No Kings, No Idols
From divine right to executive order, America’s founding paradox returns. Re-signing the social contract begins with learning to yield.
We traded the divine right of kings for the consent of the governed. Somewhere along the way, we forgot: consent means restraint. No Kings Day is a reminder to sign the contract again.
A key—the key, maybe—difference between monarchy and republican government is the source of the ruling body’s authority.
The monarchs, especially within the divine right of kings argument (apologies for the history lesson here), derived their power as absolutely given by the Divine. No further defense of authority was required.
I should pause here to say this is all a Western view of political organization, owing only to my ignorance, not my explicit omission of other non-Western forms of government.
The social contract emerged as a foil to absolute authority: Why should we follow a sovereign without question who claims to derive sovereignty from the cosmic sovereign who is God, or something like this? Such rhetoric is not far from us today.
Jamelle Bouie captures this relapse with precision. His portrait of Trump’s executive behavior reads like a study in regression: the revival of divine prerogative in a modern state. He notes attempts to leverage federal power against political opponents and legal adversaries, the desire to enlist the I.R.S. and other agencies against perceived enemies, even a kind of revived lèse-majesté, as if you crossed the bitter paranoia of Richard Nixon with the absolutist ideology of Charles I.
The social contract takes a much different tack: it claims that we, the people, willingly sacrifice our rights in a freely chosen act to be governed: the consent of the people. The contract secures the populace by inviting, as the name implies, a covenant between government and the governed: we yield some private power to gain public peace. In the language of Western modernity—John Locke and the sort—these are “natural” or, you may be familiar with hearing them called, inalienable rights.
Locke conceived of these natural rights not as grand abstractions but as conditions for peace: “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things.” His civil interest was a doctrine of restraint—an acknowledgment that the good society begins with the promise not to molest one another’s body, conscience, or property. Jefferson’s later “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” rephrased that preservationist vision in the idiom of Enlightenment optimism. Where Locke sought security from interference, Jefferson sought opportunity for fulfillment. The shift from indolence to happiness reveals the republic’s founding paradox: in our aspiration to be free, we began to sanctify the self, forgetting that freedom’s first purpose was mutual peace, not personal elevation.
That subtle translation carried consequences. What had been a communal agreement to give up certain powers so that all might live without the insidious threat of competition from others exercising their own natural rights, slowly transformed into a private right to self-realization. The grammar of the contract, once written in the plural, turned singular. We forgot that freedom was a shared construction, not a personal inheritance. And as the civic “we” eroded, the stage was set for a different kind of sovereign claim, one that appeals not to consent, but to decree, or rule by executive order.
Trump’s second term made that shift explicit. In his first hundred days, he issued 185 executive orders and memoranda, including forty-one on his first day in office—more than any modern president. Analysts at the American Presidency Project noted that the effort appeared “aimed at nothing less than reversing and dismantling the structure of policy and administration launched in 1933,” and asked how thoroughly a president could remake the state “without passing new legislation.”
The Federalist Corrective: Learning to Concede
Even the Framers themselves, those careful architects of our experiment, distrusted the very people in whose name they claimed to build it. Madison’s Federalist 10 warns of “faction,” Federalist 51 exalts the separation of powers as a brake upon popular passion, and Federalist 1 asks whether societies can truly govern themselves by reason and choice. In earlier readings, and a shout-out to my Constitution readers from earlier this year, I took these essays as expressions of prudence.
I was mistaken.
They were men of sober wisdom, yes, but also men of property and position—determined to secure their vision of order against the many. In earlier readings, I mistook that for virtue, a necessary guardrail against chaos or populist excess. But the longer I watch our republic stumble, the more I see that the restraint they prized was also a form of insulation. What they feared was not simply mob rule; it was the unsettling possibility of equality. The system they built to restrain the people also preserved the hierarchies that would later find new life in movements like MAGA. My earlier admiration was too optimistic—it saw prudence where there was, in truth, protection of privilege. Their mistrust was not unfounded, but our crisis lies in having sanctified it, mistaking their supremacy for stability.
That fear has proved fertile ground for the modern cult of executive power. By insulating authority from the governed, we made space for a president who could imagine himself a monarch. The “unitary executive” that some now praise isn’t a break from our design; it’s the Constitution’s own latent temptation, matured into form, flowering at last in full view.
And yet, if the design erred toward mistrust, the remedy is not to abandon the structure but to reanimate the contract; to remember that liberty’s durability depends on our willingness to yield. That mistrust, born in the fear of the many, now finds its heirs in those who cheer the plenary powers of the modern executive: the right to deport without due process, to deny habeas corpus, to ignore the Fourth Amendment’s shield against intrusion. They see no contradiction because the contradiction was built in. The same constitutional architecture that once insulated property and hierarchy now grants moral cover to cruelty. MAGA did not invent the impulse to dominate; it inherited it. What was once a guarded mistrust of the people has become the people’s own suspicion of democracy.
That same mistrust now seeps into the culture war, where appeals to “real Americans” or “traditional values” serve to decide who counts as part of the polity before democracy even begins to speak.
No Kings Day, that civic celebration of shared humility, hints at the corrective we need. Those who would defend the strongman must learn the nobility of concession; the grace of relinquishing one’s own power for the sake of the republic. The true strength of a free people is not the freedom to dominate, but the discipline to stand down.
The Sacrifice of the People
The renewal of the republic will not come from new idols or stronger men. It will come from us, from a people who remember that freedom, rightly understood, is a shared discipline, not a private indulgence. The social contract was never meant to free us from one another, but to bind us to one another’s flourishing. We traded the security of divine decree for the risk of self-government, and that trade only works when we keep faith with the cost: the continual act of yielding our own will for the common good.
To live as citizens rather than subjects is to consent again and again; to limit our reach; to restrain our rage; to accept that compromise is not weakness but covenant. In this light, “indolency of body” is not a relic of Locke’s vocabulary but a model for the body politic: the right to exist unmolested, and the duty to ensure others may do the same. The pursuit of happiness must return to its first meaning: life together in peace.
If the Trumpist era has shown anything, it is that we cannot outsource virtue to institutions or imagine that constitutions enforce themselves. The contract is only as strong as our willingness to keep signing it. Every election, every act of restraint, every concession to the rule of law is the ink by which we renew the republic. Those who love the “unitary executive” must learn the humility that sustains it. Citizenship does well to find glory not in command but in consent.
No Kings Day was a good beginning. It reminded us that the truest loyalty in a republic is not to the ruler but to the relation—to the fragile, chosen agreement that makes us citizens of one another. The work ahead is not to crown new leaders but to practice old virtues: patience, compromise, and the courage to yield. Only then can the people, in their sacrifice, become again the sovereign they were meant to be.
The contract still holds—if we do. No kings, no idols. Only the steady courage of a people who know when to stand down.
Thanks, Adam. So much in this article to think about...... and along the way of it I was caught by this phrase you penned: "... the unsettling possibility of equality."