Note: the article promised last week, on ways to defend privacy, has been delayed so that we can obsess over the royal baby like everyone else.
The world loves the new British royal baby: hundreds camped out in front of the hospital for days, the media was on watch and gave the event massive coverage and everyone gushed over William driving his wife and new child home.
Doubtless, many are also ready to throw up in disgust. Are the British royals nothing more than the Kardashians of Europe, a vapid group given attention only because we hope we can see something horrible occur? What possible purpose could there be to having a monarchy in a democracy? Isn’t it a relic of an undemocratic past, a painful reminder of a hereditary class system that oppressed and smashed lives?
As surprising as it sounds, there are two reasons why a constitutional monarchy can support and defend a democratic society.
The Imperial Presidency
In the United Kingdom, the head of state is the Queen, the head of government is the Prime Minister. In the United States those positions are held by the same person. And that is one of two key mistakes in the structure of our federal government that are slowly strangling American democracy (the other being the composition of the Senate).
Since the 1960s, and especially after the 1973 of the publication of the so-named book by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the term ‘Imperial Presidency’ has encapsulated the worry that power is slowly being centered around the president. That President Obama retained nearly all of the executive powers that Bush claimed is just the latest step in this trend. The modern president travels with the kind of pomp even a Tudor monarch would envy. Indeed, Air Force One, the limos and the armed guards constitute an entourage that is significantly more enormous and more elaborate (if not anywhere near as stylish) as what surrounds Queen Elizabeth II.
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” President Nixon said, and one could not find a more perfect statement of the divine right of kings than that — except to note that even Nixon didn’t think he could kill Americans with robots or collect every phone call in the U.S.
Instead, Nixon tried to bug a single office and the subsequent outrage and botched cover-up brought down his administration. Now we shrug at bugging the entire nation.
The Queen, or any constitutional monarch, is the embodiment of a nation, can speak for it on solemn occasions and is the object of the people’s patriotic sentiment. In the United States, the flag performs some of these functions, but unlike a living royal, the flag is easily appropriated for partisan causes.
To be sure, the U.K. Prime Minister has also acquired more power over the years. The position has never channelled the sort of reverence afforded the Queen, however.
In fact, and though it may feel like heresy to say so in the American context, separating the head of state and head of government is an important safeguard for a democracy.
Promoting good things
We observe the royal family as visual spectacle, and, as is often noted, no one does spectacle better than the British. From royal weddings, to changing the guard at Buckingham Palace, to trooping the color, to state visits, even to going home from the hospital with a new baby, the careful choreography provides great pageantry and many tourist dollars to the U.K. economy.
But, day in and day out, the royal family does “engagements”: opening new charitable institutions, commemorating significant events, visiting the sick, marking anniversaries.
And then there is the honors system: a very complex set of awards for merit, lifetime achievement and courage of various kinds. The purpose is so the country “officially recognises success and excellence; and supports the ideal of voluntary service” in the words of the Queen’s website.
Of course, this system gets politicized (since it is the government that chooses the winners) and sometimes the “service” being awarded seems only to be giving money to the political party in power. However, the majority of the awards are typically given to people for a lifetime of quiet achievement and are treasured by the recipient and their family.
A crucial question for any society is: what do you reward? It isn’t just conservatives in the U.S. who decry the extent to which our culture now gives attention to, and thus implicitly rewards, the trivial, the scandalous and the dysfunctional. From “reality” shows designed for conflict and outrageous behavior, to drooling over celebrity misdeeds, to the admiration of “gangsta” culture and outlaws in general, we are a long way from Mayberry.
Many TV shows used to have a nice tidy moral message; this was admittedly unrealistic in its depiction of actual life. Equally unrealistic, however — and much more harmful — is the endless insistence that to depict the worst of human life and behavior is to be authentic.
The various ranks of honors, all symbolically flowing from the monarch, and the ceremony of giving them out — when ordinary people can meet the Queen — work to provide a national cultural marker that good behavior is rewarded and honored.
Other societies also do this. Canada, for instance, has an national honor society and the U.S. president also gives out certain medals. But by tying the whole system to the head of state, it gives these awards a national — and permanent — nature. It is one of the many services of the monarchy to democracy.
Seriously, a queen?
If you were building a country from scratch, you wouldn’t likely create a new royal family. Nor would you be likely to import a prince from elsewhere and impose it on the new country as, for example, was done when Greece became an independent nation in 1828. Instead, you would likely create a president and prime ministerial system where the president is an honorary position chosen by the national legislature.
Greece has that now, and in the governmental crisis of 2012, that neutral president was able to play a positive role in trying to broker a government.
In this system, the president handles all manner of honorary and symbolic roles as head of state, all while preventing the prime minister from acquiring too many monarchical qualities. The presidency also has the advantage of not being hereditary and also is limited to fixed terms, and so can be changed, allowing a variety of elder statesmen and stateswomen to cap their careers with this position. Of course, the choice of a president can be political and contentious, too; there is no perfect system.
Royal misbehavior
It’s common now to celebrate the run of successes of the current British monarchy: a fairy-tale wedding, a national jubilee and now a birth. This stands in contrast to the era of scandal, divorce and tragedy of the years of Princess Diana, Fergie and others.
That was a bad era, but the point is that you could write a detailed political history of those years and not mention the royal family at all. You could discuss all manner of amazing volunteer workers and heroic deeds and note that they went on being honored without interruption. The misdeeds and missteps did not destroy the royalty’s role in British democracy.
An American monarch?
Institutions cannot just be transported from one nation to another. It would be ludicrous to think the U.S. would be improved by adding a royal family and giving it Air Force One to fly around in. The history of the United Kingdom and the slow evolution of its governing institutions is one reason the royal family can still occupy a useful niche in that nation’s democratic system, but it can’t be a model for other nations with different history.
The lesson for the United States, however, is that the current model of presidency is not working and is unlikely to improve, absent some dramatic crisis. Instead of evolving towards the system of cultural restraints that keep the British monarch out of politics, the American presidency evolving towards the unrestricted excesses of Henry VIII or pope Boniface VIII. We have a ways to go before we get there, but it is unclear what might stop us. Does anyone actually believe that President Hillary or whoever the Republicans might nominate will challenge this trend?
It’s all the more ironic that both the British royal family and the new pope are trying to dismantle some of the pomp and mystification around their positions, while the U.S. president goes on expanding his.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy.