On Her Majesty’s Seedy Service - It’s Time To Go

When the antics and confessions of Charles and Di are not provoking gales of laughter, they call forth a certain earnest regret. This is not how royalty is supposed to behave.

Here is a crowd - Charles, Di, Fergie, Randy Andy and the rest - who are paid gobs of money by British taxpayers to be symbols of, well, something, and they can’t even pull that off. What is the world coming to?

When it comes to such regrets, count me out. The world should be grateful to this Windsor lot for proving what our American forebears understood long ago: that republics are better than monarchies, that monarchism and its philosophical ally, aristocracy, are dead ideas that deserve to stay dead.

In light of recent events, it’s worth giving that 18th century pundit, Tom Paine, a little credit for calling this one right a lot earlier than most.

“For all men being originally equal,” he wrote in “Common Sense,” “no one by birth could have a right to set his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and though himself might deserve some degree of honors of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.”

And here’s the clincher: “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disapproves of it. Otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule,” and here Paine used some particularly colorful language - this is a family paper - to suggest that the linear successors of even great monarchs proved as embarrassing to their families as to those who were forced to live under their rule.

Now you’d think this a settled issue. Not even Pat Buchanan is lobbying for hereditary monarchy, even if he is a little soft on the old Hapsburg Empire. But the truth is more complicated.

Monarchical and aristocratic yearnings lie just under the surface in many of the democracies as voters translate their impatience with politicians as a group into a wish for something resembling “a better class of people” to run things.

If you want to be a real republican (that’s small-“r,” the opposite of a monarchist), you don’t have to love politicians, but you do need to respect their craft. Politicians are what you get when you toss out the kings and the princes.

The best defense of the British royals was that constitutional monarchy neatly parceled out the responsibilities of state. The monarch and his or her family provided the nation with the symbolic unity it needed. The argument went like this: Citizens have certain natural patriotic sympathies that go well beyond their loyalty to the government-of-the-day. They like the idea of personalizing those sympathies, of having a particular figure who embodies them. If people have such yearnings, far better that the symbol be a powerless monarch than a power-hungry politician or would-be dictator.

I confess to having seen a logic to this argument when I lived in Britain during Richard Nixon’s fall in Watergate. The American president, it seemed, carried too much freight. The president was given the job of being both the symbol of the nation and the head politician who was necessarily engaged in the grubby business of getting things done and getting reelected. Nobody could do both jobs effectively.

One of the attractive things about British politics was its refusal to pretend too much about the qualities of politicians. With the queen carrying the totemic burdens, no one could conceive of depositing their deepest longings in the persons of Harold Wilson or Edward Heath, then the country’s two leading politicians. Wilson and Heath were treated like politicians and no more, which seemed a fine democratic sentiment.

But there were two deep flaws in this argument. The practical flaw is that other democracies have effectively split the jobs of president and prime minister. A democratically chosen president can carry the symbolic duties as effectively as a monarch, and a democratically chosen prime minister can worry about the real decisions. Israel has such a system, as do postwar Italy and Germany. They’ve done just fine without kings or queens.

But the second issue is more important: that free citizens should neither need nor want hereditary or even personalized symbols of unity.

Monarchies were junked precisely because people traded their faith in symbols for a confidence that, for better or worse, they could (and ought to) rule themselves. They could live with the fact that those they chose to run their governments would always be less than perfect, and that the task of self-government itself would always be contentious, thereby requiring a class of people (politicians) willing to accept that they would be frequently vilified and never deified.

Far better this than the pretense that there exist individuals who are “born to rule” and that it’s possible for leaders to “be above politics” or “outside the fray.”

Human leaders, no matter how gifted or ethical, ought never be believed when they make such a claim. Imagine a politician saying now what James I told Parliament in 1609: “The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon the earth; for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon the earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself, they are called Gods.”

On his very, very worst days, Newt Gingrich would never say such a thing. That is the mark of progress.

So as between royals and pols, let’s salute the pols. And let us also lift a glass to the current House of Windsor for finishing the job started by Washington, Jefferson and Tom Paine.

God save Citizen Charles and Citizen Di.

MEMO: E.J. Dionne Jr. is a Washington Post columnist.