The Right’s Strange Romance With Monarchy

This year, America marks 250 years since declaring independence from a monarch.

That milestone should invite reflection, gratitude, and a renewed commitment to the principles that made the American experiment possible. It should also force a serious question upon the political right: do we still believe in the system our forefathers risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to establish?

There was a time when accusing someone on the American right of wanting a monarchy would have sounded like an unserious caricature. Conservatives, at least in the American tradition, were supposed to be the people who defended the Constitution, celebrated the American Revolution, revered federalism, and warned against the dangers of centralized power.

That is what makes the growing fascination with monarchy among certain corners of the populist right so bizarre.

What once would have been dismissed as internet eccentricity has become a recurring theme among a small but increasingly vocal group of activists, influencers, and intellectuals who argue that America’s constitutional republic has failed and should be replaced by something more hierarchical, more centralized, and more openly authoritarian. In some cases, the language is explicitly monarchist. In others, it is dressed up as “postliberalism,” “integralism,” “Christian order,” or the need for a “Caesar” figure who can defeat the left by wielding power more aggressively than the current system allows.

The trend remains a minority movement, but it is no longer invisible. A growing number of right-wing activists now openly flirt with the idea that the American experiment has run its course and that a constitutional republic under a system of federalism should give way to some form of centralized personal rule.

That absolutely SHOULD be rejected loudly and without apology.

Part of what makes this trend so difficult to discuss is that it sometimes travels alongside sincere religious searching. In recent years, many young men and women on the right have been drawn toward older Christian traditions, including Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, precisely because they are looking for order, rootedness, beauty, and moral seriousness in a culture that often feels hollow. That longing is not the problem.

To be clear, this is not an argument against Catholics, Orthodox Christians, or religious converts generally. Sincere Christian conversion should be welcomed, not mocked. Nor is this an argument that every person attracted to older liturgy, historic Christianity, or traditional social teaching is secretly plotting to crown a king.

The problem is when that religious searching becomes fused with a political ideology that treats monarchy, Caesarism, or centralized personal rule as the supposedly Christian answer to America’s problems. Some on the right are using Christian aesthetics and theological language to justify a political vision that is not merely foreign to the American constitutional order. It is also deeply at odds with the Christian understanding of fallen man, limited earthly authority, and the danger of placing too much trust in princes.

At the exact moment America should be remembering why it rejected monarchy, some on the right seem determined to rediscover the very temptation the American founding was designed to restrain.

America’s 250th Birthday Should Remind Us Why Monarchy Was Rejected

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is not just a patriotic commemoration. It is a reminder that America was born out of a direct rejection of monarchy as the ultimate political authority over a free people. America250, the official nonpartisan semiquincentennial effort, describes July 4, 2026, as a moment to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration and to reflect on the nation’s past while looking toward the future.

That reflection is badly needed.

The American Revolution was NOT a rejection of order. It was NOT a rejection of law. It was NOT a rejection of inherited wisdom, moral virtue, or religious conviction. It WAS a rejection of arbitrary power. The founding generation did not declare independence because they wanted chaos. They declared independence because they believed legitimate government must be bound by law, accountable to the people, and instituted to secure rights rather than violate them.

That is what makes today’s right-wing monarchist flirtation so perverse. It treats the very thing America escaped as though it were the cure for America’s problems.

The Declaration of Independence did not merely object to the personal behavior of King George III. It made a broader claim about the nature of legitimate government. Rights come from the Creator, not the crown. Governments are instituted to secure those rights, not manufacture them. And governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, not from bloodline, conquest, clerical approval, or the supposed necessity of a strong ruler.

That principle remains radical, and it remains worth defending.

America’s founding claim was not that every citizen would be virtuous, every election would be wise, every institution would remain healthy, or every generation would preserve liberty perfectly. The claim was that no man should be trusted with unchecked power over the rest of us.

That insight has NOT expired.

If anything, the chaos and corruption of modern politics should make us more committed to constitutional limits, not less.

Monarchy Is Not Conservatism

One of the most frustrating aspects of this trend is that it often presents itself as “conservative.” But in the American context, monarchy is not conservative. It is radical.

American conservatism, at its best, seeks to conserve the principles of the American founding: ordered liberty, natural rights, self-government, federalism, constitutional limits, religious liberty, private property, and the rule of law. Those principles are not compatible with hereditary rule, unchecked executive sovereignty, or the belief that civilizational decline can be solved by placing enough power in the hands of one man.

The Constitution reinforces the same basic structure. Article IV guarantees every state in the Union a republican form of government. The American system is not a pure democracy, and it was never designed to be one. But it is a constitutional republic, built on representation, separation of powers, federalism, and the idea that civil authority must be restrained because human beings are not angels.

That last point matters. The American founders did not design a limited constitutional system because they believed man was naturally good. They designed it because they understood man is fallen, ambitious, self-interested, and corruptible. That is not an anti-Christian insight. It is one of the most Christian assumptions embedded in the American constitutional order.

Monarchy asks us to move in the opposite direction. It assumes that the solution to disorder is not more accountability, stronger limits, or a renewal of self-government. It assumes the solution is a ruler powerful enough to impose order from above.

That is not conservatism. That is political escapism.

A TRUE conservative does not look at 250 years of American self-government and conclude that the experiment should be discarded because our generation finds liberty difficult. A true conservative asks how the inheritance can be restored, repaired, and passed on.

Policy institutions Have Drifted Toward Postliberal Populism

The monarchist impulse does not usually appear in isolation. It often grows out of a broader set of postliberal, neoreactionary, and populist frustrations with the modern American order.

Some of those frustrations are understandable. Many Americans look around and see hollowed-out communities, collapsing trust in institutions, economic disruption, cultural hostility toward traditional beliefs, the growth of an unaccountable administrative state, and a political class that often seems insulated from the consequences of its own decisions. It is not irrational to conclude that something has gone badly wrong.

The danger comes when legitimate frustration hardens into a rejection of liberty itself.

That danger is not confined to fringe online spaces. Some of America’s policy institutions have also traveled, or at least flirted with, this postliberal and populist road. The Heritage Foundation is one of the clearest examples. For decades, Heritage was broadly associated with the fusionist conservative project: limited government, free enterprise, national defense, traditional values, and constitutional restraint. Its Mandate for Leadership series famously sought to give conservative administrations a governing blueprint. Heritage itself notes that Mandate for Leadership was first published in January 1981 as a conservative plan of action for the Reagan Administration and that, by the end of Reagan’s first year, nearly half of its ideas had been implemented.

In recent years, however, Heritage has increasingly aligned itself with the populist and national conservative wing of the right. Project 2025, Heritage’s presidential transition project, describes Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise as a collective effort by hundreds of volunteers to advance conservative policy ideas for a future administration. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with preparing conservatives to govern. In fact, the right has often suffered from entering government without the personnel, discipline, or institutional knowledge needed to implement its own agenda.

But preparation for governing is not the same thing as preserving constitutionalism.

A policy institution can begin with legitimate complaints about bureaucracy and still end up embracing a vision of executive power that places too much faith in centralized control. That is the concern with portions of the new institutional right. The critique of the administrative state is often correct. The proposed remedy, however, increasingly sounds less like a restoration of Congress, federalism, and constitutional limits, and more like a demand that the “right” executive wield the machinery of government more forcefully.

The shift can also be seen in the way some institutions now talk about family, economy, culture, and national renewal. Heritage’s 2026 report Saving America by Saving the Family argues for removing obstacles to healthy family formation and restoring the family to the center of American life. The Associated Press described the report as reflecting “an expanded view of government’s role” in Americans’ lives.

The concern is not that marriage, family, and cultural health are unimportant. They are profoundly important. The concern is that the right increasingly treats every social problem as something to be solved through national power.

That is where the postliberal critique becomes unstable.

Postliberal thinkers often argue that modern liberalism has weakened family, faith, community, national identity, and the common good. Some critiques focus on social liberalism and the sexual revolution. Others focus on neoliberal economics, globalization, deindustrialization, and the ways market ideology has disrupted local communities and working families. Still others attack procedural constitutionalism as too weak to withstand hostile institutions.

Not every person making those arguments is a monarchist. Many are simply trying to explain why modern America feels socially fragmented, economically insecure, and spiritually exhausted.

But there is a path from those critiques to something much darker.

If liberalism is blamed for every cultural and economic failure, then liberty itself can start to look like the problem. If constitutional limits are dismissed as procedural obstacles, then concentrated power starts to look efficient. If pluralism is treated as weakness, then coercion starts to look like moral seriousness. If self-government is viewed as too slow, too messy, or too corrupt, then a strongman begins to look like a shortcut.

