The Fourth of July must be very hard for the British.
I mean, imagine fumbling a sizable chunk of your empire, watching it grow into the greatest country in the world, and then having them celebrate the breakup every year with pyrotechnics? Not even 250 years is long enough to get over that.
So, I don’t begrudge our pals across the pond for finding ways to cope when Independence Day rolls around. Like the good chaps over at JL Partners, who commissioned a poll that found that one in five Americans want to replace the president with the British monarch. Or their fellow expatriate, POLITICO’s Jack Blanchard, who printed the poll results in this morning’s Playbook.
“You heard me right,” Blanchard writes. “Polling and strategy firm JL Partners asked 1,000 U.S. voters if they support or oppose replacing the current president of the United States with the British monarch. The survey found 19% of Americans supported the idea.”
This support was “even higher among certain groups,” JL Partners’ James Johnson told POLITICO, noting that “more than one in three 18-29-year-olds back the idea.”
Does Gen Z really yearn for a return to the monarchy? Well, not exactly.
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Johnson confirmed to The Daily Wire that JL Partners collected information through an online, opt-in poll. According to the Pew Research Center, these polls “can produce misleading results, especially for young people.”
The issue, it seems, is that young people who opt into these polls and click through quickly, “with as little effort as possible to earn money or other rewards.” The result? “Studies have shown that bogus respondents can cause opt-in surveys to overestimate rare attitudes and behaviors.”
Pew tested this theory by asking online opt-in respondents if they were licensed to operate a nuclear submarine. Twelve percent said yes. The actual proportion of Americans licensed to do? Less than 1%.
In other words, you can pretty much get 18-29-year-olds to say yes to anything, if you ask. This is why there’s still a market for Chappell Roan singles, or nonalcoholic beers.
And Gen Z isn’t perfect. Just 41% of them say they’re “extremely or very proud to be Americans,” according to Gallup.
But that doesn’t mean young Americans want King Charles to swoop in and hand them a cup of tea. In fact, Gen Z is moving more and more to the Right. And why wouldn’t they? We’re entering a new American golden age.
The economy is booming. Iran’s on the ropes. The Pope is from Chicago. Joey Chestnut’s back at Coney Island.
And what’s happening in England? Rappers are calling for jihad, and people are losing their minds about the 78-degree heat. Yeah, no thanks.
At the end of the day, you can never trust the polls. They said Trump would lose in November, and look how that turned out. But we don’t need statistics to know how Americans feel about monarchy. As Americans, we know deep down that we would never, could never have a king. That ship sailed long ago — long before we even declared independence in the first place.
As John Adams wrote to Hezekiah Niles in 1818: “What do We mean by the American Revolution? Do We mean the American War? The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.”
That Revolution lives on in the hearts and minds of today’s Americans. And, whether they know it or not, it lives on in the hearts and minds of today’s Brits, too.
In Freddy and Fredericka, Mark Helprin, one of America’s greatest living novelists, imagines a modern-day Prince of Wales who must reclaim “the colonies” before he’s crowned king. As he crosses the United States to complete his mission, Freddy grows to love and understand the country he’s meant to reconquer, eventually coming to this conclusion:
“America does not need and cannot have a king, for it is majestic in itself as perhaps no country has ever been. And its great majesty is not the splendid landscape or the long and sunny coasts, not the Mississippi or the snows of the Pacific Crest. Its greatest majesty, its gift to the world, is that it has carried out God’s will to make each man a king, subservient only to Him. From the beginning, this has been the underlying force of every footfall, smile, and blink of an eye in this country.”
So, the monarchists can poll all they want, and journalists can print the results. It doesn’t matter to us — we’re too busy not having a king.