May 3, 2007
Presidents and Monarchs III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, “I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Gordon that there’s not much heart in my position. I have little patience for the monarchy, but I don’t think the alternative is necessarily so dry and unromantic. While Mr. Gordon disparages the office of prime minister as one for a ‘worn-out bureaucrat (the usual occupant of the office of head of state in a parliamentary government),’ I’d argue that there is more than a little glory in the succession of leaders from Walpole to the Pitts, to Wellington and Peel, running straight down to Thatcher and Blair. Maybe they haven’t ruled by the grace of God, but if they’ve done their jobs well, ruling by the grace of elections will do for me.” I did not, of course, disparage the office of British prime minister, nor any of the historical giants who have served in that office, but rather the putative office of a British president. Every country needs a head of state (or at least every country has one). In parliamentary systems, the offices of head of state and head of government are separate. The former gets the pomp, the latter the circumstance. In parliamentary republics, the office of president is usually filled by some has-been bureaucrat whose name no one can remember if they ever knew it. Quick! Who’s the president of Germany? See what I mean? But in parliamentary monarchies, the office of head of state is held by a king or queen, who holds it for life (although the Dutch monarchy has a tradition of abdicating in old age). In all cases the history of the royal family and the history of the country are deeply intertwined and so the sovereign is, quite literally, the embodiment of that nation’s history. And, as Walter Bagehot noted in the nineteenth century, royalty is magic. I wish a scholar would try to figure out why royalty has such a deep fascination for the rest of humanity instead of just dismissing it out of hand as a relic of a past time to be replaced by something “logical.” Since states, thank heavens, are not run by intellectuals, they have been much more sensible. I can think of no country, not led into political disaster by a monarch, that has chosen to abolish its monarchy. In one case, Japan, even though the monarch had indeed led the country into disaster, his retention on the throne was the one condition the country set before surrendering its sovereignty to a conquering foreign power. Instead, countries that have had monarchies have retained them, both because of their historic significance and in order to exploit the magic of royalty as a national asset. That exploitation can be seen, in spades, in this country beginning today with the state visit of Queen Elizabeth in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. She later goes to Kentucky for the Derby and then to Washington for all the ruffles and flourishes of a state dinner, invitations for which are worth their weight in gold among Washington movers and shakers. The visit will—I fearlessly predict—receive wall-to-wall media coverage that no president of a middling power could dream of commanding. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see the TV coverage of the horse race with a split screen, one half on the leading horse, one half on the Queen of England. I doubt the British people—who have survived and often triumphed for more than a thousand years as subjects of a monarch—would be so foolish as to throw away so priceless a national asset, just because their chattering classes can’t understand what is clear to everyone else.
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