I don’t want to rain on Prince William’s nuptials. His bride was spectacular and both of them seem like really nice people. I wish them a happy marriage. But, contrary to Ross Douthat, I do not want a king and queen. My first instinct on seeing royalty is to quote Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine. Douthat thinks anti-monarchism is passé. If it is, it’s because the kings and queens of Europe have taken on ceremonial roles. The Kings and Queens of the Middle East? They are as awful and illegitimate as any Wilhelm the Second or George the Third. And the newer form of monarchy, dictatorship, is just as bad. In Syria, the son took over for the father and now is repeating his father’s pattern of slaughtering his own people to avoid accountability. Mubarak wanted to pass power along to his son, and Qaddafi wants to do the same. Does anyone doubt that Saddam intended to turn power over to one of his sons? These leaders are (or were) monarchs in all but name. It shouldn’t come as a big surprise. The first dictator, Bonaparte, had himself and his brothers crowned. As late as 1870, there was still a Bonaparte on the French throne.
America may cozy up to monarchs and dictators when we find it convenient or necessary, but our founding principles argue against it. We may show a little too much missionary zeal at times for injecting ourselves into foreign affairs, but when we do it to promote and support representative government we have a lot more legitimacy than when we do it to prop up some tyrant.
Douthat does have a way of opening up the conservative mind so that we can see its strange mechanisms. I travel in liberal circles, and no one I know thinks like Douthat, at all. No one I know craves authority figures that they can bow down before. Just look at how progressives savage their Democratic president.
Why does Douthat get paid to write garbage like that?
He doesn’t know about Bloody Mary and Elizabeth the Sirst when if you were the wrong religion, you could be executed.
Taxation was the issue that started the British government on the path of taking power away from the monarch. Now it seems so pretty and nice, but the power a monarch had in the old days was terrifying. A king or queen could point a finger at you and you would be killed.
This is not meant to take away anything away from the wedding. It was a boon to Britian and to all who watched and enjoyed it.
Douthat is just another example of the Peter Principle. And why do you think the only one TBogg mocks more is McMegan? It’s because they are both as dumb as nails despite going to what are supposed to be super-elite institutions of higher learning.
Peter principle? Promoted to the level of his incompetence?
I think you’re using the wrong term – the “Peter Principle” is that employees who aren’t a good fit to a position exist because they were good at their previous position so they were promoted. Their promotions stop when they prove to be no good at their current position but they don’t fall back down to what they were good at.
Megan and Ross are examples of “born on third base and thinking they hit a triple”. They are both from privileged families who could afford to send their kids to the “right” prep schools to get them into Ivy League schools and build the connections to get jobs that require competence far above what they have.
That’s not Peter Principle, that’s just how the elite classes have always rolled.
I thought the Peter Principle was that idiots and dopes kept getting promoted because of connections, not because of them being any good at their job. So it was along the lines of what you first quoted:
Promoted to the level of his incompetence?
That a fix of depression, anxiety and cynicism can’t be put aside anymore, even for a day, to watch something that is about tradition, commitment, beauty & shiny boots is a testament to how boxed in we find ourselves.
While we’re busy hating, there are still good things lurking out there (especially when they’re paid for by another country)
Not only all of this, but I don’t care about their wedding in the first place. I haven’t had a computer unless I come to campus, and so I have to rely on cable news. Let’s just say that I have no idea what’s happening in the world, even in the slightest, because of this annoying wedding. Sure it’s not like I’d get the best coverage of world events in American cable media anyway, but at least I’d have a vague idea of how the Beltway is thinking or what issues are coming up.
I never understood humans’ fascination with royalty; I suppose it’s why the Tea Partiers think we should suck the dick of every corporation out there to thank them for the jobs they provide for us mere parasites.
I don’t think we need or want a king, but I agree with Douthat that there are certain advantages to separating the ceremonial functions of the head of state from the practical functions of the head of government. Almost every other democracy does this – most by having a ceremonial president who is distinct from the prime minister.
Progressives might not have the authoritarian instinct, but many people in our society do, and I would prefer if their need for a ceremonial father figure were offloaded onto somebody who didn’t have any actual political power. This would avoid the unfortunate situation we often run into in this country where people feel that criticizing the president is akin to criticizing the nation… We would have done better after 9/11 if we didn’t have to rally around Bush as our symbolic leader.
Oh that’s right………I plum forgot. That used to be the rule, didn’t it?
Until, of course, until that skinny, scary, foreign black guy came along and criticizing the president became the national hobby.
Maybe he should move to Saudi Arabia – land of a thousand princes!
Ir is refreshing that Douthat, among all conservatives, has come clean on their real opinion of the Founding Fathers they are constantly genuflecting toward.
Thanks to Henry Luce’s coverage of the Kennedy administration, the US does have a royal family limited to the term of the President. Does anybody think that there was as much to-do over Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower as there has been over Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalind Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush (and the Bush heirs), Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michele Obama. And we have our own OBE, called the Medal of Freedom.
The mythology of royalty (including all the prince and princess stories), the elaborate rituals involved in separating the Royals from the hoi-polloi, and the symbols of the royal seal, the royal medallion, etc. are irresistible cultural circuses.
Unfortunately, the cult of royalty (or its extension the expectation of omniscience and omnipotence) have infected progressives. It is easy to forget that, however much they put on airs and claims privileges that their constituents do not have, the President, Senators, and Members of Congress — even Democratic ones — are still human beings with blind spots, capable of pique, and often compromised by money. Just like our neighbors, friends, family members, and co-workers. But the marketing that goes on in campaigns means that they have to put on the appearance of being different from ordinary mortals (even Joe Biden).
We need better ways of talking about what constitutes leadership.
Sorry but this
is just wrong. We’ve always had some quasi-royal trappings involved in the presidency since the beginning. The Kennedys were just the most obvious example, and easily the most photogenic first family, and when you have one major media outlet in your empire devoted to photographs, it would have been stupid not to take advantage of the way the Kennedy WH could help enrich your bottom line, which they did every time they appeared on the cover of Life.
But as for actual policy as opposed to the superficial aspects of being head of state, the cold warrior/American Century Luce empire was very much anti-JFK, certainly after the Bay of Pigs — even to the extent of privately financing (unknown to JFK of course) anti-Castro Cubans, post BoP and post-Missile Crisis, to undertake highly dangerous cold war actions to infiltrate Cuba and try to disrupt and destabilize the Castro regime. Henry Luce also was anti-JFK during the famous Steel Crisis (e.g., his empire’s “Beware the Ides of March” article in Forbes magazine)
As for the FLs who followed Jackie, none remotely had the same public drawing power, with the brief exception, for non-queenly reasons, of Betty Ford. Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush (Poppy) were the only others with some aristocratic airs, but neither in a positive way, and mostly for their evoking cake-eating images of Marie Antoinette.
Re those before Jackie, there was the widely reported on Mary Todd Lincoln, and not always for good reasons. Eleanor R. was very popular (while despised in some anti-New Deal quarters) and rather well-covered by the MSM (with certain of her private matters not reported on, as per the custom of the day). Bess Truman lived half the time back in Missouri and didn’t care for the limelight of the WH. Ditto Mamie who was elderly, quiet, and not terribly interesting to the public — what’s there to report?
I find nothing wrong with the public being interested in or approving of some of the better head of state couples we’ve had in the WH, provided there is substance and competence in the head of govt aspects. With the Kennedys we got both elegance and charm as well as good governance. Nothing to complain about there, and it’s human nature to want to look at attractive people.
Could this desire to bow down to a superior being (god or human) be a manifestation of Sado-Masochism?