This year election day in America falls on the 5th of November, a date innocuous for us, but auspicious for our British cousins (who themselves just held a consequential election on our hallowed July 4). On that day in 1605, a Catholic plot to blow up the House of Lords—with King James I in it—was happily foiled. The conspirators, including most famously Guy Fawkes, were executed. To this day, people across the pond celebrate November 5 with bonfires and fireworks.

　　We must pray that no conflagration—literal or metaphorical—accompanies our democratic proceedings this year. November 5, however, can point us to another momentous event in English history that can teach us much about our constitutional order, particularly how it divides powers among the branches.

　　Eighty-three years to the day after the Gunpowder Plot fizzled out, William of Orange set foot on the shores of Devon, invited by English noblemen to oust the Catholic James II and assume the throne. Of the Glorious Revolution’s many fruits, the most consequential was the diminishment of the monarchy’s real power, which a Whiggish Parliament steadily assumed. Less than a century later, George III’s authority bore a closer resemblance to that of Charles III today than to James I. This upset the traditional balance of the English constitution: the prime minister, a member of the legislature, was now the de facto chief executive. The separation of powers for which Montesquieu praised Britain didn’t really exist anymore.

　　A century after William disembarked, the New World gave a remarkable rejoinder. As Eric Nelson shows in The Royalist Revolution, some American colonists like John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and James Wilson protested parliamentary abuses by unearthing a reactionary, pre-1688 political theory. They regarded the monarch as the independent chief executive of the whole empire, possessing the authority and obligation to overrule Parliament and defend his American subjects. They essentially asked the king to veto bad legislation, a power monarchs had ceased to possess in practice. Only when the functionally powerless George III refused to do this did they renounce his lordship. A decade later, the new American Constitution was ratified with these men’s support, and it bore the marks of their theory of the British constitution. This document created a truly independent executive office, a presidency vested with powers that Parliament had long ago stripped from the king, including powers of veto, appointment, and pardon, and expansive authority over foreign affairs. Understanding this, anti-federalist critics of the Constitution sounded the alarm, alleging that the American president would be “an elective King.” To an extent, these avowed republicans had recreated an older, more monarchical form of the English constitution.

　　Parallel developments in England and America have yielded a regime paradox. Britain retains an anointed monarch who is officially the head of state, but is actually ruled by a unicameral elected legislature, the House of Commons (after the House of Lords was neutered in 1911). In America, the trappings of monarchy were long ago rejected, but presidents are true and independent heads of government. Since the Progressive Era, presidents have wielded even more power than originally intended—we have, by some accounts, an “Imperial Presidency.”In Nelson’s words: “On one side of the Atlantic, there would be kings without monarchy; on the other, monarchy without kings.”

　　As we prepare to elect our next king, ought we to envy the Brits? Some Americans can’t help it, for a variety of reasons. Traditionalists cast a wistful eye on the British state’s official sacral basis, reverently appreciating a lingering shade of the ancien régime. Meanwhile, some progressives tire of our system which, by making the executive independent, makes possible divided government with its attendant gridlock.

　　Yuval Levin and Philip Wallach have eloquently defended this constitutional inefficiency as a virtue because it forces the legislative and executive branches to bargain and deliberate toward a moderate consensus. They contrast this to parliamentary systems like Britain’s, in which government is never divided and can ram through a radical program within a short duration. They see here a failure to put checks on the mutable (and potentially tyrannical) passions of the majority. These concerns follow Hamilton, who in Federalist # 71 worried about the “almost irresistible” tendency of “the legislative authority to absorb every other.” An energetic, independent executive provides a counterweight.

　　America and Britain took different directions regarding executive power, but both roads have led to an erosion of the separation of powers.

　　Checking the legislature wasn’t the only benefit Hamilton saw in a strong executive. In Federalist #70, he underlined the necessity of “energy in the executive” for “good government.” Making an audacious comparison to the Roman republican office of dictator, Hamilton argued that a “vigorous” executive “is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks.” Conducting foreign policy, and the execution of the laws domestically, often requires “decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch,” of which “one man” is capable while a large assembly is not.

　　Today, we demand energy from presidents, but we also fear it. Various libertarians and progressives fret about the rise of an energetic tyrant, and see just that in Donald Trump. Imitating the opponents of Andrew Jackson, they ascribe monarchical ambitions to him. Yet this summer, President Biden was pressured into ending his 2024 campaign by a chorus of Democrats who’ve adopted Republicans’ longstanding view: that the aging Biden lacks the vitality, the energy, to continue as chief executive. The president must be vigorous because he is said to “run the country” like a CEO, in American parlance, or more accurately, like a king.

　　In foreign affairs, too—the area of greatest presidential prerogative—we want it both ways. The Global War on Terror awakened many Americans to the ways a president can abuse the office’s expansive foreign-policy powers. Yet we still expect our president to be the Leader of the Free World, whether with an emphasis on drone-striking Iranian generals or spearheading a pro-Ukraine alliance. We enjoy the prestige and economic dividends of being a world hegemon, but the reality is that America’s global primacy helped solidify the primacy of the executive. As the policy arena that most requires “decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch” expanded, the most unitary, efficient branch grew at the expense of the others. There’s a reason early-twentieth-century Republicans like Robert Taft paired their commitment to small government with isolationist tendencies. As academic progressives might say, an American Empire necessitates an imperial presidency.

　　The current presidential race has featured intense concerns from the Left about executive tyranny and how to constrain it: How much legal immunity does the president have? Can he fire any federal employee unilaterally? Will Trump rule as a dictator and fatally weaken our democratic norms? Has he delegitimized the Supreme Court by stacking it with loyalists? These ostensibly procedural concerns are almost always voiced in relation to substantive issues like abortion rather than strictly in defense of Congress’s constitutional role. There’s no political fault line concerning the relationship between the legislature and the executive; rather, what’s contested is the level of personal control the president should enjoy over the administrative agencies.

　　America and Britain took different directions regarding executive power, but both roads have led to an erosion of the separation of powers. Hamilton would certainly prefer the American path: he would be pleased to see that the United States has avoided the republican pitfall of legislative tyranny. We have, however, moved in a different direction, toward a more monarchical regime than the Constitution established. Hamilton probably would not lament this either. He harbored a more outward-facing (globalist?) long-term vision for the republic than did his mentor, George Washington, who refused an American crown and counseled earnestly against foreign entanglements.

　　Woodrow Wilson, going further than Hamilton, believed in an inevitable (and desirable) replacement of representative government by administrative agencies. Some on the right today view that this regime transition as a fait accompli. But if America is still a republic, and if The Federalist was right about a republican legislature’s natural predominance, then Congress could swiftly reclaim its role in our governing process—if it wants to. One hopes this won’t require a revolution, glorious or otherwise.