy Carter.) These people have extraordinary name recognition across the country that gives them an obvious advantage over party newcomers.
BH: About 34% of U.S. adults watched at least some of the Prince William/Kate Middleton wedding in 2011. Why do you think America is still so fascinated with British royalty centuries later?
EN: Was it really that many? Human beings are susceptible to this kind of idolatry, to feelings of awe and reverence. The British monarchy captures all the pomp and ceremony and display. It becomes fetishism. In the U.S. we are starved for an outlet for our adulation so we look abroad. Some say U.S. celebrities and rock stars are stand-ins for royalty in this country, but it’s not the same thing.
It wasn’t the political role of the king himself that the founders came to despise. They didn’t object to monarchical power. They didn’t like all the trappings of royalty.
BH: What inspired you to write this book?
EN: I actually had no intention of writing it, but about four years ago a group of my students came to my office hours complaining that there was no course on the American Revolution at Harvard. This seemed unthinkable in a place so close to where George Washington formally took command of the continental army! So I developed a syllabus for a course on the American Revolution and I began teaching it in the fall of 2009. It was in doing research for the course that I started to see the story of the revolution differently. I thought I might write an article or two about it, but it gained momentum and became this book.
BH: Who are some of your favorite historians and political theorists? What are you reading now?
EN: I have been lucky that many of my scholarly heroes have also been my teachers: Bernard Bailyn, John Pocock, and Quentin Skinner.
I just read A Great and Wretched City by Mark Jurdevic…about Machiavelli, Florence, and political theory. I’m also reading The Once and Future King by F. H. Buckley — which touches on some of the same themes as my book, although in service of a very different argument — and Forbidden Music by Michael Hass, about Jewish composers banned by the Nazis in the Third Reich.
BH: What can people expect from your Brookline Booksmith event?
EN: I hope I won’t talk too much! I’ll give a brief introduction to the argument I present in the book and I’ll then look forward to the discussion.
—By Jennifer Campaniolo