"Donald Trump’s New Version of an Old Political Fantasy"

"Ever since announcing his presidential candidacy, Donald Trump has topped polls, dominated headlines and hovered over the Republican field like a dirigible. Panicked rivals, story-chasing journalists and thrilled supporters have treated him like some momentous (or monstrous) one-off. But he is actually an old thing in American politics—older even than the republic itself. Mr. Trump is the latest incarnation of the Patriot King—the hero who swoops into the political system from the outside to save it from its own vices."

The idea of the Patriot King was the brainchild of a thinker well known to our founding fathers—Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), an English politician and journalist at a time when royal power in Britain gave way to government by Parliament and political parties.

Bolingbroke’s political disappointments led him to a second career as a polemicist. In a series of essays and books, he argued that the original sin of English political life was corruption. Party leaders bought elections by bribing voters and bought the loyalty of members of Parliament by giving them government jobs.

Bolingbroke argued that only a public-spirited royal could rise above this dirty traffic. In his most influential book, he named this paragon the Patriot King. High birth would guarantee such a ruler’s independence; he would “put himself at the head of his people in order to govern, or more properly to subdue, all parties.”

The founding fathers didn’t want a king, patriotic or otherwise. But they also didn’t want political parties, which James Madison in the Federalist dismissively called “factions.” When parties inevitably arose, the founders and their heirs quite naturally yearned for some savior who might check them.

For more than two centuries, the most common candidates for the role of Patriot King have been heroic generals. Six have made it to the White House—Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower—and in our day, Colin Powell, Wesley Clark and David Petraeus have been mentioned as possible aspirants. (read the whole thing)