From the Paris Review:
AB: I think I’m a Jacobite, meaning that I’m traditionally Catholic, support the Stuart monarchy and want to see it restored, and distrust imposed change even when it seems to be for the better. I honestly believe that America should become monarchist (preferably Stuart) because with a limited monarchy you have no president, and a president is one more corruptible element in government. I hate all republics. I suppose my conservatism, since the ideal of a Catholic Jacobite imperial monarch isn’t practicable, is really a kind of anarchism.
INTERVIEWER: Many Americans believe their presidency has evolved into a form of monarchy, with unhappy results. Do you see anarchy as a viable political alternative?
AB: The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones. Your alternative is either a return to the limited monarchy of the British Commonwealth—a constitutional monarch is at least out of politics and can’t get dirty or corrupt—or devolution into unfederated states with a loose cooperative framework for large development schemes. Anarchy is a man’s own thing, and I think it’s too late in the day to think of it as a viable system or nonsystem in a country as large as America. It was all right for Blake or for Thoreau, both of whom I admire immensely, but we’ll never get it so full-blooded again. All we can do is keep pricking our government all the time, disobeying all we dare (after all, we have livings to earn), asking why, maintaining a habit of distrust.
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As someone who finds Burgess to be one of the most interesting writers of the 20th century (and therefore any century), I find his views here refreshing, and also saddening - they express a certain nuance, an intellectually guided humility and sentiment for the beautiful and the baroque that is becoming increasingly non-existent as we hurtle towards a faceless, mechanistic and anti-cultural society.
