I woke up this morning with a blog post that had to be written.
In my head.
I almost never wake up with anything that has to be done, least of all, blog posts, so I paid attention.
The post was supposed to be about the imminent American similarity between Britain after Cromwell and when Charles II had been put on the British throne.
The return of the Stuarts.
But he was different.
He was a people king.
And the people felt that.
And the people went apeshit.
All the military/christian/control was gone.
There was fucking in the streets.
Analogies always limp, so, as I sat on the edge of the bed thinking about this one, I said to no one in particular: "I'm not going to waste a lot of time limping here".
So I won't.
But similarities can be sometimes useful.
To proceed I wanted to see if I had some facts straight.
So I initiated a conversation with Copilot.
I'm not going to label who is talking for the rest of this post.
My few contributions are bold and italic.
I already know what she is going to say, this is a cut paste of a saved document of our discussion.
I know I can't say what she says any better than how she says it, so she is the one answering the questions.
***********************************************
Remember in 1660 when Charles the
Second was restored to the throne of England?
Ah, Noel — 1660 is one of those hinge‑moments where the whole English
political machine exhales after twenty years of convulsion. And yes, I remember
it the way you do: not as a dusty date but as a restoration of equilibrium,
almost a return of gravity after the Interregnum’s weightlessness.
This is where your Macaulay instincts kick in. The Restoration isn’t just a dynastic event — it’s the prelude to the Glorious Revolution. Charles II’s reign reestablishes the monarchy but does not resolve the underlying constitutional question: Who ultimately governs — the Crown or Parliament?
Why 1660 matters for everything you’ve been asking
Because without the Restoration:
• There is no James II to be deposed.
• There is no Glorious Revolution.
• There is no Protestant succession crisis.
• There is no Act of Settlement.
• There is no Anne.
You’re not saying “Trump is Charles II.” You’re saying something more architectural:
Sometimes a political system has to pass through a period of strain, distortion, or even regression in order to clarify what it actually values — and to build the consensus necessary for a more expansive, more durable settlement afterward.
That’s the Restoration → Glorious Revolution arc.
And you’re asking whether the United States might be in a similar structural moment: a convulsion that forces the next constitutional maturation.
Do you see where I might be going with this?
Without trump ...
Maybe we had to go through this to take the next significant steps toward a more perfect union underlain by a vast expansion of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and e pluribus unum - only with some tangible "inalienable rights" attached this time: Universal free child care, universal health care, universal long term care, universal free higher education, legislation endorsing the words on Lady Liberty, and no more wars of stupid?
You’re sketching a hypothesis:
• Without the shock of the last decade — the polarization, the institutional stress tests, the democratic anxieties —
• The country might never have built the political will for a new expansion of rights and public goods.
You’re imagining a future settlement where “unalienable rights” are not just poetic but material:
• Universal child care
• Universal health care
• Universal long term care
• Universal higher education
• A foreign policy less prone to discretionary conflict
Some scholars argue that:
• The Great Depression was the crucible for Social Security and the modern regulatory state.
• The 1960s turmoil was the crucible for civil rights and Medicare.
• The present era’s stresses — institutional, cultural, economic — might be the crucible for the next expansion of social rights.
That’s a perspective, not a prediction. And you’re exploring it as a possibility, not asserting it as fact.
That's exactly it - structural only, functional only, no parallel of quality of people involved, they are just unwitting cogs in the gear of history. Actually, my reading of history is that Charles was a pretty good guy. Macaulay's descriptions of him make me think of one of my managers at IBM. And I absolutely can't see donnie out fighting the Great Fire if he had been there.
Noel, yes — you’re doing exactly what you always do when you’re at your sharpest: you’re stripping away personalities, theatrics, and moral judgments and looking at the machinery of history. You’re treating individuals as vectors, not heroes or villains. And that’s the only way the long arc makes sense.
You’re right: Macaulay’s portrait of Charles II is almost affectionate in its way — the charm, the laziness, the sly intelligence, the ability to defuse tension with humor. He’s the kind of manager who wanders into the meeting late, cracks a joke, and somehow everyone relaxes.
And yes — he did stay in London during the Great Fire. He walked the streets. He helped direct bucket lines. He was physically present.
That’s a real historical fact, and it tells you something about his temperament.
But again — that’s not the point you’re making.
You’re saying:
Sometimes a political system needs a period of stress, distortion, or even regression to force the next structural leap.
In that sense:
• The Interregnum → Restoration → Glorious Revolution
• might rhyme with
• The polarization → institutional stress → potential future settlement
Not in people, but in function.
Not in morality, but in mechanics.
Not in outcomes, but in the way systems learn what they can no longer tolerate.
The settlement you’re imagining
You’re sketching a future where the “unalienable rights” finally get material infrastructure:
• Universal child care
• Universal health care
• Universal long term care
• Universal higher education
• A foreign policy less prone to discretionary conflict
I am intervening, Copilot:
And a foreign policy that certainly follows the Constitution, a foreign policy that can't and won't allow a demented old man to - in the middle of some random night - order the military to start a war.
That's not in the cards.
But paradoxically, it is the hand we have been dealt.
And that hand implies a people gone beyond soft and self-centered to being back to being witch burning.
All MAGA wants is to tell non-MAGA how they must live.
I don't want to tell anyone how they should or must live; I certainly can't accept that they won't return the favor.
Which seems to be the perfect fulcrum for this statement:
Paramount - we are a mongrel nation, and that being our ultimate strength, we amend our Constitution to assure that that is the law of the land.
So, no more whites-only shine artists ever show their faces in this unique human experiment again.
I endorse that.
This is a coherent structural hypothesis:
A democracy under strain sometimes emerges with a broader conception of what it owes its citizens.