That is how populist frustration can drift into Caesarism.

This is why the institutional right should be especially careful. A think tank devoted to policy should not become a permission structure for post-constitutional politics. It should not answer the failures of the administrative state by empowering a different faction to command that same administrative state. It should not respond to cultural decay by implying that virtue can be rebuilt from Washington, D.C. It should not trade the conservative task of limiting government for the populist temptation of wielding government.

The post-industrial critique also deserves care. It is true that many communities have been damaged by deindustrialization, globalization, corporate consolidation, and the erosion of local economies. But a monarchy has no special answer to any of that. Neither does Caesarism. A king does not magically restore manufacturing, rebuild civil society, repair family formation, or make a nation virtuous. More often, centralized power protects entrenched interests, rewards loyalists, punishes dissenters, and replaces organic community with political command.

The problem with parts of the populist right is not that they recognize real decay. They often do. The problem is that some have concluded that decay can only be answered by power.

That conclusion SHOULD be rejected.

America does not need a ruler who claims to embody the people. It does not need policy institutions preparing the ‘right’ to become better managers of centralized power. It needs citizens willing to govern themselves, lawmakers willing to reclaim legislative authority, states willing to reassert federalism, churches willing to form people faithfully, families willing to endure, and communities willing to rebuild from the ground up.

The failures of modern America are real. But they are not proof that liberty has failed. They are proof that liberty requires virtue, responsibility, local strength, and constitutional limits to survive.

Christianity Does Not Require an Earthly King

The strangest part of the monarchist turn on the right is the way some try to baptize it in Christian language.

The argument usually goes something like this: liberalism has failed, democracy has produced decadence, secular institutions are hostile to Christianity, and therefore Christians need a ruler who will restore moral order. Some versions are Catholic integralist. Others borrow from Eastern Orthodox ideas of historic cooperation between church and emperor. Others are less theologically developed and simply amount to the belief that America needs a strong Christian ruler to crush its enemies.

But Christianity does not teach that political power is the path to salvation. It does not teach that the Kingdom of God arrives through state coercion. It does not teach that righteousness can be imposed by crowning the right man.

One common argument from Christian monarchists is that because God appoints, ordains, or raises up rulers, monarchy must therefore be the preferred form of Christian government. They may point to kings in the Old Testament, the language of Christ as King, or passages such as Romans 13 to argue that earthly hierarchy is divinely sanctioned and that political authority flows downward from God through rulers to the people.

But that argument confuses God’s sovereignty over rulers with God’s endorsement of every political arrangement those rulers occupy.

Christianity certainly teaches that God is sovereign over nations and rulers. Scripture repeatedly shows God raising up leaders, judging kings, humbling empires, and using even pagan rulers for His providential purposes. But the fact that God can use a ruler does not mean that the ruler’s office, actions, or form of government is morally ideal.

God used Pharaoh in the story of the Exodus. That does not make Pharaoh a model for Christian government.

God used Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. That does not make the Babylonian Empire the preferred political order of God.

God used Caesar’s census to bring Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. That does not make Roman imperial rule a Christian ideal.

This is the category error at the center of the monarchist argument. God’s providence is not the same thing as God’s approval.

Romans 13 teaches that civil authority has a legitimate role in restraining evil and maintaining order. It does not teach that Christians must prefer monarchy, empire, or unchecked centralized power. It also does not erase the many biblical examples of rulers abusing their authority, persecuting the faithful, or demanding obedience that belongs to God alone.

The apostles themselves recognized this limit. When commanded by governing authorities to stop preaching in the name of Christ, Peter and the apostles responded, “We ought to obey God rather than men.” That single statement is fatal to any theology that treats earthly rulers as unquestionable instruments of divine will.

Scripture Warns Against Concentrated Earthly Power

The Bible’s treatment of monarchy is far more cautious than monarchists often admit.

In 1 Samuel 8, when Israel demands a king “like all the nations,” God tells Samuel that the people have rejected Him as king. Samuel then warns them what an earthly king will do. He will take their sons. He will take their daughters. He will take their fields. He will take their servants. He will take their livestock. He will take the fruit of their labor.

The repeated warning is unmistakable. The king will take.

That passage should haunt every Christian tempted by romantic visions of monarchy. Israel’s demand for a king was not presented as a mature embrace of godly order. It was, in large part, a desire to imitate the nations around them and place trust in a visible earthly ruler.

