Protestors organised across the United States on 18 October 2025, united under an increasingly common refrain: ‘No Kings’. Mass protests are a mainstay of American political discourse, but the language of monarchy has become an unusual and growing facet of recent political life.

The driving force behind this is, unavoidably, the second Trump administration. The president has exerted such muscular executive power and driven such dramatic change in American governance that it has conjured in the minds of many the unilateral political might of a genuine monarch. President Trump, his administration, and some across their extended orbit have leaned into this imagery through social-media posts and frequent, coy talk of seeking an unconstitutional third term in office. This has only deepened the worry that the office of the president is transforming into a throne room.

What does all this mean? Where is it leading? This is not the first time in American history that the allure, or the danger, of a monarchy has been seriously debated. Indeed, two of the most notorious incidents happened early during the Revolutionary Era. In 1782, Colonel Lewis Nicola, an Irish-born resident of Philadelphia under George Washington’s command, wrote to the future president complaining that hundreds of veteran soldiers were ill-equipped and had been without pay for such a long period that they were growing restless. Nicola argued that the nascent republican government of the Continental Congress was demonstratively ineffective, and that many among Washington’s troops, including Nicola himself, thought that he should take the title of ‘king’ to position troops more efficiently, secure the frontier borders of the colonies, and ensure the armies were paid.

For Nicola and others, a constitutional monarchy like Great Britain’s was preferable to the emergent chaos of republicanism. Washington, horrified, declined in no uncertain terms and severely reprimanded Nicola. Four years later, in 1786, a possible half-hearted attempt to lure Prince Henry of Prussia to become the newly born country’s monarch was met with disinterest.

There is no denying that anti-monarchism runs deep in America’s history and its national spirit. This should not be surprising, grounded as America’s self-conception is in the history of a very real and bloody revolt against the British monarchy, as well as the added accretion of two centuries of cultural mythos, and the occasional hit musical, that Americans have created about defying a tyrannical king.

The expanding power of the executive branch has certainly been a perennial source of worry that the president’s authority might become too monarchical in scope, however. Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton flirted with the idea of an ‘elective monarch’, though there were critical lines they drew between the idea of an absolute monarch in the medieval sense and the tamed constitutional monarchy of the Great Britain they emerged from and still admired. Hamilton spent the rest of his life dodging allegations he was simply a monarchist. When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, Southern newspapers lambasted him as a demonic ‘King Lincoln’ for overstepping his legal authority. In the 1930s and 1940s, after his threat to expand the Supreme Court and fill it with judges friendly to the New Deal, as well as seeking a third term in office, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was decried as a king usurping constitutional authority.

In fact, depicting presidents negatively as kings has been one of the most common ways in which American political commentators and the public have expressed dismay at the conduct of an overweening or underperforming executive.

But there have always been Americans who have been enticed by monarchy of one stripe or another. In 1936, a little over a century and a half after Nicola asked Washington to consider taking up a crown, the famed American architect Ralph Adams Cram wrote enthusiastically about the prospect of President Roosevelt becoming a king. It was leaders such as Roosevelt, Cram argued, who alone had the wherewithal to ‘take the bull by the horns’ and address the crises of the Great Depression. Cram is probably the most famous American monarchist, unique for his high profile as the leader of the Gothic Revival architectural movement and for his decades of outspoken advocacy for transforming the United States into a constitutional monarchy.

Cram was not alone in his quest, though the number of fellow travellers on the road to an American throne was small. He helped found the American chapter of the Jacobite Order of the White Rose, a short-lived group dedicated to the Jacobite cause of restoring the House of Stuart to the British throne. Cram and his friends, composed of an eclectic collection of artists and writers in Boston, Massachusetts, were all enamoured with the aesthetics and politics of the Middle Ages. It was this ‘Medievalist’ political attitude that saw Cram dismiss modern democracy and the United States’ expanding republic.

Cram’s vision was inspired by his Anglo-Catholic faith and his study of medieval aesthetics, architecture, and culture. It was also informed by his lifelong admiration for Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist politics and his reading of a host of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers and writers who had grown wary of the new, democratic age they saw emerging.

