When President Ronald Reagan was in surgery after being shot, Al Haig, his secretary of state, went on television and announced, “I’m in charge.” This occasioned some disbelief and merriment, and not just because Haig overstepped his constitutional duties. No one is in charge in America. The constitutional system is designed to balance the elements of government perpetually in defiance of princes, physics, human nature, and historical precedent.
The founders knew their Cicero and their Livy, but they also had recent British and French cases in mind. Monarchical France epitomized despotism and “Popery,” which was Protestant shorthand for arbitrary power and clerical meddling. This attitude was overwritten when the Bourbon tyrant became the cynical savior of the American Revolution and then erased when America’s increasingly ecumenical civic nationalism made it impolite to mention the founders’ anti-Popery.
Britain, meanwhile, offered a contrary case study in runaway republicanism. This is usually referred to as the English Civil War, but it had distinct Irish and Scottish theaters, so it is better called the Wars of the Three Kingdoms or the British Civil Wars. The Scots set to it in 1639, two years before the English started fighting. The Irish were still at it in 1653, four years after the English had executed their king. The Irish war remains notorious for Cromwell’s brutal conquest. The Scottish wars are almost forgotten, though it was the Covenanters, the Presbyterian rebels who refused to accept royal control over their church, who had sparked the trouble by signing a national covenant in 1638.
One national covenant leads to another. The descendants of Covenanter emigrants became patriotic rebels in the American Revolution. Some subsequently became abolitionists. As Kevin Phillips argued in The Cousins’ Wars, America’s revolution and Civil War replayed Britain’s wars of Roundheads and Cavaliers. The rebels of 1776 and the federal authorities of 1861 recited the parliamentary republicanism of the Roundheads. The Tories of 1776 and the pseudo-aristocratic secessionists of 1861 cosplayed as the party of kings and Cavaliers. Like Haig, George III thought he could fix a crisis of authority by declaring, “I’m in charge.”
Two centuries after the British Civil Wars, and a century after the colonists’ secession, this internecine script remained powerful enough to motivate the actors in the American Civil War. It doesn’t matter if they understood their motivations that way: Actors always recite other people’s lines, whether they understand them or not. The language had changed, too. The Roundhead ideal of the farmer who knew his rights was domesticated into the Jacksonian ideal of the farmer who knew his rights. The legalese of Parliament versus Crown had been domesticated into the legalese of federal authority and states’ rights. Still, Phillips believed this continuity existed a century after the Civil War. In the 1960s, Phillips advised Richard Nixon on the “Southern strategy” that realigned the South from Democratic to Republican.
How you see current American partisanship depends on how you see the 1960s realignment. If you think white Southerners switched sides out of racism, they become the heirs to Cavalier exceptionalism. If you think they switched because they rejected big-government bossiness, they become the heirs to Roundhead republicanism. Both views can be true. Both probably were. Realignments always collapse the political categories and then restore them in new but familiar forms. To see how realignment switches the sides, ask who are the Cavaliers now, and who are the Roundheads?
The Republican presidential nominee is the New York-born son of a Scottish Protestant. His running mate is Appalachian-born and describes himself as a “Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.” They denounce the federal government as an overreaching despot and detect corruption in the ministries as avidly as any 18th-century pamphleteer. They even talk pidgin evangelical. Under former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republicans are the new Roundheads, appealing to American covenanters.
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The Democratic nominees are generally cavalier in matters religious. Vice President Kamala Harris attended both Hindu and Baptist ceremonies as a child. Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), was born a Nebraskan Catholic but calls himself a “Minnesota Lutheran.” This traditional American freestyling shows how effectively the American system shears religion from state. Harris is married to a Jew, Trump to a Catholic, Vance to a Hindu, and Walz to a Lutheran, but our political arguments remain rooted in the religious antagonisms of Roundheads and Cavaliers.
The Democrats are the new Cavaliers because, whether they know it or not, they are replacing the American covenant with a postmodern version of the premodern, predemocratic society of orders. If Harris has a message, it’s “I’m in charge, and I believe in arbitrary power.” Favored groups receive legal and racial privileges. “Our democracy” means federal contracts for her friends and judicial trouble for yours. The divine right of kings that closed the English parliament becomes the bureaucratic right to pack the Supreme Court for giving the wrong verdicts. The constitutional system was designed to prevent this kind of power grab. Perhaps it will. Perhaps it won’t.