Constitutions and Controversies

I have said it before and will say it again - a republic is not a stable constitution.    To be clear, I am using republic in the sense of a government without a king or queen.   This meaning goes back to ancient Rome.   It goes back to the history of the city, I should add, rather than its Latin language in which "res publica" literally means "the public thing" and could be translated "commonwealth".   This is why there is a need to clarify the meaning of republic, because the Latin word was often used to translate the Greek politeia, which means constitution or commonwealth, even in works by Plato and Aristotle which clearly do not exclude kings from the concept.    A republic in the sense of a kingless government, a government without a crowned head of state, is unstable and the more democratic the republic, the less stable it is.   This is because it is the nature of elected assemblies that their members form factions or parties.   Sometimes these are basically carbon copies of each other, who compete for office, but basically offer the same thing to the electorate under different brand names.   This is usually a sign of stagnation, decadence and corruption.   Conversely, they might offer radically different and fundamentally opposed, ideologically driven agendas.   When this happens the assembly of elected representatives and the electorate itself tend to become polarized and to view the issues that divide them through the Manichean lens of a struggle between Good and Evil.   In this situation filling the office of head of state by popular election is like lighting a match and setting it to a powder keg.

 

This is one reason, although not the only one or even the most important one, even though it might be the most practical, why I am a lifelong Royalist and Monarchist.    The person who occupies the office of head of state is the person who represents the country as a whole.    It is difficult to do this when the office is filled by the partisan politics of popular election.   The more polarized partisan politics become, the greater this difficulty becomes.   When you have arrived at the point where half of the country says “not my president”, regardless of who wins the election, it is now completely impossible for the elected head of state to function as representative of the whole of the country.   A hereditary king or queen is the best head of state, and the only kind who can fully do justice to the role of representative of the whole country, because only a hereditary king or queen is capable of being fully non-partisan and even non-political since he or she owes the office to hereditary right rather than popular election.

 

While our republican friends south of the border have often boasted that their country has the longest history of the peaceful transfer of power  that is clearly not the case,   In 1861, their country literally divided over the previous year’s election of Abraham Lincoln, the first president from the newly formed Republican Party.   The states south of the Mason-Dixon seceded and formed a new federal republic, the Confederate States of America.   The states that remained in the Union then invaded the South and conquered them in what was the bloodiest war in their history, costing more American lives than their other major conflicts combined.   While my country, the Dominion of Canada, was founded in Confederation two years after the end of this war, the monarchy we share with the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth Realms is much older.   The last time the Crown changed heads in a way that could be described as less than fully peaceful was when George I, the first Hanoverian king succeeded Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, in 1714.   The following year, John Erskine, Earl of Mar, led a number of Scottish landlords in an uprising aimed at restoring the throne to Queen Anne’s brother James Francis Edward Stuart who had been excluded from the succession by the Parliamentary requirement that the heir be a Protestant, but the Jacobites did not come anywhere close to achieving their objective.   The last Jacobite rising took place in 1745 and was defeated in the Battle of Culloden in 1746, but since this did not coincide with a succession – it took place about half way through the reign of George II – it does not invalidate my saying that the original Hanoverian succession was the last to be less than fully peaceful.   Even if one wished to argue this point, however, the rising of ’45 predated the American Revolution by three decades and so my point, which is obviously that the Crown has been passed from head to head peacefully for longer than the American republic has been around, is made either way.

 

It is also worth noting that in the same period in which the Crown has been passed down from heir to heir peacefully, Parliamentary elections have been held and governments elected in the United Kingdom, the Dominion of Canada, and the other Commonwealth Realms without anything comparable to the results of the 1860 US Presidential Election.   This also can be largely attributed to the stabilizing factor of the monarchy.   Having a unifying monarch at the head of the state reduces the destructive potential of partisan politics in the elected assembly.   Furthermore, in Parliament under a royal monarch the official role of Opposition is assigned to the runner-up in each election, making it much less of a winner-takes-all contest, which also reduces the destructive potential of partisanship.   The official designation of the Opposition party is Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, which re-emphasizes the unifying role of the monarch as the personal representative of the whole country, to whom loyalty is owed whether in government or Opposition.   Finally, Parliamentary government tends to be multi-party rather than two-party, and it is difficult for partisanship to develop into a polarized, Manichean, Good versus Evil, when the options are greater in number than two.

