CULTURE FILES // CLAIRE FINKLESTEIN'S CONSTITUTIONAL ASSESSMENT AT 250 YEARS
King George III
NO KINGS: Will the People Protect Democracy When Those in Power Do Not?
Volume 7 // Issue 3 // Winter 2026 // Denial
by Claire Finklestein
I. A Republic if We Can Keep It
On July 4, 2026, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the event that severed the colonies from their allegiance to the British Crown and launched the process by which the nascent country would become a constitutional democracy. The document was a daring call to arms, one that would transform a domestic colonial uprising against the British monarchy into a full-scale revolutionary war. It was also an act of treason, punishable under British law by death. For the signatories of that document, it was now a life or death matter: If America lost the war, they would all hang.
What drove the Founders to this point? The text of the Declaration gives an indication of the motivations of its signatories in the beginning of the second paragraph, which famously proclaims it a “self-evident” truth that “All men are created equal.” The incompatibility of those words with the profound inequalities of eighteenth-century life—from the horrors of the slave trade to the refusal to allow women to own land or vote—makes the talk of equality in the Declaration an unfulfilled promise. But the sentiment that drove it gave way to a future conception of equality, one that afforded the same rights to all persons, regardless of race, sex, or creed. In this sense, the signing of the Declaration was not just a call to revolution. It constituted the rejection of a highly stratified political system organized by nobility and the accident of birth; where those lacking such stature were governed and taxed but unrepresented in the halls of Parliament. The Declaration of Independence was revolutionary, not just because it demanded an end to military-monarchical rule in the colonies, but because it was a call to replace the class system that sustained it with a system in which “we the people” were sovereign.
With the birth of the country tied to the rejection of monarchical rule, one would expect America to be ever vigilant lest the country fall into a new state of political subservience. Yet now, at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, vigilance has failed us. Indeed, one might say that the country is in the process of reverse-engineering the Declaration of Independence by imbuing the American presidency with the powers of a king and failing to ensure the robustness of those guardrails that prevent that king from destroying that popular sovereignty that provided a critical and principled alternative to monarchical rule. The United States, in short, is arguably in the process of placing itself under the control of an unchecked monarch, and we the people have failed to ensure our own representation in the political processes. This is not just “democratic backsliding,” as many commentators these days are fond of saying. It is political servitude.
The enfeeblement of representational democracy was not inevitable. Human beings naturally decay with age, but not so with democracies. Systems of government can in fact grow healthier and stronger with time if the practices of the nation serve to reinforce constitutional norms that express the same ideals. Constitutions do not interpret or apply themselves. A constitution is more than a text; it is the application of the text across a long period of time and the constant updating of this text to novel circumstances. This is why constitutional principles are subject to decay through disuse or misuse at the same time that dramatic constitutional transformations can occur with no alteration of the document at all. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Court brought about a titanic change in our understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment: the rejection of the doctrine of “separate but equal” and a new understanding of equality as mandating racial integration. Nevertheless, the language of the Fourteenth Amendment remained unaltered.
Today, protections for civil rights and individual liberties under the U.S. Constitution are being rapidly reversed, a process that is similarly occurring with no change to the text of the Constitution. This regression is one of the many consequences of allowing the power of the executive branch to go unchecked. But the undertow of presidential power has carried with it America’s own version of nobility—the billionaires who stand to benefit from the presidential empire; a highly conservative U.S. Supreme Court that is increasingly dedicated to the project of enhancing presidential authority, and a Congress rendered impotent by its own allegiance to that self-same executive authority. In short, the constitutional remaking of today is being imposed from the top down, rather than emerging from the bottom up. The revolutionary ideal of popular sovereignty, which fueled the rejection of monarchy in 1776, is being replaced by a commitment to political subordination, in which the president controls all three branches of the federal government as well as the independent sovereign authority of the states. The lack of accountability for this contemporary monarchy is precisely the sort of tyranny the Founders sought to reject. Yet now, two hundred and fifty years later in the birthplace of political equality, we the people have demonstrated an allegiance to an unaccountable king.
II. Did the Framers Underestimate the Risk that Presidential Power Would be Abused?
After the Revolution, the question of how closely the American presidency should resemble the British monarchy was a critical one for the Founders. John Adams, as a newly elected vice-president, won for himself the derogatory title of “monarchist” by suggesting that the president should be adorned with a fancy title like “His Majesty the President” in order to bolster popular respect and awe for the office. But the U.S. Constitution provides that “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States,” and there was no sentiment in the House or Senate for attempting to skirt that rule. Adams’ concerns were at one level understandable. The nascent national government was weak, and the power of state governors was comparably strong. Adams felt that the idea of a federal government would not survive unless power was consolidated and the newly formed office of the presidency could rise above the power of state governments. The danger seemed all too real that the American presidency would never command the authority it needed to unite the country for its common defense against foreign nations and would also be too weak to unite the country internally.
