A few years ago I realised, to my surprise, that I am actually in favour of
costitutional monarchy. Generally, my political tendencies are what, in Europe,
we call republican – I hold that all matters involved in government should
be public matters, subject to scrutiny by all who wish to comprehend them; they
should be justified in terms of the common good; those in positions of authority
should be held to account if they let such decisions be made on any other
ground; political expediency is explicitly an other
ground. I'm also a
democrat (that is, I believe that The People should have responsibility for
making the mistakes government shall inevitably make; it is a mistake to let a
ruling elite be in control of the process of government). Yet it appears that
(constitutional) monarchy is actually a good way to run a country.
People have, against all sense, a propensity for loyalty – perhaps
it's instinctive, I'm not sure; it might equally just be a piece of common
cultural baggage. I can understand loyalty to one's family, especially loyalty
to the other parent of one's childern. To some degree I can make sense of
loyalty to one's network of social peers, or to one's village – these make
sense (in evolutionary terms) as survival strategies. But loyalty to one's
nation
is an oddly abstract thing; I am surprised that people commonly
have an attachment on such a large scale. People generally despise their
governments, but don't go slagging off the people running their nations –
you'll find they take it personally.
I can see how national loyalty has its practical utility; but it also
generates a singular problem. This is most easily seen in the United States of
America: indeed, that nation took steps to partially correct the problem,
amending the constitution to not allow a president more than two terms after it
had seen its own response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. National loyalty tends
to attach itself to the person who is head of state
– and, in the
U.S.A., that rôle is held by the president, who is elected. National
loyalty expresses itself as loyalty to the president, with the result that
decent folks shall vote for the president as a matter of course: and most of the
U.S.A.'s citizens are decent folk, so the president would be re-elected forever.
Worse, the binding of national loyalty to the person of the president means that
decent folk can't deal rationally with information indicating that their
president is abusing his position.
The surprising virtue of (constitutional) monarchy is that decent citizens
attach their sense of national loyalty to the monarch, rather than the
government: decent citizens are thus able to make rational judgements about
their government and (largely) vote with their minds rather than their hearts.
Decent folk still have their sense of national loyalty, but they bind it to the
person of the monarch, who has little practical power. Nominally, the monarch
may have significant authority – commander-in-chief of the armed forces
and no decision of the government becomes law unless the monarch signs it
– but the proper process of democracy ensures that the monarch cannot
afford to exercise that authority: it would precipitate a constitutional
crisis
, meaning that the government would insist that it, having been
democratically elected, should have its way. The monarch can only afford to
pick such a fight when it's clear (not just to the monarch but also to the
nation as a whole) that the government is out of whack with the nation and needs
to be kicked back into line. This is actually a secondary virtue of monarchy:
someone is trained from birth for the job – or, at least, once they get
the job they know they're lumbered with it for life, so need to think about how
to do it properly – without having to pander to common idiocies, yet can
afford to say what they believe, even if those things are unpopular, and has the
authority to kick up the fuss that it would take for a (very) bad government to
be replaced.
As Winston Churchil said of democracy, monarchy is obviously the worst possible way to run a country, but it turns out to work better than all the alternatives we've seen tried.
Written by Eddy.