America has never had a monarch.
English and Dutch adventurers came to America in 1620 to escape England and the Netherlands, which of course did then and still do have a monarchs. As colonists, the settlers still pledged fealty to “our Lord King James” whose name was used as often as not in the same sentence as God, but later they got tired of the King’s soldiers, whom he sent over here as proxies to lord it over the colonists–the very thing they left the old part of the world to escape!
So by the time of the American Revolution in 1776, they’d had it with the whole “dread Sovereign” imperial monarchy thing.
They made sure, beginning in 1787, when the Constitution of the United States of America was formulated, and later on, in 1789, when the First Congress passed the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, that freedom and the rule of law governed the people of America, so they were no longer subject to the whim of a monarch.
Everything worked out well for quite awhile.
Then the condition and quality of the U.S. government began to erode in the early part of the Twentieth Century. It got worse after World War II. By the end of the 1980s, the government had become what it is now: unresponsive to the will of its citizens; out-of-touch with the people; profligate; non-representative.
By far the most corrosive influence in American politics and government is money. As long as it is legal to bribe politicians and officeholders, you shouldn’t expect good, representative government. This is precisely why there is gridlock and increasing polarity of thought and action in Washington DC, and why our state legislatures are so appallingly bad.
Ironically, America has reached the point where only a monarch, a King unsullied by the taint of bribery and influence, could straighten things out.
The book If I Were King is a fanciful, sometimes comic and sometimes serious look at what I would do, acting completely autonomously, unilaterally and arbitrarily as sovereign, completely aloof from any pecuniary influence or conflict of interest whatsoever, to make America and the world a better place.
