Long-time readers will remember Rembrandt Clancy’s extensive scholarly translations from the German. The following essay is his own composition, and was occasioned by the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.
The Idea of the Monarchy
by Rembrandt Clancy
18 September 2022
While the marriages, ideological proclivities or political associations of individual members of the royal family matter, our purpose here, on the occasion of the end of the seventy-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II, is limited to exploring the meaning of monarchy as a symbol, mainly through the writings of Oswald Spengler and George Orwell, with the British monarchy serving as the primary exemplar.
Some hours after the death of the Queen, Jordan Peterson gave a rather conversational video talk honouring her long reign (cf. How the Queen’s Passing will affect the World). In the course of his remarks, he pointed to the many contributions the United Kingdom has made to representative governments such as those of Canada, Australia, the United States and India. His central focus, however, was on a single concept: the wisdom of the symbol behind the British monarchy.
In the United States, the checks and balances to power are accomplished in principle by three divisions of government: the executive, the legislative and the judicial. Peterson goes on to explain that in Britain there is a fourth division where
“the monarch holds the symbolic weight [of power], and that’s really smart, because it separates it to some degree from the political weight.” (6:17 min.)
For Peterson, the monarchy is an added bulwark against tyranny. In the American system, on the other hand, the executive and the symbolic weighting are combined in one branch, giving rise to “temptations” for a president to assume monarchical pretensions and thereby accumulate a surfeit of power to his own person. Peterson’s meaning is that while the president cannot help but carry these two weightings in his capacity of President, he may be tempted to cloak himself personally in the symbolic element, hence suffer from a type of psychological inflation, a puffed-up condition akin to l’état, c’est moi, or to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s claim, that “I represent science”: to damage him is to damage science (cf. The Washington Times, 28 Nov. 2021)
In the American executive branch, only the nomenclature changes: the King becomes President — rather than a Prime Minister — and the Queen becomes a First Lady; the White House is akin to a palace where on official occasions the President walks on and off stage to the equivalent of a trumpet fanfare. Moreover, there is a certain dynastic tendency attached to the presidency, which strives to come to the surface for recognition. In later years, for example, the Kennedy dynasty, the Clintons and the Bushes come to mind; but in practice, a hereditary presidential line has not been successful. Trump made a mockery of it when in 2016 he frustrated Hilary Clinton’s right of succession. Nevertheless, this dynastic tendency draws attention to the sense of entitlement among an entrenched nouveau riche called “the elite”.
Peterson says that “Trump, he’s King and President all rolled up into one, and that’s just too much” (7:24 min.). We understand that Peterson is trying to exemplify the dangers inherent in the office of President-King, but is Trump a good example? Why is the office of President-King “too much” for Trump and not for any other president? That Trump accumulated fame; first, as a nouveau riche businessman; then, in the TV series The Apprentice and finally in the presidency does not build a case for any of it going to Trump’s head by simply summing it all up as being “too much”. Having actually built something, having media savvy and experience with a variety of people are normally assets. Trump’s knowledge of the media contributed greatly to his handling of the legacy media. One wonders why all of Trump’s accumulated experience becomes dangerous in his case. The socially agreed, American, monarchical simulacrum was already awaiting Donald Trump as long-established ‘royal’ protocol when he entered the White House ‘palace’. All presidents have the opportunity to bask in that pseudo-royalty. On the other hand, instead of taking these displays seriously, Trump ridiculed the disingenuousness of acting presidentially multiple times through mime: “If I acted presidential, I can guarantee you this morning, I wouldn’t be here” (cf. PJ Media, 26 April, 2016). By bringing his case to the granular level of a particular president, Peterson buries his own lead, for his main purport was to show that in the United States, the very country that separated itself from the monarchy of George III through revolution, incorporated monarchical trappings in the office of the presidency itself.
Why has the monarchical tendency returned to the America despite her revolution against monarchy? Peterson says
“that’s partly because there is that demand for the symbolic weight that the leader should manifest, and you also see that to, some degree, in the United States, which is a star-worshipping culture obviously, with the glitterati and the royalty of Hollywood” (6:55).
But that begs the question of why there is a demand for the symbolic weight of monarchy in the first place.
According to Oswald Spengler in his great intuitive work, ‘The Decline of the West’ (Der Untergang des Abendlandes)[1], Faustian (Western) nations owe their very existence to the “dynastic idea” (Vol. II, p. 179):
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