Even Israel’s best kings were deeply flawed. Saul became jealous and tyrannical. David, though a man after God’s own heart, abused his power grievously. Solomon began with wisdom but ended by burdening the people, multiplying wealth, multiplying wives, and turning toward idolatry. After Solomon, the kingdom fractured. Many kings led the people into corruption, false worship, injustice, and ruin.

If monarchy were the uniquely Christian form of government, Scripture gives us a remarkably strange record of it. The biblical story does not romanticize kings. It repeatedly shows how quickly concentrated power can corrupt even those chosen for leadership. Christ Himself also rejected the worldly model of domination. In Matthew 20, Jesus contrasts the rulers of the Gentiles, who “lord it over” others, with the model He sets before His followers: servant leadership, humility, and sacrifice.

That does not mean civil government has no legitimate authority. It does not mean Christians must embrace anarchism. It does not mean every monarchy in history was equally wicked or that every republic is automatically virtuous. But it does mean Christians should be especially skeptical of political arrangements that concentrate power, elevate rulers into symbols of national salvation, and encourage people to place messianic expectations on the state.

For Christians, Christ is King. That does not require an earthly king. In fact, it should make us more skeptical of every political movement that tries to locate salvation, order, or national redemption in a man with enough power to command the rest of us.

The crown belongs to Christ.

Civil rulers, whether presidents, governors, legislators, judges, or kings, are merely men. They should be treated accordingly.

The American Experiment Has Not Run Its Course

The monarchist argument often depends on a spirit of surrender.

America is too far gone, they say. The institutions are too corrupt. The people are too decadent. The culture is too hostile. The Constitution is too weak. The left is too aggressive. The republic is too slow. Federalism is too messy. Liberty is too fragile.

Therefore, the American experiment has failed.

This is not courage. It is defeatism.

It is one thing to admit the country is in trouble. It is another thing entirely to conclude that the principles of liberty, consent, constitutionalism, and self-government should be abandoned because they require difficult work.

The American experiment has always faced crises. It survived the early fragility of the republic, foreign threats, civil war, economic depression, world wars, internal corruption, cultural upheaval, and repeated assaults on constitutional limits. None of that means the American system is indestructible. It is not. Free societies can collapse. Republics can decay. People can surrender their inheritance. But the proper response to decay is renewal, not submission.

Those who say America’s experiment has run its course are often really saying they no longer believe free people are capable of governing themselves. They no longer believe persuasion is enough. They no longer believe virtue can be cultivated apart from centralized coercion. They no longer believe constitutional limits are worth preserving if those limits prevent their preferred side from winning quickly.

That IS a dangerous confession.

America’s 250th birthday should not become an occasion for fashionable cynicism. It should be a reminder that the American founding was not inevitable, easy, or safe. It required people to believe that liberty was worth sacrifice. It required them to believe that self-government was possible. It required them to reject the false comfort of crown and throne.

The question before us is whether we still believe that.

A King Will Not Save the Country

Much of the monarchist rhetoric on the right flows from real frustrations. The administrative state is bloated and unaccountable. Congress often refuses to legislate clearly. Courts sometimes invent doctrine out of thin air. Federal agencies routinely stretch statutory language beyond recognition. Universities, media institutions, corporations, and bureaucracies often act with open hostility toward traditional values.

These frustrations are not imaginary.

But the answer to lawless institutions is not a lawless ruler. The answer to an unaccountable administrative state is not to place even more power in the hands of one man. The answer to cultural decay is not to abandon self-government. The answer to bureaucratic tyranny is not royal tyranny with better aesthetics.

A monarchy would not abolish the problem of human nature. It would intensify it.

Every argument for monarchy eventually runs into the same problem: what happens when the king is wicked, foolish, corrupt, cowardly, incompetent, decadent, or captured by bad advisors? What happens when the monarch is not your imagined philosopher-king, but your political enemy? What happens when the crown is inherited by someone who hates everything you believe?

The monarchist daydream depends on imagining the best possible ruler. The liberty-minded constitutionalist begins by asking what happens under the worst possible ruler.

That is the genius of the American system. It does not require us to pretend that rulers will be wise. It assumes they may be dangerous. It divides power accordingly.