Cram eagerly read the works of European thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Thomas Carlyle, and Joseph de Maistre, who criticised the chaos of industrial modernity and the downsides of democratic life. Some, like Carlyle and de Maistre, mused about the likely necessity of monarchy to counter the ‘big black democracy’ that loomed over Europe and the United States; others, like Ortega y Gasset, lamented the rise of the industrial ‘mass-man’ personified in the expanding democratic process.

Cram embraced the broader ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ tradition that these thinkers worked within, arguing that the tumultuous world of the early 20th century was ‘reaping the whirlwind’ of the Enlightenment’s advances in industrial science, democratic thinking, and philosophical change. His solution? A return to what Cram called the ‘High Democracy’ of the Middle Ages. Or, at least what Cram imagined the medieval period to have looked like, which often bore little resemblance to historical reality. The America he envisioned was ruled by a group of wealthy, educated aristocrats with a titular monarch enthroned in the White House.

During the early 20th century there was a convulsive output of articles, pamphlets and books from across America’s political spectrum rife with arguments over where modern society should go next. Cram’s medievalesque politics were echoed by others who had grown frustrated with modernity and the state of country. In outlets like the American Review and the American Mercury, Cram wrote about the necessity of undoing democracy and replacing it with his preferred aristocratic, constitutional monarchy. His articles sat alongside the writing of fascist sympathisers, such as the American Review’s editor Seward Collins, and works written by people he admired, including Ortega y Gasset and Berdyaev.

Cram’s monarchism and desire for a simpler, purer life governed by a clear hierarchy of authority was mirrored by a variety of groups and movements who sometimes agreed with his call for a more medieval politics. ‘Southern Agrarians’ like Herbert Agar, who wanted to resurrect the eroding Antebellum rural life of the South, expressed their thoughts in the American Review. There, they occasionally yearned for what they saw as a good life ensured to common white citizens in the South before the Civil War in a similar system to the medieval triune of Church, throne, and craft guild.

Catholic ‘Distributists’ like Cram heeded the then-recent call by Pope Leo XIII to address the mass-socioeconomic malaise caused by rapid industrialisation. Conservative Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton, who was friends with Cram, joined his critiques of modern life, though fell short of overtly calling for a return to medieval life to better care for the masses. Indeed, Cram’s elitism only drove him to adopt an increasingly paternalistic outlook toward the ‘mass-man’ he thought should not be able to vote. Still others, like conservative Catholic Ross J.S. Hoffman, wrote in the Review of the growing ‘disenchantment with democracy’ that arose from humanity’s need for a kinglike figure.

Cram’s ideas were never implemented. When he died in 1942, there were few other monarchists in the United States. While conservative politics in postwar America included the kind of aristocratic elitism that Cram preferred, there were not many calls for an explicitly medieval-style throne. Small, short-lived American organisations, including the Constantian Society, tried to persuade people that American monarchy would be preferable, but their reach was tiny, and their message ran counter to the advancing waves of democratic government that swept the world in the Cold War and post-Cold War decades. Founded in the early 1970s, the group became moribund when its leader, Randall J. Dicks, passed away in 1999. Its website is still active, maintained by a small cohort of online neo-monarchists.

And so, the idea persisted. Global organisations, particularly the International Monarchist League, have acted as a network for deposed monarchs and their erstwhile supporters. The Order of the White Rose was revived into the Royal Stuart Society, which remains the most active and vocal Jacobite organisation in the world, outputting pro-monarchist literature in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

Cram’s ideas and the broader intellectual legacy of his milieu have been revived by a prominent and persuasive wing of conservative, anti-democratic modern monarchists. Ironically, Cram’s message has a far greater reception now than it did in his own time. One need only go online to places like Reddit or YouTube to find raucous and surprisingly popular forums for modern monarchist thought that receive far more attention than Cram ever managed to acquire.

People like Curtis Yarvin stand at the forefront of the new modern monarchism. Yarvin is a computer programmer who gained fame in far-right online circles under the pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’ in the late 2000s with his blog Unqualified Reservations, where he wrote extensively about the downsides of democracy and the necessity of an American monarchy. ‘Let those of us born with golden brains, therefore – the tiny top sliver that Ralph Adams Cram called human, as opposed to anthropoid – inherit the earth’, Yarvin argued back in 2009.