The Anti-Federalists were worried in the other direction, of course, but their worry mostly extended to preserving the power of the states. They appear to have paid inadequate attention to the question of whether the intended checks and balances in the federal government would fail to hold under the pressure exerted by a president who abused the power of his office.
The Founders of course did provide some precautions against abuse of the presidency, but when one considers the potential for tyranny of which they were aware, these protections seem tepid and ineffectual. The Constitution creates a high bar to impeachment, and voting only happens every four years (and at the time of the founding, there were no term limitations). Why weren’t the Framers more preoccupied by preventing abuse of presidential authority? Did their failure to imagine a very different president from George Washington lead them to build a fundamental design flaw into the implementation of the notion of checks and balances?
Admittedly, Donald Trump is in a class of his own when it comes to breaking traditional constraints on presidential authority, including mobilization of large numbers of federal agents for supposed immigration enforcement; misuse of the Department of Justice for prosecuting or investigating political rivals and granting favors to friends; attempting to control the heads of federal agencies, including independent agencies, through removal; and weakening integrity in federal law-enforcement authority. This president has engaged in an unprecedented and largely successful campaign to seize control over every independent source of authority that could either limit his hold on power or that might prove useful to him in either consolidating power. He has immunized himself against accountability.
The Founders may have failed to imagine such acts—but that seems an unlikely explanation. Is Trump more grasping and more rapacious than, say, King George III? Were all the crowned heads of Europe that had abused power over the years truly unimpressive to the Framers, and were they truly so naïve as to believe despotism could not happen in America? By no means. The Declaration itself shows their awareness of the King’s “long train of abuses and usurpations,” which its signatories believed were inflicted to reduce them to a state of “absolute despotism.” Under such circumstances, they declared, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
In what did this supposed state of “absolute despotism” consist? The complaints sound surprisingly modern. The Declaration charges King George with “mak[ing] judges dependent on his Will alone;” of “obstruct[ing] the Administration of Justice;” “[keeping] among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures;” and “render[ed] the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power,” among other indignities. The ensuing Constitution addressed all these matters in various places in various forms. It provided, and still provides, for a federal judiciary whose authority is independent of the executive branch; it created a Department of Justice and gave the legislature control over the laws by which it operated; it required a declaration of Congress to send U.S. troops into war and created a number of other countermeasures to balance out the risk of the emergence of a military dictatorship.
Ironically, however, we now live in a Republic in which the president has the power to do all of the things of which the signers of the Declaration of Independence complained. Through various means, the president has managed to exert extraordinary control over the judiciary, largely based on his exercise of the power of appointment and the political ambitions of the judges who serve. The Department of Justice has currently lost all independence, and members of Congress have refused to rein in the power the president exerts over the federal justice system.
Perhaps most worrisome is the insertion of the U.S. military into law-enforcement operations and domestic policing. Throughout much of 2025, Trump deployed federalized National Guard troops to American cities in blue states all across the country. He may not have literally quartered federal troops in the homes of Americans (one of the other complaints of the Founders regarding use of the military), but he has interposed the military into civilian affairs, and in that sense he has “rendered the military independent of and superior to the Civil powers,” in a way that would have greatly alarmed the Founders and should alarm us. As the Declaration warns, if we allow a sovereign to run roughshod over the very guardrails designed to protect the nation against tyranny, we should not be surprised if we see our liberties declining and our rights cast aside. The current King George has not done this by force of bad character—though a bad character he certainly has—but through a transformation in the conception of the presidency itself. As the Founders decried with respect to the position of the British monarch, the American president is now, for all intents and purposes, above the law.
III. Equality Before the Law
The concept of equality means very different things. The conception held by the Founders is not the concept of social equality on which we tend to focus today. It was a burgeoning conception of political equality, or formal equality before the law. What this meant to the Founders was that despotism as a formal system of government had to be rejected. However imperfectly, the Founders laid the foundation for the idea that everyone is both subject to the law, and the related idea that everyone is equally protected under the law. That “everyone” includes the president of the United States. The president cannot be above the law, because to position him there would elevate him above we the people as well.
Since the time of the American Revolution, equality under the law has been the core value for which America stands. It is the value that led men to risk their lives in battle fighting off the shackles of a king, and it is the very essence of a society governed by the rule of law. Establishing the president as a king—unaccountable and above ordinary law—is the very antithesis of the rule of law. Now, on the 250th birthday of America, is a good time for the country to remember its beginnings and reject the idea of an unaccountable sovereign as the leader of we the people.
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