The Queen is dead. Long live the King
"Never complain. Never explain."
The British royalty is national glue for the U.K. We don't have it here in the USA.
I mostly scoff at the whole royal rigamarole. The royal family. The line of succession. The dress up. The pageantry. The rules and courtesies and formalities. The monarchy isn't justified out of logic or common sense. There is consent built into the passive voice surrounding things royal. It is the way things are done. The Sphinx does not complain or explain. It exists, serene and permanent.
The monarchy spawns a kind of counter-revolution in the form of tabloid celebrity culture and behavior. Paparazzi follow "the royals" hoping to get publishable photos. People want gossip. They want to get behind the curtain. They want the real story, and the more scandalous the better. They precipitated Diana's death, but the royalty continued. The Sphinx endured.
Life is not 100% politics for me. When I need a break from the whirlwind I sometimes retreat to simple formula dramas on TV. The Hallmark channels have them nonstop. Some dramas involve an American woman in some unnamed English-speaking monarchy. She encounters a royal family and after some misunderstandings are resolved, she is understood by the Queen matriarch to be exactly the right woman for the single and marriageable prince. There is a royal style in manner and speech. No contractions. Full sentences. Never petty. Never emotional. The queen--and it is almost always the queen--is wise. She sees to it that the country's present and future is secure.
I consider Hallmark, in its simple formula uncomplicated by the messiness of reality, to be a useful clarification of the very idea of royalty. Queen Elizabeth was the archetype. She was imperturbable and permanent.
The USA is in a very different place. A substantial number of Americans appear to agree with Trump that our nation's government is illegitimate, and has been for a decade or more. They remain of the opinion that Barack Obama was a foreign-born imposter. Back in 2012 Trump was adamant that Mitt Romney, not Obama, won the election in a landslide. Trump said the 2016 election was miscounted and that he, too, won far more votes than were counted. Trump continues to insist he won the 2020 election and that it should be voided. Trump-supported candidates win primary elections repeating that. Meanwhile, he says that the apparatus of federal law enforcement, national security, and tax collection are all part of a liberal Deep State, and deeply illegitimate. They call Democrats an existential threat to democracy. Meanwhile, Democrats think that it is Trump and people who support his efforts to overturn elections that are the existential threat. Both sides think American democracy is in peril, but for opposite reasons.
The United States has our own version of the serene, wise monarch. We have our glue that persists despite the workaday conflicts of politics. George Washington, the anti-royalist, became our version of royalty. The Washington Monument is our Sphinx. The Constitution and Gettysburg Address are our Magna Carta.
It isn't enough. People attend Hamilton, the play, and then cheer defunding the IRS. There are no paparazzi or tabloid newspapers in the Hallmark movies, so there is no real threat to their county. In real life people eagerly chip away at the mythic ideas and institutions that hold a nation together amid the turmoil of politics. Our symbols of glue represent a mythic past that is lost. The phrase "Make America Great Again" is the slogan of people who believe democracy doesn't work. That is the new consensus: Democracy is in trouble. In America, democracy was both the politics and the mythic symbol. Democracy is our monarchy, and people fear it is on its deathbed.
Everyone agreed it was Prince Charles's throne now.