Yarvin is familiar with both Cram and the philosophical influences that shaped the architect back in the early 1900s, especially Counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Carlyle. ‘I’m a Carlylean more or less the way a Marxist is a Marxist. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion – but the conscious choice of a mature adult. I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist,’ Yarvin has said. Rather than a medieval-style monarch in Cram’s mode, though, Yarvin has called for a modern corporate style ‘king’ to cut through the sclerotic bureaucracy of American politics.

It would be easy to dismiss Yarvin, as many have, as a fringe monarchist on the far right. Yet his influence has become extensive. He, alongside writers like Nick Land, have cultivated the broader ‘Dark Enlightenment’ movement, a powerful wave of postliberal ideas embodying the new reactionary politics. Such postliberalism has become a major force in domestic politics in the United States and across the world, embodying and influencing the erosion of the ideals – such as classical liberalism, cultural pluralism, and democratic government – that increasingly defined the last two centuries in the West.

Some in the Trump administration, such as Vice President J.D. Vance, and powerful corporate leaders like Peter Thiel, are open about their connection to Yarvin and his ideas. It was Yarvin who was among the first to inspire the current Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with his own concept of ‘Retire All Government Employees (RAGE)’, though he has expressed frustration that the current administration is not going far enough to enact his ideals. The sudden attention dedicated to Yarvin over the last few years by traditional media, particularly a major interview earlier this year in the New York Times, reflects a belated awareness in the public that his cohort of disparate postliberal thinkers have grappled their way to a high place in the global zeitgeist.

Cram would likely find some of Yarvin’s ideas appealing and others deeply troubling. While he quotes and draws on the same thinkers as Cram, and calls for a monarchy in America, Yarvin is not a medievalist. Indeed, Cram disliked industrial corporations and channeled an almost Transcendentalist outlook on the importance of nature and rural life that would have made Ralph Waldo Emerson proud.

Yarvin does not share such sentiments, nor do others in the ‘neoreactionary’ movement he helped to create. Corporate power has become part and parcel of neo-monarchist and postliberal thought in the United States and abroad. In France, for example, the neo-monarchist group Action Française argues that a ‘new aristocracy’ has arisen. As Action Française members march through Parisian streets to commemorate dead kings, they also talk about how corporate power, including people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others, should only grow closer to the Trump administration to further favourably blur the line between private and public structures.

This is not to create the image of some conspiracy that claims Yarvin or those in his coterie of postliberal advocates are somehow directly running the government. Rather, they, like any other group of outspoken thinkers, have simply had their ideas simply become influential. The possibility of President Trump trying to obviate the Constitution and seek a third term in office, and the concurrent discussions happening in online circles about the necessity of a ‘Red Caesar’, reflect the influence and normalisation of such neo-monarchical, postliberal thought. They have proposed alternatives to the established systems of government and society that are increasingly being entertained.

As in Cram’s era, these divergent ideas about restructuring society and government arose out of a particular moment, one where tensions and problems within American life have reached a boiling point. Cram wrestled with the sudden expansion of democratic enfranchisement, industrialisation, and global socioeconomic unrest. Similar problems beset the world, and the United States, today.

Where Cram wrote tracts lamenting the rise of the steam engine and gunpowder, an ocean of digital ink has been spilled discussing the pitfalls of the internet, social media and artificial intelligence’s corrosive, atomising effects on society. As Cram lived through the disaster of the Great Depression, he wondered if a powerful president might steer the ship of state aright with dramatic changes to the established economic norms. Today, we see the Trump administration reject decades of free-market idealism in favour of an evolving mixture of state-influenced mercantilism and industrial onshoring. ‘Common good conservativism’, as Vice President J.D. Vance has called it, is beginning to supplant the ‘magic of the marketplace’ that conservatives like Ronald Reagan espoused, echoing the ‘Distributist’ ideals that Cram promoted. A growing series of voting limitation laws and dramatic reversals on voting rights have come down across state and federal legislatures, drawing echoes of Cram’s strident calls for limitations on the franchise.

The ‘No Kings’ protests are a response to the same centrifugal forces that the Trump administration and others are addressing. But the protests are especially animated by concern at the shifts in norms and power that the Trump administration is undertaking to accomplish its goals. On a tangible and highly fraught level, what happens next depends on how far along the road of Cram’s ideas about unilateral power the administration goes, and how far the American people are willing to walk with them.