Press Association via AP Images
Members of the British royal family on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, July 10, 2018
Once every 20 or 30 years, I think about the British monarchy. Chiefly, I wonder why, against all good sense, it still exists. The reports of Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan Markle and Harry Whatshisname have, of course, returned me to this question.
I suppose one reason the royals still haunt the Earth is that they provide spectacle, both good and bad, to Britons and visiting tourists. Why British taxpayers have to subsidize this spectacle has never been clear to me. It’s as if Americans were compelled to pick up the entire tab for big-time professional wrestling, with no say over which wrestlers would be performing.
A second possible reason is that the royals increasingly provide fodder for dramatists in various media to tell stories that show them to be just like us, only dumber. That can have a comforting effect, sometimes.
Finally, the royals persist because they evoke national traditions. While they lost their right to govern in the early 18th century, they still summon up a host of memories, some of which may be pleasant. To be sure, they remind us of how many British aristocrats have been absolute twits, anti-Semites, racists, and the like; they remind us that some of them still are.
But lest we Americans snicker at these Paleolithic survivors, we need to remember that we suffer under ante-democratic dinosaurs of our own—some of which, unlike the royals, still actually govern us. The Electoral College dates to the same century that the Brits put monarchy on the shelf in matters of governance. We, on the other hand, still elect our presidents through a Rube Goldberg–like system that the Founders put into the Constitution partly because those from Southern slave states feared that in a straight-up popular vote (of solvent white men, of course), Northerners who might become antipathetic to slavery would dominate the electorate. Today, slavery is gone, but the Electoral College persists.
So, ignore the first four paragraphs. I’d swap the Electoral College for the royals any day.