 

The current crisis of the American republic is a good illustration of how the combination of an elected head of state and a radically polarized electorate makes for a volatile combination.   It was evident long before November 3^rd that whoever won the 2020 United States Presidential election, approximately half of the country would say “Not my President”.   While those whom Auberon Waugh labelled the chattering classes have been accusing the incumbent of trying to undermine the democratic process, overturn the election results, and impede the peaceful and orderly transition to the next administration by alleging massive voter fraud amounting to an election theft, the reality, of course, is, that if the election was stolen through massive voter fraud, if the media themselves are either knowingly pretending this was not the case or simply turning a blind eye to the evidence because of their obvious and unhinged bias against the incumbent and the courts have been simply dismissing the evidence without really giving it a fair hearing out of cowardice,  corruption, or even a misguided desire to try and prevent the rift in their country from getting worse even if it means sacrificing truth, all of this, and not Donald the Orange’s attempts to expose all these shenanigans, is where the real threat to the American democratic process is to be found.   It is worth pointing out that these same chattering classes who are now claiming that to allege election fraud is to undermine democracy have spent the last four years making claims about Russian collusion in the election that put Trump into office that have a lot less substantiating evidence behind them than the charges concerning the 2020 election.   While they were handed a pile of ammunition to use against Trump on Epiphany by the foolish actions of some of his supporters – a small portion of the much larger number that had shown up to his rally and the majority of whom behaved lawfully and orderly just as he himself told them to – in storming Capitol Hill and forcing the evacuation of Congress, it should not be forgotten that the same pundits who are now making full use of that ammunition are the ones who have been pretending that Black Lives Matter riots are “peaceful protests”.   BLM has been attacking and terrorizing people since Trump was first elected, with these media commentators turning a blind eye to it, or even in some cases encouraging it.    This, of course, does not justify lawless and violent action on the part of the MAGA protestors, although it is worth noting the distinction Ilana Mercer has just made that the difference “between pro-Trump patriots and BLM detritus” is that the latter “trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s livelihoods, their businesses” while the former “stormed the seats of corruption.”  

 

What all of this demonstrates is that the polarization of America is again approaching the level of that of 1861 if it has not already arrived there or even surpassed it and that once again controversy over the election of their head of state threatens to tear their republic asunder.   While Trump’s media enemies would love to make him the scapegoat for this polarization, in actuality he is the product of it rather than its cause.   The polarization goes back to the election of Barack Obama, not, as progressives might argue, because white America is so racist it couldn’t stand the thought of a black president – it voted for him, after all – but because Obama, who had a unique opportunity to bury American racial division and promote true unity, chose to squander it, by bringing Critical Race Theory, a neo-Marxist form of racism that promotes racial hatred against white people because they are white by maintaining that all whites are racist and only whites are racist, out of the Ivory Towers of academe and into government policy.  I shall, DV, have more to say about this at a later time, but for now will simply say that the result was the polarization of American into dualing Manicheanisms, that is to say people convinced that they are the Children of Light fighting on the side of Good against the Children of Darkness fighting on the side of Evil, that are of a racial nature, which is an extremely combustible combination.   One of the Manicheanisms, the one which has rallied behind Trump, is approximately half-right.  The Democratic Party has indeed, at some point after 2004, become completely sold to Evil, although this does not make the Republicans the Children of Light.

 

I hope, for the sake of our American neighbours, that they can find their way back from the precipice upon which their republic is now teetering.   For my own country, I will say once again, God Save the Queen!

Change and Reaction

Conservatives are fortunate to have enemies who are always trying to help them out. The foes of the conservative – liberals, socialists, bleeding hearts, leftists, do-gooders, and everybody else who falls under the general umbrella of “progressives” – are always trying to tell us who we are and what our role is. Or rather, they are always trying to tell us who we are not and what our role is not. The “true conservative”, they tell us, is never a reactionary. There are those within the conservative camp who would echo this sentiment, particularly those on the left wing of conservatism, but I think this is a mistake, not only because by doing so we are allowing our opponents to define us and thus giving them an advantage over us, but because what they are telling us simply does not hold up to scrutiny.

Indeed, the only way the claim that the true conservative is never a reactionary would make sense would be if we accepted the definitions of conservative and reactionary which state that the former is the person trying to preserve the present status quo and the latter is the person trying to restore the status quo ante. If we accept these definitions, then, of course, a conservative and reactionary could never be the same person for their purposes are at odds with each other. These definitions, however, are notoriously woefully inadequate.

It is not that difficult to see what the Left gains by insisting upon this claim. Progressives see themselves as being the advocates of socially beneficial change. They grudgingly acknowledge a legitimate role for the conservative as the voice of caution, to argue the con-side against their changes as they propose them, but who, once they change has been made, is supposed to accept it as being written in stone and never attempt to reverse it. If the conservative accepts this limitation on his role then all the progressive has to do is obtain enough support at any given time to make a particular change and then he need never worry about defending that change from conservative attack ever again but can indeed, rally the conservatives to defend his changes against the reactionaries who would seek to undo them. It also boosts confidence in the progressive vision of history in which every change introduced by a progressive is seen as a positive step, moving history along in a linear fashion, towards a future, better, and more just society.

