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.
