1776 USA: "No more kings!" Why?

Note that for over 150 years, very low status people had come to America, worked hard, and became middle class or better people within a generation.

That wasn’t all that common in the Old Country. Ben Franklin, for example, was appalled when he visited the UK to find class snobbishness permeating every level of society. In the UK, who your parents were, etc., mattered tremendously. In the US is didn’t.

The class consciousness (which still permeates the UK), affected everything. Incompetent boobs became judges, military officers, and even King solely based on their parentage.

At the other end, if you were a hard working son of peasants, your chances of moving up in life were small. It was actively discouraged. This just ran counter to the American experience.

So anti-royalty was just part of a sentiment that “We don’t care what your great grandfather did for a living, what are you doing to make a better life?”

(Slaves, excepted, of course.)

As long as you are being given a reading list, Montesquieu and Machiavelli should be added. Machiavelli on The Discourses of Livy, not The Prince.

The founding fathers were very well read, having leisure time and no TV, radio, internet or local theater. So they read. History is replete with idiot monarchs, and not so many good ones. They wanted an executive that could regularly be removed so they could avoid the idiots. So they created checks and balances so that no one branch would dominate if the other two opposed it.

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