For the conservative to accept the role assigned to him by the progressives, however, would be to reject some of the most basic principles of conservatism. This is one of the reasons why I prefer the older term Tory. The newer label, conservative, has connotations of caution, risk-avoidance, and resistance to change, all of which are good enough in themselves but none of which, singularly or taken together, make much of an argument against the progressive definition of the role of the conservative. The same can hardly be said of the term Tory which from the seventeenth century has been the party of church and state, standing for apostolic authority in the former and the rights and prerogatives of the monarch in the latter. There is no way that this can be reduced to a mere defence of whatever the status quo happens to be at the present movement.

Indeed, the history of the Tories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very much gives the lie to the claim that a conservative – or a Tory at any rate – can never be a reactionary.

The antecedents of the Tories in the late seventeenth century were the Royalists or Cavaliers who fought for King Charles I in the English Civil War in the 1640s. They lost, the king was arrested, charged with treason in a mock trial conducted in a Parliament from which all of his supporters had been removed by the force of arms by the triumphant New Model Army of the Puritans, then murdered and martyred. After a mercifully short interregnum in which, under the evil dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans cancelled Christmas and Easter, stripped the churches of everything that was visually or audibly aesthetically pleasing, closed the theatres, forbade harmless amusements on the Lord’s Day, and basically went out of their way to make everybody gloomy and miserable, Charles II was restored to his father’s throne and the Church of England with its bishops, King James Bible, and a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer that would become the standard edition was brought back, in what was the most spectacular and successful act of reaction in the history of the world – the English Restoration.

Then, when the Tories lost the battle against the Whigs in 1688, and James II was ousted from the throne by Parliament and replaced by his son-in-law and daughter, those Tories who remained loyal to the House of Stuart, including the non-juror bishops of the Church of England, became the reactionary Jacobites who tried unsuccessfully to restore James and later his son Charles to the throne. While the case can certainly be made that the Jacobites acted unwisely it can also be argued that they were the most true to the principles of the Tory Party. Such later High Tories as Dr. Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth, while loyal to the kings of the Hanoverian succession, nevertheless looked back on the Jacobites with sympathy and romanticism.

At any rate, within the space of a single century (the last Jacobite rising was in 1745, less than one hundred years after the death of King Charles I) the Tories had sought to restore two different status quo ante’s, and whatever we may think of the Jacobite cause and movement, the first of these, the Restoration, is certainly an argument in favour of reaction.

The folly of the idea that the Tory or conservative is allowed to oppose progressive changes as they are put forward but must accept and defend them once they are made is quite easily demonstrated. If followed to the letter this would mean that we could never attempt to correct a change that has proven to be a mistake. It is no good saying “you cannot turn the clock back”. Not only is this a bad metaphor – the statement is not even literally true – it is a deadly one. To use another metaphor – a more apt one – when you have swerved off a road and are heading towards a cliff it is suicidal to shrug your shoulders, say “what’s done its done” and keeping heading in the same direction.

Perhaps the most bizarre argument I have ever encountered against the idea that a conservative could take the reactionary position was based upon the fact that conservatives are not traditionally opposed to all change but accept change that is in accordance with the rule of law and which is done “little and little”. This, however, is actually an argument against the declaration that conservative and reactionary are mutually exclusive because that declaration is based entirely upon the idea that the conservative must support the present status quo against all changes.

Yes, the conservative accepts certain kinds of change. His position is not that all change is bad – just that the onus of proof lies upon the person who proposes an innovation. The changes he accepts are lawful, accomplished slowly, and on a small-scale. More importantly, however, for a conservative to accept change it must be change that is consistent with and better yet a means of continuity. Furthermore, a conservative can accept changes of a sort that no progressive ever accepts – changes that acknowledge that a progressive innovation has been a mistake and go back to a way that was time-honoured, tested, and true. It is precisely because a conservative can accept this kind of change that he can be a reactionary.

Indeed, Tory principles demand that the conservative be a reactionary in certain situations. The Tory regards society as an organic whole that includes past and future generations as well. He does not accept simple, unmixed, democracy, whether as a constitutional form, or the idea that the majority at any present moment should rule. The voices of past and future generations must be heard as well and since the future generations cannot yet speak the past generations must be their voice against the present generation whose primary concern is always its own interest in the here and now. Therefore if some demagogue or some persistent group of activists is able at a given moment to obtain enough support in the legislative body or even the general public to make a change that goes against the wisdom of the ages embodied in the voices of the past generations passed down to us in tradition, the Tory has the duty to work to undo this change – to take on the role of the reactionary.