Presidents and Problems "All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen. All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen. This difference, deep and perhaps ineradicable in the temperaments of the two peoples, explains a thousand things in their literature and their laws.
. . .
"For this is especially the secret of the monarch or chief magistrate in the two countries. They arm the President with the powers of a King, that he may be a nuisance in politics. We deprive the King even of the powers of a President, lest he should remind us of a politician.
. . .
"The American Republic is the last medieval monarchy. It is intended that the President shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling. . . . All the popular Presidents, Jackson and Lincoln and [Theodore] Roosevelt, have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not as constitutional monarchs. In short, the names have been curiously interchanged; and as a historical reality it is the President who ought to be called a King."
Isn't it interesting how well the present occupant of the White House fits this description?
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