OH NO, NOT A KING AGAIN!

Who would have thought we’d get to a point where democracy is at risk of dying in America and that the beacon of light (in my opinion) to the world is dimming.  The Statue of Liberty was given to us by France, on the centennial anniversary of the American Revolution, when America declared its independence from a king. That’s what the American Revolution was all about. In a monarchy, the people are the king’s subjects.  In a republic (or democracy), the people are citizens. A very big difference. And now we have a person in the White House with a large fan base who says he wants to make America “Great Again,” and he’s talking and acting as if he is (or aspires to be) a king. 

I think more than ever about our country’s history as I teach my undergraduate courses on Milton and on the Enlightenment at Barnard College. There was a time, perhaps, when my teaching and study of this period seemed like an escape from the present, something I could anchor myself in, escaping anxiety about the here and now. But no more. What I teach is more relevant than ever (or “relatable” as my students often say). The words we read in those old texts by dead white men sound a warning, like an air raid or tornado siren. And these young women and men hear it loud and clear. 

This whole year has felt like a lesson in the connection between the present and the past, but particularly this spring semester 2019, which has just ended.

As the showdown between the House’s Judicial Committee and President Trump was starting in April following “The Mueller Report,” my Enlightenment Colloquium syllabus was at the point where we were reading about the American and French Revolutions. We had already read Milton, Locke and Spinoza on toleration and the necessary separation of church and state to preserve freedom of conscience (and freedom of the press).  Now my students read selections from a century later: Thomas Paine, the American Declaration of Independence, the first article of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. On one beautiful spring afternoon after weeks of rain, we sat outside around a table, discussing history and these writings, as the trees with their new green leaves provided shade. We took turns reading passages and contemplating them. The indictments of the King of England in the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence: his “usurpations,” his refusal to “Assent to Laws,” his “Invasions on the Rights of the People,” his “Violations of Law,” his “Cutting Off Our Trade with all Parts of the World.” “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice,” “made judges dependent on his Will alone.”  I was teaching history and historical documents, and had not intended to give a lesson about our present situation. But there was no ignoring the parallels. 

We read James Madison’s Federalist No. 10, where he worries about “the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations,” a “faction” in which “a number of citizens are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” My women students were shocked at how current these texts seemed, as if they were addressed to them. I remembered Milton’s comment in Areopagitica (1644) that “books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them.”  All of my students spoke, feeling these readings and the questions the writers raised were urgent. When they read James Madison’s definition of dangerous faction as a group (minority or majority), which is “adverse to the rights of other citizens,” they saw a prediction of our present dangers: one of which is the growing number of states outlawing abortion, restricting the rights of women, in the hopes that the Supreme Court, now stocked with so-called “pro-life” justices, will overturn Roe vs. Wade. A situation that also violates the First Amendment on the separation of church and state. And they asked: is democracy declining? 

In my Milton course, we had been studying the seventeenth-century, not the eighteenth. We read his polemical prose during the English Revolution (1642-1660), as a lead up to his epic Paradise Lost  Milton’s writings all were concerned with liberty, with its challenges and problems and they influenced the American Revolution. In Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1664), defending Parliament’s trial and conviction of Charles I, Milton boldly declared, “all men naturally were born free, being the image of God.” He insisted that “the power of kings and magistrates is …committed to them in trust from the people…in whom the power yet remains fundamentally.” But Milton didn’t like kings, particularly kings who claimed absolute power. He was outraged by men who set themselves up as gods to be worshipped. (And what do we see but something like the idolization of a king in those hysterical Trump rallies?) Then my class read Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, published in 1660 as England was about to bring back Charles II and restore monarchy. Milton, distraught and angry, accused the English of preferring to return to bondage of Egypt (that is, to live under a king) than to do the hard work of liberty. He mocked a king who would “pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him for nothing done that can deserve it.” We’ve witnessed the same. Milton was a Christian, saw things in terms of sin, and thus was alert to the idolatry inherent in any person’s ambition to be God-like, above the law, and in people eager to worship him, who he feared might be a majority. My students didn’t miss any of the connections with our present moment. They left the course knowing that history is important, and understanding the contemporary relevance of these old texts, and (I hope) inspired to act and to vote. 

Only days after our classes ended, Representative Jerrold Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, appeared on TV, saying that Trump is acting like a king who believes he is above the law. “He wants to make himself a king, and Congress cannot permit that.” If my students were watching (they were probably too busy writing their term papers, taking their finals), surely they made the connection with those warnings against tyranny and unchecked power that they had read in my courses. Nadler’s language precisely echoed the American Revolution where the revolutionaries rebelled against England’s King George III, who, like James I and Charles II in the seventeenth century, insisted his power was absolute, that he could ignore the law.  Now we have an American president, many of whose followers think he has been appointed by God, and who claims to be above the law when he repeatedly invokes “executive privilege” and refuses to release information or share it with Congress, the elected representatives of “the people,” when he jokes that he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.  We make comparisons to the 1930s, with its xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and anxiety about borders, and they are apt. But I also feel like I’m reliving the period in English history I teach and write about—seventeenth-century England. That particular past (the literature, the history, the political and religious conflicts) now seems eerily and frighteningly current, as my students tell me more and more these days.