The Limits of Lineage

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The New York Sun

This has been a good couple of weeks for the notion of monarchy. On Monday, the Queen and the Prince celebrated 60 years of marriage in Westminster Abbey, London.

The service, a rerun of their wedding when she was Princess Elizabeth, heir to the throne, and he Philip Mountbatten, a callow Royal Navy lieutenant, was a reminder that Britain has thrived under a monarch who can display grace under pressure and the stability that a constitutional monarchy offers a nation.

Although three of the queen’s four children have divorced, and the ghost of Princess Diana continues to stalk the land, the colorful event, rich in pageantry, music, and ritual, was a timely reminder that the monarch herself remains unmoved by such distractions.

If she lives as long as her mother, Elizabeth will reign for another 21 years, bringing certainty and tranquility to the British constitution, as is her principal purpose.

Following the British example, when the military dictator Francisco Franco returned Spain to parliamentary democracy after nearly 40 years of fascist tyranny in 1975, he ensured his country’s tranquil transition to normalcy by establishing a constitutional monarchy.

Two days after Franco died, Juan Carlos, a descendant of the Bourbons and a distant relation of Elizabeth, was installed on the Spanish throne.

Like Elizabeth in Britain, King Carlos is a popular figure, and never more so than last week when he told Hugo Chavez, the despot of Venezuela, “Why don’t you shut up?”

The king’s angry intervention has become an enormous cyber-hit, with 500,000 cell phone users downloading his slap down of the Caracas martinet as a ring tone.

More than 3,000 videos featuring the rare royal explosion have appeared on YouTube. It seems that when civilized debate comes face to face with totalitarianism, there is no better defender of democracy than a constitutional monarch. Since the founding of the new republic in 1776, Americans have suspected the institution of monarchy. The often clinically mad King George III was not, perhaps, the best advertisement for rational governance, though the founding fathers soon discovered that it was not easy to purge a residual devotion to the British crown among the citizens of the new republic.

There is a tendency to deference and devotion to authority in human nature which can be unnerving to true democrats, and the founders were careful that the presidency they were creating should not evolve into a monarchy.

George Washington had regal tendencies aplenty, but having deposed of one King George, the drafters of the constitution were anxious not to land themselves with another.

Nonetheless, the founders established a system of government which often appears to amount to an elected monarchy. Notwithstanding the checks and balances in the constitution, the chief executive has endless powers to draw upon. This is nothing new. Presidents have always taken liberties and dared Congress and the Supreme Court to mount a challenge to their audacity.

Those who think that it is only President Bush who has stretched the notion of executive privilege and hidden behind wartime powers should go back and read how Franklin Roosevelt operated without check in implementing the New Deal and in girding the nation to wage war against Nazism.

America also has provided a ready procession of what might be called democratic aristocrats, families of wealth and ability who have produced more than their share of political leaders. John and John Quincy Adams, presidents two and six, were the beginning of an honorable trend.

The Roosevelt family produced two presidents, Theodore and his cousin Franklin, not to mention First Lady Eleanor, also a Roosevelt cousin, who took her patrician duties most seriously.

Ambassador Joseph Kennedy founded a dynasty which provided the nation with President Kennedy, presidential candidates and senators Robert and Edward Kennedy, and in the late John Kennedy Jr. a young man who was constantly spoken of as if he were the natural heir to the presidency.

It is no accident, perhaps, that Governor Schwarzenegger should marry into the Kennedy clan by taking as his wife Maria Shriver, President Kennedy’s niece. Nor is the Kennedy dynasty finished with governing, as the spattering of Kennedys in Congress attests.

The presumption of the Kennedys, however, has met with some resistance from democrats who suspect the burgeoning power of an established family. The Bush family, too, has, it seems, encountered a limit to their dynastic reach. After two presidents in such short succession, with an eight-year Clinton interregnum, it is barely thinkable that Jeb Bush, a successful and popular governor of Florida who has every right to consider himself a suitable presidential candidate, could mount a winning campaign. Whatever the merits of a Jeb run, the country is suffering from Bush fatigue.

Which leads us to the Clintons. For many Democrats, the prospect of the return of the Clintons to the White House, this time with their roles inverted, has something of the appeal of a royal restoration.

The king and queen across the water have come to represent a kind of golden age, when the economy was booming and all was more or less right with the world. If America could wind back the clock to those happy days, we could pick up where we left off.

If only real life were as easy as that. Like the Republicans who hanker after a return of Ronald Reagan’s sunny days, the world has moved on. Even if one of the Republican candidates who takes it in turns to claim to be the true son of Reagan were to emerge as a reincarnation of the Gipper, Reagan II would be nothing like Reagan I, just as Bush 43 was quite different from Bush 41.

As for the return of the Clintons, it may be what Hegel was thinking of when he said, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

Mr. Wapshott’s “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage” has just been published by Sentinel. He can be reached at nwapshott@nysun.com.


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