Sam Alito’s monarchical cosplay explains the Supreme Court justice’s actions.

We found out last week that in 2017, Justice Samuel Alito, apparently bored with the gray black robe of a U.S. Supreme Court justice, donned the ceremonial robes of the Holy Military Constantinian Order of St. George after receiving a knighthood from the monarchical religious-military order. Considering Alito enthusiasm Considering far-right European aristocrats such as Princess Gloria von Thurn and Taxis, perhaps his enthusiasm for chivalry is understandable. But the circumstances add to Alito’s growing pattern of disdain for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, especially as it pertains to himself. Like a modern-day Louis XIV, it is clear that Alito considers himself untouchable, embodying the Sun King’s famous statement: l’état, c’est moi.

Alito’s choice to become a knight of the Holy Military Constantinian Order of St. George, an order led by fringe Italian monarchists, is not just eccentric cosplay, although it certainly is that too. Knighthoods bestowed by princes are, to put it mildly, beyond the everyday experience of most Americans. After all, the Holy Military Constantinian Order of St. George is not comparable to more conventional fraternal societies such as the Knights of Columbus or lay Catholic orders such as the Knights of Malta. Among other key differences, the Constantinian Order is attached to the crown, and its Grand Master is a potential king. This is the so-called “dynastic order of knighthood”; that is, an order under the patronage of the royal family. Knighthoods like Alito were historically awarded by monarchs as rewards for loyalty or service to the crown.

Today, some defunct European dynasties retain their orders of chivalry as remnants of the power they once held. The Bourbon-Two Sicilies family, which knighted Alito in 2017, has not ruled southern Italy for more than a century. But in the alternate universe of the Constantinian Order, their greatness was practically intact. Led in the US by self-proclaimed “monarchists” who actively seek to restore their Bourbon prince to the throne, the Constantinian Order appears to exist primarily to preserve a lost monarchy: allowing a would-be king to exercise his hereditary privileges into a miniature kingdom of loyal subjects, allowing those whom he deems worthy to bask in the royal glow.

In contrast, the American republic was founded on a clear rejection of monarchy and nobility, which the framers considered hostile to the principles of equality and equal justice under the law. The drafters also recognized that titles, gifts and other “rewards” could be used by foreign monarchs and states to gain influence in the US government. This is why the Constitution places explicit limits on the executive branch and why the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits officials, including Supreme Court justices, from accepting these things without the express approval of Congress.

Alito didn’t just join the club. He accepted the high honor from a foreign prince and devoted himself to the cause of that prince for life.sacred militia” Like every other American, Samuel Alito is free to practice his faith as he wishes, and there is a long history of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States that unfairly questions the loyalty of American Catholics and their ability to hold public office. Alito, however, accepted knighthood and swore an oath to the order, which seeks to restore monarchical power, and does so by investing that power with the highest religious authority. The Americans who lead the Constantinian Order in the United States adhere to a “throne and altar” style of monarchism. According to leading monarchist The “throne and altar” monarchy revered by these knights views the church as the “animating principle of society” that “confers legitimacy and power on the king through… state ceremonies,” while the monarch exercises power with “God-given authority.” ” It was this type of monarchy that was personified by the ancestor of Prince Carlo of Bourbon, the same Louis XIV, who ruled by divine right and strove for absolute power.

Alito’s initiation ceremony clearly belongs to this throne-altar universe: the bishop declared him a knight “by order of His Royal Highness Prince Carlo”; the ceremony concluded with a Latin prayer for “the strong, pious, prudent and indefatigable ruler of this sacred Order”; as well as militaristic paraphernalia and images of the order – capes, swords and the motto: “in Vince’s special sign(“by this sign you will conquer”) – all of them recall the real history of the use of military force against non-Christians (or “infidels”, as the order called it). website puts it). Five years before the inflammatory decision that abolished Roe v. WadeAlito joined an organization whose ideology combines religion, political power and the rule of law.

This chivalry did not arise out of nowhere. Alito joined the monarchist, militaristic fanfare on the eve of the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s election as president, at a time when white supremacist violence at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was still fresh. The resurgence of the far-right authoritarianism of that time has not subsided since. Instead, the intervening years have seen these ideologies penetrate the mainstream and place the United States on the front lines of democracy’s global battle for survival. In the United States and abroad, a theomonarchical worldview prevails among prominent political leaders.New right“like J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon and the coalition of powerful forces behind Project 2025.

It is important to note that Alito’s ideological fundamentalism is expressed in the results of his judicial decisions, which categorically promote not only his far-right religious views, but also his commitment to an unchecked monarchical executive power, which would have been anathema to the Framers. After decades of trench work by Alito and his allies in the right-wing legal movement to advance the concept of a dominant “unitary executive,” that worldview took center stage—and our constitutional law—in this year’s 6-3 ruling. Trump vs USAwhen, 248 years after the start of the American experiment, the court’s supposed “originalists” invented the concept of absolute presidential immunity, giving the US President the powers of a monarch.

Alito’s judicial activism and his atmosphere of impunity are just visible signs of a rot that goes much deeper than chivalrous justice alone. All this is happening against the backdrop of a Supreme Court majority that rightly suffers from historically low public confidence in its legitimacy after a series of clearly partisan decisions such as Dobbs And Trump vs USAand unprecedented corruption scandals (of which Alito is often at the center) that Chief Justice John Roberts is completely unwilling to control. When the Framers carefully designed our system of separation of powers and prepared provisions such as the Foreign Emoluments Clause, the tyranny they sought to prevent resembled in many ways this.