Today on Young Heretics, I would like to nominate myself, Spencer Clayton, for King of the United States.

No, I don't actually want to do that, although I hope I would have your vote for King. But I do

want to talk about kings and kingship. This is going to be a two-part episode. This is part one

and then part two will come next week. This is a hugely important element of political philosophy.

It is becoming troublesomely relevant right now because for a whole host of reasons, but

one reason that's emerged on this show is as we talk about some of the developments that are going

on this sense of social collapse, decay from democracy into mob rule. A lot of what's going on

is sort of looks to me a little bit as if we could be in line for some kind of really scary

government transition or some strong man to kind of get us, you know, to clear the field. This is

when I did the episode on Rome in the 130 species you talked about the Grocchi and we talked about

the fact that when you have these mass movements of popular unrest, all of this kind of this dead elite

that's not doing anything, you leave the field wide open for people who can come in. I'm not

advocating it hardly at all, in fact at all, but I am saying that you leave the field wide open

for somebody to make use of all that popular energy and basically rally the whole community behind

himself. And so it's come up a lot and another thing that's come up is that the experience of

monarchy is not always bad for every people, right? And that's something that it's very hard to

talk about in an American context because we all, myself included, have a story about America that

begins with the expulsion of a king with, you know, removal of king George from power over the

Americas. And it's like the Romans, as we'll get into, we emerged from that experience with a

deep and I think fully warranted mistrust of kings and of any one fallible human being accruing

too much power to himself. I will now pause and bring you a word from our sponsors. So this show

exists to bring you ancient culture and Western culture more generally and to really make that

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