Instead, we get William Windsor, who carries himself with the quotidian air of a secular, modern Everyman: the sort of amiable public servant you might find working in a countryside charity. Watching his meeting with Donald Trump after the re-opening of Notre-Dame in Paris at the weekend, the royalty seemed to be on backwards. It was the democratically elected leader who came across like a monarch, grandly telling the actual prince he was “doing a great job” while Wills nodded and smiled like a bureaucrat.

It has long been presumed that even those retrograde nations that keep falling for strongman leaders will see the superiority of liberal democracy in the end. And this goes some way to explaining the hysterically overblown progressive panic about Donald Trump’s purported “fascism”. For simply by existing, and being popular, Trump contradicts this supposed arc of the moral universe toward rational, besuited proceduralism.

This must be frustrating for the progressives; the arc has been bending their way for a long time. In a 1923 essay, “Roman Catholicism and Political Form”, the political theorist Carl Schmitt was already cursing their triumph. In his view, the “economic-technical thinking” behind it — which today we’d call “managerialism” — displaced an older, more esoteric mode of representation with its “representative” government through elections and parliaments for a far.

What it replaced was “representation” not as a count of voters but a series of metonyms: parts that represent a whole, as “keel” might be used metonymically in poetry to denote the whole ship. In this mode, hereditary or appointed figures stand as representatives of distinct “estates” — that is, interests within the overall polity — such as the clergy, the landed gentry, the artisans and so on. But as we arrived in modernity, Schmitt argues, this understanding of “the principle of representation” was gradually lost — for it is the “antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today”.

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But if this case seemed hopeless to Schmitt, something has changed. Whatever the official policies on the table, at the vibes level, the 2024 US Presidential election pitted the spirit of “economic-technical thinking” against that of “representation” in the sense Schmitt describes. Consider: Trump’s opponents offered what was by then very plainly a purely self-propelling managerial regime, whose ability to run entirely on autopilot was revealed when its purported leader became so senile in office that his dementia could no longer be hidden.

Against this, two of the most iconic images of his presidential campaign — Trump “working” in McDonalds, and Trump in a bin lorry — show him deploying the vocabulary of representation-as-metonym: in them, he stands as part-representative for whole classes (or, as the medieval world would have had it, “estates”) of the American electorate, especially in lower-paid and menial jobs.

And while there has been discussion of Joe Rogan and the podcast ecosystem, this is one of the less well-understood ways the digital revolution helped to win the election for Trump. That, as contemporary readers of the great 20th-century media theorist Marshall McLuhan are fond of asserting, “digital retrieves the medieval”. According to McLuhan’s theory, shifting to a new technology will often retrieve older social forms or ideas the previous technology seemed to have rendered obsolete. Contemporary McLuhanists argue that shifting from a print to digital-based information environment re-opened space for cultural norms and practices that were common in the Middle Ages, but which “arc of history” enjoyers had since come to view as relics of the past.

For example, digital media reliably produces increasingly neo-feudal concentrations of wealth and power, which in turn enables the rise of a new class of lords and princes. The same revolution has retrieved the medieval experience of signs and symbols as a living language, in the form of memes. And Trump is by no means the only political leader who has grasped the power of digital to retrieve political legitimacy in a register that’s far more like the one Schmitt describes than the “economic-technical thinking” he decried.

If Trump does this instinctively, perhaps the most obviously skilled communicator in this register is El Salvador’s leader Nayib Bukele. Bukele (or his social media team) is online a lot, plugged into the Anglophone meme discourse, and artful in cultivating his presence in this field. His X timeline blends retweets of frog jokes, conventional state announcements, and visuals from Little Dark Age edits of El Salvador’s armed forces to intimate and painterly visuals such as this, seemingly calculated to convey a sense of the king among his people, lit as if by the grace of God.

As for Trump, having secured his election at least partly via his instinct for internet-mediated medieval-style representation, he is now presiding over a de facto court his haters decry as markedly monarchic in character: picking favourites, greeting petitioners and toadies, and playing courtiers off against one another. Henry VIII was reportedly by turns charming, volatile, generous, and mercurial, and always completely confident of his right to power. And when I try to imagine life in his court, it sounds much more like being around Donald Trump than the polished, controlled, and formally powerless William.

And much as a medieval monarch would, Trump is choosing his inner circle from among the realm’s real lords and princes. This has always been a pragmatic consideration, for a monarch: how do you keep your nation’s most powerful close enough to be on your side, but not so close they try and depose you? Accordingly, Trump has already appointed enough billionaires to his cabinet to form a football team. Indeed, if we were in the 13th rather than the 21st century, these notables would likely already have been granted honour and titles. As it is, Americans don’t really roll like that; but perhaps first-name-only fame, plus serious proximity to the empire’s nuclear core, is the 21st-century equivalent. (Elon was also at Notre-Dame.)

But while in some ways most of this is just a different inflection on existing democratic norms, what’s distinctive about “representation” in the digital age is that you gain legitimacy via genuine affection between people and leader — and this is hard to fake. As disdainful politicians from Gordon Brown’s “Bigotgate” to the Boriswave migrant explosion attest, it’s easy enough in the UK to be elected as a parliamentary representative, via “safe seats” and the party machine, without feeling any special affection for or affinity with the people you represent. But for leaders exposed online, that’s almost impossible to disguise. Regular people may be busy, but they’re not stupid: they will swiftly identify a representative that disdains them, and take note, and hate them for it.

Genuine affection, on the other hand, will cover a multitude of flaws: a blessing for Trump, who is not short of them. And yet he has a clear love for America and Americans, evident in the way he can pose in a bin lorry, a McDonald’s apron, or a police mugshot and look iconic, rather than stage-managed. He may thus turn out to be a terrible leader; but he’s nonetheless a potent antithesis to the headless, faceless, “economic-technical thinking” order not in spite of but because of his personality. The same goes for Bukele: it’s clear, in the way he speaks to and about the people of El Salvador, that he views them as continuous with himself.

By contrast, it’s difficult to imagine Starmer feeling warm and fuzzy about ordinary Brits; he usually emanates something more like tightly controlled fear and disgust. As for William Windsor, I have no reason not to believe he feels some fondness for the people of Britain. But it’s an open question whether he’d ever represent us in this sense. After all, his whole dynasty, and mode of royalling, only came into being after Britain’s last absolute monarch was deposed in 1688. The “constitutional monarchy” that replaced it has always known itself to be defanged, a settlement that suited an increasingly mercantilist country and which has served Britain well enough for several centuries.

For the same deeply embedded historical reasons, I think Britain will have to grow considerably more fed up with our managerial overclass than we are even today, before we’re willing to revisit the pre-1688 monarchical register in any more serious a manner than the Faragist pantomine style. But there’s no reason to believe political legitimacy always and forever flows through the same channels. And it’s clear that something much more like the medieval version is now re-emerging, in the internet age, to challenge the managerialism Carl Schmitt so vividly depicted, and viscerally loathed. So perhaps there’s still hope for us; certainly I’d like to believe assisted political death by Starmerism is not Britain’s inevitable terminus.

So in this sense, perhaps the restoration and re-opening of Notre-Dame does indeed serve as sign. Not for moral collapse, but for the recovery of older forms we thought had burned to ashes. Both ancient yet brand-new, a restored medieval cathedral destroyed and then restored stands as a fitting representative for the restoration of medieval representation. I expect none of us will like everything about this development; but the managerialism it opposes is a whited sepulchre. Let it be defeated by its new, ancient antithesis; and in its place, long live the new kings.

To understand why, we need to take a brief detour back about five centuries — to Florence and the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. He identified two archetypical psychological profiles of people who become leaders: the cunning but weak fox, who can outmanoeuvre his opponents but is “defenceless against wolves”; and the strong and brave lion, who likes to fight and can scare off wolves, but who is “defenceless against traps”. Machiavelli argued that a true statesman must embody both personalities, or risk destruction.

A distant student of Machiavelli, fellow Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would later expand the metaphor further. Observing history, he noted that the rise and fall of states and civilisations could be matched to a cyclical pattern in the collective personality of their ruling classes.

Nations are founded by lions, who are a society’s natural warrior class — its jocks, so to speak. They establish and expand a kingdom’s borders at the point of a sword, pacifying external enemies. Like Sparta’s Lycurgus or Rome’s Augustus, their firm hand often also puts an end to internal strife and establishes (or re-establishes) the rule of law. Their authority can be dictatorial, but it is relatively honest and straightforward in nature. They value directness and the clarity of combat. They are comfortable with the use of raw force, and open about their willingness to use it, whether against criminals or enemies. They have a firm sense of the distinction between enemies and friends in general — of who is part of the family and who is a prowling wolf to be guarded against. The security and stability they establish is what allows the nation to grow into prosperity.

Security and prosperity produce a proliferation of foxes. Foxes are unsuited to and deeply uncomfortable with the employment of force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, because they’re nerds. They will use physical force if necessary, but prefer to disguise its nature and are prone to use it ineptly. The brainy and cosmopolitan foxes have talents the lions don’t, however: they are good at managing complexity and scale, navigating the nuances of diplomatic alliances, or extracting profits from an extensive empire.

As long as peace prevails, civilisations come increasingly to morally prize the indirect and diplomatic methods of foxes and to avoid and indeed abhor the strength and violence of lions. As states grow larger and more complex, establishing new layers of bureaucracy, law and procedure, this quickly favours the Byzantine organising and scheming of foxes. In comparison, lions are inarticulate and unprepared for the traps of more underhanded mammals. So eventually, a wholesale replacement of the elite occurs: the lions who founded the nation are pushed out of its leadership, marginalised and excluded by a class of foxes who see them as brutish relics of a barbaric age.

But a curious thing then happens, Pareto observed: the instability of societies overly dominated by foxes begins to increase relentlessly. The foxes, reluctant to properly distinguish and identify real threats or to openly employ force even when necessary, find themselves defenceless against wolves both internal and external. When faced with escalating challenges, the foxes tend to resort to doubling down on their preferred strategy of misdirection and manipulation, and attempt to bury or buy off threats rather than confronting them directly. This does nothing to solve problems that require the firm use of force, or the threat of it, such as keeping packs of wolves on the other side of the borders. Eventually, when things get bad enough, foxes may desperately lash out with violence, but do so indecisively, ham-fistedly, or in entirely the wrong direction. The wolves, for their part, can instinctively smell weakness and just keep coming.

Like the rest of the West, Britain has been ruled for decades by an effete managerial elite whose system of technocratic control is absolutely characteristic of foxes. There could be no better example of this than how the Government has attempted to manage immigration and the ethnic tensions it has brought with it.

It has attempted to manage the perception of it, in classic fox-like fashion, via careful control of media and online information. Those who continue to speak out on the issue are then smeared with reputation-destroying labels such as “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “far-Right” in order to deflect others from listening to them. This reflects foxes’ consistent instinct to turn first and foremost to information warfare and narrative manipulation over direct confrontation. Hence the immediate reaction to the latest riots: to blame them on “misinformation” and “unregulated social media”. The implication being that nothing at all would be amiss if the information common people had access to could just be better suppressed.

This controlling instinct is also reflected in the UK’s “Neighbourhood Policing” model, which, as Aris Roussinos has noted, makes state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict the top priority of the police forces. In practice, this means deploying police to swiftly shut down anything that might provoke unsightly public disturbances in minority ethnic communities, such as “openly Jewish” men walking too near pro-Palestine demonstrations, people criticising Hamas, or Englishmen holding the English flag. Meanwhile, inciting rhetoric and open violence committed by the same ethnic communities is met with studious non-confrontation or polite de-escalation in order to avoid upsetting “community relations”.

This means British police now operate much less like a conventional crime-solving and deterrent force, as Ed West has pointed out, and far “more like that of a colonial [police] force, charged with preventing community relations from spilling over into violence”, while keeping multi-cultural imperial possessions  stable despite the natives’ displeasure.

The British elite’s habitual reliance on these techniques of information control and relationship micromanagement have combined most spectacularly in the Home Office’s “controlled spontaneity” programme, which aims to pre-empt any backlash to terrorist attacks and violent crimes by “pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks”, such as candle-lit inter-faith vigils and people handing out flowers “in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support”. This is of course all a façade that government “contingency planners” and their “civil society” partners rush to impose in order to, as Roussinos writes, “present an image of depoliticised community solidarity” meant to head off any potential escalation of ethnic tensions and violence. Or as one planner described it, the whole effort is intended to serve as “an anaesthetic for the community”.

The result is what Matthew Crawford has noted is essentially government by psyop, or soft managerialism. The ruling elite, Labour and Tory wings alike, would rather try to manage the British public’s whole perception of reality than ever use force to stop illegal immigration, actually police crime, or attempt — in the longer-term — to salvage the cratering popular legitimacy of their regime. Such is the way of the fox.

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But this way now seems to be reaching its inevitable failure point. The explosion of violence in the streets is proof enough of that. Pareto and Machiavelli would not be surprised, as this is exactly how just about every other fox-ruled regime in history eventually collapsed.

So, what is likely to happen next in Britain? We should first expect the foxes to immediately double-down on soft managerialism, including by restricting even further the digital information space, expanding surveillance and financial restrictions, and using the techniques of obfuscation and manipulation to control dissent — all of which Keir Starmer has already committed to doing.

His government has also already demonstrated its willingness to lash out with naked force against the disgruntled “far-Right” that it blames for disturbing the peace (doubtless along with the broader political opposition). And we should certainly expect to see more of this in the future. But the flailing response, and the resulting escalation in Britain’s state of anarcho-tyranny (“law and order for thee, but not for them”), will hardly solve the deeper problems driving the nation further into chaos.

That would take lions. But the foxes of the Western elite are even more scared of lions than they are of wolves — and perhaps for good reason: again and again in history, the oligarchic rule of foxes tends to end when the people finally get fed up enough to turn to a lion to save them from wolves.