Tuesday was a genuinely entertaining day in Washington.
King Charles addressed a joint session of Congress (only the second British monarch in history to do so, btw) and received a bipartisan standing ovation.
Multiple ovations, actually.
Democratic leadership was on their feet throughout: Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer. Representative Ilhan Omar was even seen smiling and snapping photos on her phone.
The White House, clearly delighted by the optics, posted a photo of Trump and Charles together captioned "TWO KINGS."
This would be unremarkable if not for one thing. These are the same lawmakers who have spent the better part of two years organizing, attending, and enthusiastically promoting "No Kings" protests across the country.
Omar herself addressed what she called "the largest No Kings rally in the country" in Minnesota just one month ago.
The protests, which have drawn millions into the streets across all 50 states, exist specifically to argue that America doesn't have, and shouldn't have, a king. That kings are bad. (Of course they mean Trump, whom Democrats have repeatedly accused of acting like one.)
So. One week: No Kings. The next: standing ovation for an actual king.
Republicans had a field day, and honestly, they earned it. This is a pretty bad look.
Before conservatives get too comfortable feeling superior about all of this, it's worth pointing out that this kind of thing goes both ways, and always has.
When George W. Bush built the architecture for mass domestic surveillance after 9/11, Democrats were furious. Civil liberties. Fourth Amendment. Government overreach. The PATRIOT Act was the boogeyman of the left for the better part of a decade. Then Barack Obama took office, expanded almost every one of those programs, and the polling flipped completely.
A Washington Post/Pew Research Center survey found that 64% of Democrats now supported NSA phone tracking (the exact same programs they'd been calling unconstitutional under Bush) while Republican support had dropped from 75% to 52%.
The parties had begun swapping positions. Not because anything about the programs had changed, but because the jersey on the guy running them had changed.
Changing views on war are even more consistent.
Political scientists have documented it so reliably that it's practically a law of partisan physics!
Democrats support military interventions when a Democrat is president, and oppose them when a Republican is. Republicans do the exact same thing in reverse. The specific country, the specific justification, the specific cost in blood and treasure—almost none of it matters as much as whose hand is on the controls.
What you're watching, in all of these cases, isn't people changing their minds based on evidence.
It's people cheering for their team and dressing it up as principle.
Here's the test I think is worth teaching your kids: When you're evaluating a law or a government power—any law, any power—ask yourself: what would this look like if my political enemy were the one enforcing it against me? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, you should withhold support, because the parties will always switch and you will always end up living with the consequences of the very powers you cheered for when your side was holding them.
Democrats who were fine with surveillance infrastructure under Obama handed that infrastructure to Trump. Republicans who were fine with executive overreach under Bush handed that precedent to Obama. This has been going on for so long, and so predictably, that at some point you have to wonder whether the problem is the people in charge, or the people who keep giving them power.
It reminds me of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s controversial book, Democracy: The God That Failed, which makes an argument that most Americans find hard to even consider.
Hoppe posits that democracy, far from being the safeguard against tyranny we were taught it is, may actually create the conditions for it.
His case, roughly, is that politicians in a democratic system have every incentive to spend down the country's resources and expand their own power in the short term, and with little to no concern for the future, because they only "own" the government temporarily and can't pass it to their heirs. A king, paradoxically, has longer time horizons—he actually has to live with the place, and so does his family after him.
This means that people, in some historical arrangements, arguably had more leverage over a monarch who feared them and who was concerned with the long-term viability of the country he was passing on to his heirs, than over a legislature that just needed 51% of the vote every couple of years.
I’m not saying I prefer monarchy (and neither was Hoppe), but I do think we should be wide-eyed to the realities around us, and not so quick to call ourselves “free and prosperous” when so many signs point to a system that actually keeps us poor and living under the boot of a parasitical political class concerned only with their own self-preservation.
Hoppe’s is an interesting argument, and a serious one, and whether you end up agreeing with it or not, it’s certainly a valuable thought experiment.
That kind of thinking—the kind that can consider an uncomfortable idea long enough to actually examine it—is exactly what we're trying to build in the Tuttle Twins Academy.
The Civics courses don't teach your teens that government is good or bad; they teach them how it actually works, why it tends to drift in freedom-limiting directions regardless of which party is in charge, and what the founders designed specifically to slow that drift down. The Critical Thinking courses take it further by giving them the tools to evaluate an argument on its own terms instead of just sorting it into "my team" or "not my team."
The Spring Academy Sale is running now. You can use code SPRING20 for 20% off a membership that covers every teen in your household.
You can check out samples of all the courses here.
Kids who grow up knowing how to ask the right questions and who know that principles don't change based on which jersey someone's wearing are the ones who won't be clapping for kings one week and marching against them the next.
They’re also the people who can look at all of the political showmanship and inconsistency of both parties and see it for exactly what it is.
Embarrassing hypocrisy.
— Connor
