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COMMENTARY
January 21, 2009
The Royal Jelly
Yesterday's celebrations at Washington were a wonderful display of the power of monarchy. A new king was coronated, and his subjects were in a merry mood. It has been so through history, at coronations.The difficulties of the kingdom are cast upon the new monarch, with his superhuman powers; the people hail Caesar who will deliver them. That the United States have a republican constitution is beside the point. It was anyway federalized from the beginning, and the (indirectly) elected king serves more as an emperor. A mighty emperor indeed, for the U.S. emerged in the last century not merely as a superpower in the world, but towards its end a "hyperpower," without serious competition. As this century progresses we will see if America can outlast Rome. Unlike such countries as Canada and Britain, which retained the outward institution of monarchy but developed constitutional conventions by which real power was devolved upon boring legislatures, countries such as the U.S. and France chose to enhance the power of their monarchs, by giving them the golden sceptre of democratic legitimacy. The British genius was to separate the charisma and pageantry of State from the actual exercise of power within it. Thus, so great a leader as Winston Churchill could wear some pretty attractive hats, but never a crown. The American genius has been to flaunt that pageantry, in direct association with the power. Their presidents wear no crown, but the omission merely commemorates the conventions of the 18th century, when kings often went hatless, if not headless. The student of history will realize that kings, too, were often elected in the past; and the hereditary principle introduced later. The Vandals and Huns and Ostrogoths and Visigoths who besieged Europe, in former centuries, and threw themselves against the hereditary order of Rome, generally elected their kings. Intellectual confusion is created by the notion that kings may succeed only by inheritance. Like most things that appear "modern," democratic kingship is in fact quite primitive. Which isn't to speak against it. High civilization does not reject the primitive, but rather transforms it into the highly civilized. To reject something in itself, on the ground that it is primitive, is to reject what is human -- for as the anthropologists can surely confirm, the most barbaric tribes encountered in the jungles of Amazonia and Africa and New Guinea are unmistakably human in all of their affairs, and never more so than when collecting each other's heads as ornaments. Democracy itself can be primitive and barbaric, or highly civilized, or decadently post-civilized, or totalitarian. The latter two trends are easily visible throughout our Western world. "The people" are capable of electing monsters, as we have seen in Palestine, where they elected Hamas, or in Zimbabwe, where they once elected Robert Mugabe. And the people can be quite comfortable in electing hereditary leaders, as we have seen in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the United States. In this last we have, for instance, the Bush, Clinton, and Kennedy dynasties, vying for the kingship in that fine, competitive, American way. In addition to Bush, père et fils, we have Caroline Kennedy expecting a seat in the Senate, simply because she was John Kennedy's daughter, and Hillary Clinton accepting the secretariat of state, because she is Bill Clinton's wife. They don't even have to be elected. This doesn't mean that, e.g., Caroline Kennedy is not a fine character. One may have little sympathy for her, but must nevertheless acknowledge her royal touch -- the contempt alike for peasants and courtiers that rather appeals to us in so great a Lady. (Much of Pierre Trudeau's appeal among masochistic Canadians was based on his insolence towards us.) Nor can it mean that King Barack, addressing the assembled masses like a Princess Diana returned from the dead, is not a proper monarch. Journalists who followed the U.S. presidential campaign -- including several very Democratic journalists -- remarked on how accessible, friendly, and helpful the McCain staff were, and by contrast how contemptuously they were treated by Obama's entourage. But we expect to be treated contemptuously, and lose all respect for a man who is presented as our equal. That was John McCain's tragic flaw, as it was also George Bush's to some considerable degree. Both benefitted from aristocratic birth and disposition; both remain noble spirits; but each also became a compassionate "man of the people" -- and how sad for their political legacies. Mr. Obama had the royal jelly, as the journalists soon determined, and while Americans at large were skeptical at first, they finally came around. More than two million assembled themselves yesterday to salute His Majesty (according to an early estimate), a notable improvement on the 400,000 drawn to the last inauguration of King George. For whether before the masses in Berlin's Tiergarten, or along Pennsylvania Avenue and in Washington's National Mall, the people have recognized "Our Leader." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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