Fast on the heels of the recent “No Kings” protests against President Donald Trump comes an odd suggestion that Americans would be better off today if we had remained part of the British Empire — an empire whose titular head (drum roll, please) is King Charles III, the British monarch.

The fact that some Americans even think this way illustrates how out of touch they are with America’s history and ideals.

Granted, the British throne today doesn’t wield broad authority as it did in 1776, when the American colonists, in their Declaration of Independence, spelled out King George III’s “History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny.” But the nature of today’s ceremonial monarchy doesn’t make the United Kingdom’s form of government preferable to ours.

For starters, power in the United States is vested in the people, not in the government, and certainly not in a sovereign. We have no kings. We have no princes or princesses, counts or countesses, dukes or duchesses. As President Abraham Lincoln stressed in his “Gettysburg Address,” dedicating the cemetery where 3,500 Union soldiers were laid to rest after the historic Civil War battle, ours is a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” It is not a government of the nobility, by the king, for the benefit of the gentry.

Moreover, the presidency, unlike the Crown, isn’t hereditary — it is not passed from parent to child, dynasty to dynasty. We can kick elected officials out, as we do regularly. Not so the British monarchy, which traces its bloodlines back to 1707, when the English and Scottish kingdoms were united as Great Britain.

Then, there’s the critical matter of the U.S. Constitution, the legal bedrock of our country, and the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, spelling out the all-important “unalienable Rights,” or personal liberties, to which the Declaration of Independence refers.

Although the United Kingdom is described as a “constitutional monarchy” or a “parliamentary democracy,” and is ranked among the world’s freest countries, it has no formal constitution. Instead, as the London-based Constitution Society points out, its constitution is an amalgam of Acts of Parliament, court decisions, common law, and “understandings of how the system should operate.” More important, there are “few checks on the power of a government with a majority in the House of Commons” — unlike the United States, where the Constitution itself established an ingenious system of checks and balances meant to right the ship of state when politics pulls it too far off course.

Ours is a nation of ideas and ideals. That’s what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are all about: the people’s freedoms and how to organize a government that respects and protects those freedoms.

This is not to say things are perfect. For example, the United States has been having an issue with the liberties outlined in the First Amendment, from cancel culture to the unhinged voices in politics and on social media.

However, as we’ve seen time again during America’s 250-year history, the most effective antidote to unhinged speech is more speech — rational speech — not repression.

The United Kingdom, regrettably, has chosen the latter: repression. According to Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, British police during the past decade have investigated more than a quarter million “non-crime hate incidents,” which he described in The Wall Street Journal last fall as speech exhibiting “‘perceived’ hostility or prejudice against any ‘protected characteristic.’” Imagine being investigated because you said or wrote something that somebody else “perceived” as hostile, prejudicial or hurtful.

At each major crossroad in America's history — the Revolutionary War, the westward migration, the Civil War, the Great Depression, the two world wars — we’ve leaned into our values and ideals and emerged stronger for it.

If you’d rather live in a society where the police can be called whenever someone says something that hurts someone else’s feelings, send me a postcard. I’m staying here.

Because, despite the imperfect nature of the continuing American project, the United States is and remains the only nation founded on ideas — ideas intended to enhance and expand human liberty.

_____

ABOUT THE WRITER

Richard Lorenc is president and CEO of Lexandria, a project of the education nonprofit Certell Inc. intended to help develop U.S. high school students into principled citizens. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

_____

©2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC