King Charles’ address to the US Congress highlighted the tension between democratic ideals and inherited power, revealing deeper strains in the western political and economic order.

King Charles’ address to the US Congress was a strange spectacle: a hereditary monarch standing in the chamber of the world’s most powerful republic to praise democracy, constitutionalism and the liberal order.

It was meant to symbolise continuity. It revealed contradiction.

Here was the residue of feudalism including crown, bloodline, inherited office, ceremony, deference being deployed to reassure a declining capitalist........

© Pearls and Irritations