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This Diary is Not About the Queen [1]

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Date: 2022-09-10

Really. The death of Elizabeth II gives us an opportunity to discuss a bunch of interesting topics. I’m going to take a stab at one of them. But not talk about her.

Disclosure: I’m a dual Canadian/American citizen who spent his earliest school years looking at Elizabeth’s portrait on the classroom wall and singing ‘God Save the Queen’. My ancestry, at least in the last couple of centuries, is English, Scots (who moved to England) and Irish Protestant. I don’t really have strong feelings about the monarchy one way or another.

Amidst the outpouring of adulation following the Queen’s death there have been quite a few critical voices. I’m going to divide the arguments critical of the queen (and the British Monarchy in general) into three areas.

1) The Monarchy is associated with colonialism and has never confronted the evils of the colonial system.

2) The British royal family has accumulated at lot of wealth over the centuries that they don’t really deserve.

3) Hereditary monarchies are bad! Bad I tell you!! Really bad!

I think criticisms 1 and 2 are definitely valid. I’m not going to discuss them further in this diary but they are certainly worth discussion.

As you might guess from the language I used for item 3, I’m not impressed. First, it ignores the potential benefits of a figurehead leader. Second, it is ahistorical and doesn’t recognize that currently existing monarchies are profoundly different from those same monarchies in the past. Third, they ignore empirical data about life in countries with different types of governments.

Clarifying Statement: I am not (repeat NOT) proposing that the US become a monarchy. Such a venture would be doomed to failure. However, I do think that consideration of how to separate the symbolic and efficient branches of government would be a useful exercise for America.

1. The Theoretical Value of a Constitutional Monarchy. This idea was apparently first discussed by 19th century Brit Walter Bageshot. I, and probably a lot of other people, have thought the same thing independently. He argued that a constitutional system had both important symbolic and efficient functions. The efficient function is running the state, making laws, providing services and so on. The symbolic focus is to provide something upon which people can focus their ‘love of country.’

I’m a scientist and tend to value rationality in decision making. As a scientist I am also an empiricist and I recognize that humans are not rational a heck of a lot of the time. A strong identification with your nation is a fact of life. Humans tend to mythologize their leaders making the head of state of a nation a national symbol to some degree. A lot of countries have made the head of state a largely or wholly symbolic figure (a monarch or a president in the case of Germany and Ireland) with a separate head of government (prime minister or chancellor). In my humble opinion, one of the many problems with the US electoral system is that the presidency rather uncomfortably fuses the symbolic and efficient aspects of government.

2. Monarchies have changed over time. When I first moved to the US I had a couple of conversations with people who said things like “I don’t know how you can stand to live under a monarch”. I got the impression that they thought the monarchy was pretty much unchanged from George III through Elizabeth II. The history of the British monarchy since the Norman invasion has been the gradual evolution from a monarch with essentially absolute power to a constitutional monarch with no real power in the political system. All monarchies currently existing in western countries are constitutional ones in which the monarch has no or extremely limited political power. The only exceptions are tiny enclaves like Lichtenstein, Monaco and the Vatican City.

3. Modern constitutional monarchies are places with high levels of political freedom and personal contentment. Modern constitutional monarchies include Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and Luxembourg . There are quite a few indices of political freedom available on the web (here’s an example). All of these 12 countries, with the exceptions of Britain and Spain, have freedom scores on the Freedom House web site of 95 or higher. Britain’s is just under that at 93, Spain is 90. The score for the US is 83 for comparison. Only six countries that are NOT constitutional monarchies have freedom scores of 95 or higher: Barbados, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, and Uruguay. So 10 out of 16 of the most free countries in the world are constitutional monarchies. Now correlation is not causation and there are two important caveats. One is that being a constitutional monarchy and being highly free are both associated with being in western Europe or having a dominant population that is Western European in ancestry. The other is that the freedom index is not solely based on the political system but also includes other factors (e.g. social unrest) that might influence political freedom.

We can ‘get around’ caveat number 1 to some extent by looking at constitutional monarchies in developing nations within the British Commonwealth. There are 15 countries in Commonwealth that have the British Monarch as their head of state. Four of them (Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand) are included in the discussion in the previous paragraph. The other eleven countries are all either in islands in the Pacific or the Caribbean (Belize is not an island but can be considered culturally Caribbean). Of these 11 countries, only 1, Papua New Guinea has a freedom score significantly lower than that of the US (62). Two other countries, Jamaica (80) and the Solomon Islands (79) score slightly lower than the US and the other 8 score between the mid-80s and low 90s.

The point of this argument is not that being a constitutional monarchy makes you more free. Rather it is that there is nothing about being a constitutional monarchy that makes you less free.

You can also look at a happiness index, which is a measure of how good the citizens of a country feel about their lives. Here you see that 6 out of the top 10 happiest countries are constitutional monarchies and 10 out of the top 20 are constitutional monarchies. Again, nothing about being in a constitutional monarchy keeps citizens from being happy about their lives.

I do think having a ceremonial/symbolic head of state and a practical head of government that are separated into different individuals is a good idea because of human nature. It seems to me a good idea to funnel the patriotic fervor/love of country towards an office with no real power so that it can’t be exploited. Holding the office which actually wields power in lower esteem is a good thing.

It doesn’t seem practical to try and establish a hereditary constitutional monarchy in a place that didn’t already have a monarch previously. However, some sort of separation of ceremonial and actual power seems desirable. How that would be achieved in the US system I have no idea.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/10/2122027/-This-Diary-is-Not-About-the-Queen

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