US War of Independence was a mistake. Consider Trump and be grateful for our King

At the conclusion of a festival of democracy that resulted in an unequivocally democratic outcome, it may seem odd to question the system that served up the result. Donald Trump has, after all, won the US election by a thumping majority – both the electoral colleges and the popular vote. The win was so emphatic that the Republican Party has also been handed control of the US Senate. Turnout was the second highest it’s been since 1908. The people have spoken; power has been transferred peacefully, just as intended.

The president and the monarch, Donald Trump and King Charles.Credit: AP

So it might seem a strange time to urge Australians to take a moment to reflect with gratitude on our own system of government and the historical circumstances that have set us, another country colonised by the British Empire, apart from the United States.

Just a fortnight ago, King Charles visited our shores, reminding us that we are still nominally ruled by a foreign monarch. The enthusiasm with which His Anachronistic Institutionship was greeted was a surprise to many instinctive republicans, like myself. But the King’s fans might have divined an important truth about his contribution to Australia’s stability.

Despite Trump’s democratic mandate, commentators, including neoconservative historian Robert Kagan, fear a Trump presidency will threaten US democracy. Kagan used to write for The Washington Post but he quit when the paper refused to endorse either presidential candidate ahead of this election. Before he quit, it was Kagan’s habit to thunder from the WaPo’s pages that “if Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office”. Kagan and company fear that Trump’s promise to be a dictator, “but only on day one”, might turn into a more protracted form of autocracy.

US news site Vox has been exploring – since before Trump was a candidate for president – the idea that America might descend into dictatorship; the possibility had existed independent of the man. In 2015, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias wrote: “America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse. Some day – not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies – there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else.”

Yglesias says the presidential system is inherently unstable, quoting Yale political scientist Juan Linz’s observation that “aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government – but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s”. In 2019, Yglesias’ colleague at Vox, head writer Dylan Matthews, went further. The War of Independence, he declared, was a mistake.

Vox is far from a reactionary publication. In fact, it is generally considered left-leaning, or progressive. But the wonkish and carefully reasoned articles by the two men make a clear case that America’s founding fathers were, to borrow that hackneyed phrase, on “the wrong side of history”.

Matthews’ argument is not just based on America’s bung political system. He makes the point that the American revolution was in no small part a protest against the limits that King George III put on settlers’ abuse of slaves and natives. Indeed, beyond the grand language of equality that most people are familiar with – “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” – the Declaration of Independence was a list of sometimes dubious grievances against the King. These included that the Crown regarded native Americans (or as the Declaration refers to them, “merciless Indian Savages”) as equal subjects with the white settlers.

As Matthews summarises, if the War of Independence hadn’t succeeded, “slavery would’ve been abolished earlier, American Indians would’ve faced rampant persecution but not the outright ethnic cleansing Andrew Jackson and other American leaders perpetrated, and America would have a parliamentary system of government that makes policymaking easier and lessens the risk of democratic collapse”.

British academic Nigel Biggar has recently published a painstakingly considered and evidence-based evaluation of colonialism, laid out in Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, which corroborates this point and expands examination to the broader British Empire. He does not defend the practice of colonialism and acknowledges many instances of injustice and brutality, but Biggar argues that in an age of European expansionism, being colonised by the British was not the hardest of luck.

His argument rests on the Christian humanist principles with which the British instructed colonial governors to treat native peoples. Biggar cites examples of times when colonial governors launched punitive violence against indigenous populations and were rebuked by London. Governor Stirling of Western Australia was, Biggar writes, reprimanded for such an expedition, and governor Bourke of NSW was reminded that it was wrong to regard the Aboriginal people “as Aliens with whom a War can exist, and against whose [His Majesty’s] troops may exercise belligerent right”, rather than as fellow subjects of the Crown. The British Empire was committed to abolishing the slave trade, its own and that of colonised natives.

And it brought stable government structures that institutionalised the rule of law. Where this replaced corruption and despotism, it dramatically increased the prosperity and opportunity of the people of the land.

Where it has stayed longest, such as in Australia, the former colonies, now the Commonwealth, benefited from the protection of a powerless monarch. “Monarchs are more effective than presidents,” Dylan Matthews argues, “precisely because [the monarchs] lack any semblance of legitimacy.” He points out that it is rare for monarchs to intervene in politics, although they could in extreme circumstances. That is, they’re most useful when not used.

We have yet to discover whether Trump will become a dictator for more than one day, but the weakness of a presidential system that would allow him to bend the Constitution to his will should frighten us all. Lucky for us that Australia never switched our head of state to a figure who wields real power. The American War of Independence was a mistake. Long may His Distant Notionship reign over our land.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.