It’s not that today’s populists (a few intellectuals aside) favor the restoration of an absolute or Catholic monarchy. Rather, like the original Jacobites, they represent a hodgepodge of somewhat disparate causes, unified mostly by their oppositional and outsider status, their distance from and defiance of the Whiggish metropole. As Frank McLynn points out in his history of the Jacobites, whatever specific designs the Stuarts had in mind, their movement always included a variety of competing ideological and religious tendencies. There were English Jacobites who wanted to see the Stuarts enthroned over all the British Isles. There were also plenty of opportunists, familiar from the grifter politics of our own day — smugglers and privateers seeking relief from a centralizing British state, bankrupt gentry seeking relief for their accumulated debts.

---

Persons: Donald Trump’s, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Trump, Frank McLynn Organizations: European Union, London, Whig, Jacobite, Jacobites, Scottish Locations: England, United Kingdom, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Europe, Ulster, United States, Scottish, British, London