The election is less than a month away. The voter registration deadline has passed. Three debates have occurred. It looks like this thing is starting to wrap up.
A lot of us aren’t thrilled by the prospects. This year the bipartisan system presents us with Mitt “47 Percent” Romney and Barack “Pretty Nice Dude But Also, Drone Strikes” Obama.
Given these less than platonically ideal “choices,” resistance movements (i.e. the March on Wall St. South and the “Vomit in the Polling Place 2012” initiative) are natural and often effective.
And I’m all for action to bring about a true democracy. But it’s possible that true democracy is too perfect a state with which to entrust the human race. Though it’s good we know that what we’ve got isn’t working, we’re a long way from realizing a fully equal form of government.
Then what, one may ask, is to be done in the meantime?
At the risk of opining in an opinion column, I’ll propose a plan that lies not in the democratic principles of America’s infancy, but in the political framework of what Paul Ryan would call America’s “bean”-hood.
Granted, it might be too late to execute any sort of grand reform before this year’s election. Fortunately, time-sensitivity is not crucial in this collective plot to overthrow democracy and replace it with an absolute, hereditary monarchy.
In her 1989 essay “The Color Purple: Why I Am a Royalist,” the acerbic social critic (and North Carolinian) Florence King argued that America has always been secretly in favor of monarchy.
Given our fascination with presidential family narratives (the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Bushes), our obsession with the British royal family and Disney’s insistence on perpetuating the (outdated, antifeminist) princess myth, King’s claim doesn’t seem far from the truth.