Andrew Sullivan celebrates the British royals’ influence on society:
One note in favor of the monarchy. I’m an unabashedly Tory royalist. This is not because I have anti-democratic impulses (if I’d stayed in Britain and at some point been offered some kind of aristocratic title, like many of my friends in the elite, I would refuse it on principle). And it’s not even because I love royal news and gossip. It bores me to tears. It’s because I see the enormous value, especially in these tribal times, of institutions that can unite people with each other and with the past. The British monarchy brilliantly performs both functions. The country is currently bent on an act of economic suicide in its pathetic attempt to leave the E.U.; it is riven by the same tribal divides as America; it has an identity crisis around race, religion, and even the boundaries of its own territory. But everyone loves the Queen. When she dies, the nation will fall silent. She is the living embodiment of that Burkean idea of a national compact between the generations, past, present and future. She gives an apolitical meaning to being British. I remember vividly watching Netflix’s The Crown in the wake of Trump’s victory. Queen Elizabeth II represented the polar opposite of President-elect Trump. Utterly self-effacing for decades, stable, rational, devoted to protocol, insistent on political neutrality, devoting her entire life to constant service, she is, in some ways, a living rebuke to the polarizing, showboating American presidency we now have to endure.
The contrast of Queen Elizabeth II and President Trump neglects one important challenge: when the Queen dies, how do you know her replacement, whether it’s son or grandson, will have her virtues? History is full of monstrous Kings and Queens, and in fact that’s some of the motivation for the American form of government.
I want to say the antidote is composite institutions, such as Congress, but recent experience has cast doubt on that assertion. Perhaps the most that you can say is that even if a majority of the institution has been perverted, they do remain individuals capable of random, even honorable acts. As each has individual ambition, they may occasionally neglect their sad, un-American allegiance to Party and whoever controls that Party.
Occasionally.
So long as we have institutions of power, we may suffer through periods like this.