Federalism recognizes that decisions should be made as close to the people as possible. Separation of powers recognizes that ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The Bill of Rights recognizes that there are areas of life into which government should not intrude. The First Amendment protects religious exercise while forbidding Congress from establishing religion, ensuring that faith is not turned into an arm of the state.

Those protections are not weaknesses. They are safeguards.

The Problem With “Christian” Statism

One of the great errors of modern politics is the belief that state power becomes virtuous when wielded by the right people.

Progressives make this mistake when they attempt to use government to engineer equality, redistribute wealth, regulate speech, and reorder society according to ideological fashion. But some on the right now make a mirrored version of the same mistake. They believe centralized power is dangerous only when controlled by the left. If controlled by the right kind of ruler, backed by the right kind of theology, it suddenly becomes a tool of restoration.

That is not liberty. It is just statism with different branding.

The Christian right should know better. If man is fallen, then no man should be trusted with unchecked power. If sin corrupts every human heart, then political authority must be limited. If conscience matters, then the state should not be turned into the enforcement arm of a preferred denomination. If the family, church, and local community are prior to the state, then political centralization should be resisted, not romanticized.

A Christian political order should not begin with the question, “How do we seize power and impose virtue?” It should begin with better questions.

How do we protect the space for families to raise children faithfully? How do we preserve religious liberty? How do we restrain the state from punishing dissent? How do we defend private property? How do we encourage virtue without coercing belief? How do we restore local self-government? How do we keep civil authority in its proper lane?

Those questions lead toward federalism, subsidiarity, constitutionalism, and ordered liberty. They do not lead toward a monarchy.

Liberty Requires Responsibility

Part of the appeal of monarchy is that it offers an escape from the burden of self-government.

A republic requires citizens. A monarchy requires subjects.

Citizens must deliberate, organize, persuade, build institutions, raise families, serve locally, hold officials accountable, and accept responsibility for the culture around them. Subjects can outsource those burdens to the crown.

That is why monarchy can appear attractive during periods of exhaustion. When politics feels chaotic, when institutions feel hostile, when elections feel disappointing, and when cultural trends seem overwhelming, the promise of a strong ruler can feel comforting. It offers simplicity. One ruler. One will. One direction. One sword to cut through the mess.

But that simplicity is a trap.

Liberty is harder than submission. Federalism is messier than centralization. Representative government is slower than decree. Persuasion is more frustrating than coercion. But those difficulties are not defects in the American system. They are part of the discipline of living as a free people.

A people that no longer wants the responsibilities of liberty will eventually find someone willing to relieve them of it.

America Does Not Need a Crown

The right does not need a king. It needs conviction.

It needs fathers and mothers who form their children. It needs pastors who preach truth without becoming court chaplains for political movements. It needs state lawmakers willing to reclaim legislative power from bureaucracies. It needs governors who respect constitutional limits. It needs citizens who understand their rights and duties. It needs local communities that can withstand national madness. It needs institutions that defend liberty rather than merely complain about its erosion.

Most of all, it needs to recover confidence in the principles that made monarchy unnecessary in the first place.

The American system is imperfect because it is operated by imperfect people. But its answer to imperfection is not to crown one of those imperfect people and hope he saves us. Its answer is to limit power, divide authority, protect conscience, preserve localism, and recognize that rights come from God, not government.

That is why the monarchist temptation SHOULD be rejected clearly, especially by Christians and conservatives.

A king will not save America. A Caesar will not restore virtue. A throne will not revive the family. A crown will not make the state holy.

America faces serious problems. We face societal strife, cultural confusion, economic pressure, institutional distrust, political resentment, and a federal government that often seems far removed from the constitutional limits it was meant to obey. None of that should be minimized.

But our answer cannot be to declare the American experiment dead.

Our answer cannot be to trade citizenship for subjecthood.

Our answer cannot be to commemorate 250 years since independence by longing for the kind of rule our forefathers rejected.

The path forward is not backward into monarchy. It is forward into a renewed commitment to ordered liberty, constitutional government, federalism, faith, family, local community, and the hard work of self-government.

The right should not be asking for a king. It should be remembering why America rejected one.

And despite all of our problems, our best days have to be ahead of us. That is not naïve optimism. It is a statement of duty. If liberty is a gift, then despair is not an option. We owe it to those who came before us, and to those who will come after us, to preserve the republic, restore what has been broken, and prove once again that free people can govern themselves.