There are of course quite a few American Monarchists these days. There are those who favour the British Crown, which makes sense because of the foundation of the thirteen colonies, and what a critical examination of our first civil war will show you. There are Jacobites,

which also makes sense. Both the presence in America of Franco-American communities, the role he played in our independence, and the martyrdoms of he and his family make a love of Louis XVI and the French Bourbons comprehensible. Our large Hispanic population, our history of

Spanish settlement, and their own attempts at building a truly Catholic Kingdom make American Carlists (such as the late, great Fritz Wilhelmsen and Don Heriberto Porras) sensible. But why is there such an interest - other than the descendants of immigrants from thence -

in Austria-Hungary and Bl. Emperor Karl in America? On the one hand, there is the Beatus himself, who represents in himself the qualities of self-sacrificial and paternal leadership that we have been deprived of by our our quasi-sacred constitution (I like to say that our United

States are the world's longest-running and most successful Oedipus Complex!) And, of course, one of his two approved miracles happened in the United States. But beyond that, the British Isles (within each Kingdom and Wales, at any rate), France, and Spain more or less - for all

regional variety - represent cohesive nationalities. But Austria-Hungary - as with these United States - represented a collection of disparate peoples held together by common beliefs rather than ethnicity or culture. In our case, those beliefs were a common morality and our

ersatz civic religion; in the Habsburg Dominions, it was Altar and Throne. As ours have died, American Monarchists cannot help but look to those of Central Europe, which after all were only destroyed by external action (unlike ours, which have imploded), and which even yet show

fitful signs of persistence and even renewal.