I have been wrestling all week with how to explain the case for constitutional monarchy to readers in the world’s greatest republic.
I have run through various arguments, but I keep coming back to a passage that George Orwell, a socialist to his fingertips, wrote during World War II.
“A French journalist said to me once that the monarchy was one of the things that have saved Britain from Fascism. What he meant was that modern people can’t get along without drums, flags and loyalty parades, and that it is better that they should tie their leader-worship on to some figure who has no real power.”
I thought of those words last week as I sat in Westminster Hall, the only properly old part of Britain’s largely faux-antique Parliament, and watched the kind of ceremony that my country does best, with fanfares of trumpets and lines of beefeaters and the ritual covering of the maces that symbolize the authority of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. At the center of the rite, literally and figuratively, was King Charles III, enthroned on the spot where, in 1649, representatives of an earlier Parliament had condemned his namesake and ancestor, Charles I.
Yet it was not Charles III who was being exalted. It was Parliament, which the king described as “the living and breathing instrument of our democracy.” Moments earlier, the speaker of the House of Commons had recalled the late queen’s attendance at the 300th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, joking that “it is perhaps very British to celebrate revolutions by presenting an address to Her Majesty.”
He spoke truer than he knew. Since 1689, Parliament has determined the succession — most recently in 2013, when it decided that elder daughters should inherit before younger sons. No amount of pomp and pageantry detracts from the reality that Britain is a crowned republic. If members of Parliament decided to scrap the monarchy, it would go.
It is a beautiful paradox. The sovereign is the fount of all legitimate authority, yet serves at our pleasure. We keep the symbols of statehood separate from the grubby compromises inherent in government, vesting titular power in a nonpolitician.
King Charles has his opinions, of course. No doubt, at his weekly sessions with Liz Truss, he will nag his prime minister about global warming — and, no doubt, she will listen politely. But she knows that he cannot vote.
What if other countries had gone for a similar system? Suppose that, as a handful of czarists wanted in 1991, Russia had installed a constitutional monarchy, perhaps under the Oxford-educated Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna. Might she have forestalled the personality cult attached to Vladimir Putin? I can’t say for sure: The Italian monarchy did not prevent the rise of Benito Mussolini. But she would have had a pretty good shot at it.
Or imagine that you were going to live in an Arab country and that the only choice you could make was a monarchy or a republic. You wouldn’t hesitate, would you? On the one hand, Morocco, Bahrain, Kuwait. On the other, Libya, Syria, Yemen.
Nor is it just the Arab world. Freedom House finds that countries with hereditary rulers also tend to have “high-performing democratic political cultures characterized by legal continuity, compromise, self-limitation, suspicion of radicalism, and regular, moderate adjustments and policy corrections.”
Transparency International finds that 7 of the 10 least corrupt states in the world are monarchies. The World Bank finds that the same is true of 6 of the 10 best countries to do business. Other studies show that having a constitutional monarchy correlates with higher social trust and more regular elections. One Bank of England economist even found that hereditary succession leads to an extra 1.03% growth per year.
All right, you might say, limited monarchies serve a purpose in countries with weak traditions of liberty; but surely, the same is not true of advanced democracies such as the United States.
Until recently, I would have agreed. But listen to the way in which Donald Trump’s partisans demand personal loyalty to their guy, changing their positions when he changes his. Listen to how, in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago raid, they began to argue that he was not just an ordinary citizen. Does it not bear out Orwell’s point about the danger of fusing the power and the glory in one man?
To put it another way, consider why Canada, which started from the same place as the U.S., continues to have civil and civilized elections. It is literally impossible that a Canadian politician could refuse to accept an election result, because there is a neutral referee above politics. That, in these angry times, counts for a great deal.
