Don’t Diss the Queen

Or, What the Constitutional Monarchy Means to Me

My father, who emigrated from England to America at 35, has always held his inability to vote as a virtue, especially in his work as a pollster. As a permanent US resident but not a citizen, he has never been able to vote in US elections; and because he has not been a UK resident since 1976, he cannot vote in elections there. Rather than whining about taxation without representation, he looked on the bright side (as he always does) and decided that his work, including opining publicly on election results — as he did for the BBC over decades of American elections — would be enhanced by his public neutrality.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has made me, a dual citizen, realize how much my own straddling of two countries and cultures provides a particular view on this week’s news and its significance. My maternal grandmother, from the same generation as the Queen Mother (whom she loved), was undoubtedly our family’s most ardent monarchist. She too was an immigrant, in her case from Greece to England, and she loved her adopted country fervently and without reserve. While pride in the culture, language and legacy of Greece always came first, England represented the pinnacle of modern civilization to her and she would never hear a word against the country or its leaders, especially Margaret Thatcher, whom she also somewhat inexplicably but fiercely adored.

My own parents, raised in the UK, have generally communicated more ambivalent feelings about the monarchy. Much like their opinions on most institutions, they see both the good and the bad in the monarchy and are relatively unsentimental about it. Like many children of immigrants, I have always felt both proud and confused about my heritage. British immigrants — especially white ones — are a kind of “invisible immigrant,” and I adapted almost instantly to speaking and behaving like an American. But I had a classmate with an English mother, and the two of us bristled even as very small children at the inevitable depiction of the British as “the enemy” when we studied the American Revolution; we sang the British hymns extra loudly in assembly and felt very proud to be English. But I also absolutely hated when my parents made unflattering comparisons between aspects of American life they found distasteful and the English mores they’d left behind. As an adult, I can see they likely felt conflicted about having made the choice for me and my sister to become American without our consent, and that decision did put a kind of division and distance between us. Meanwhile, to outside eyes I always appeared like someone who periodically and randomly affected British turns of phrase or pronunciation, which are an immediate and indelible mark of pretentiousness. It was impossible to spend my life explaining that the way I speak is because I grew up with an English family and not because I am a snob — so I never do. I just held both parts of me together and understood they would coexist and sometimes clash and no one would ever really know.

I experienced the first major turning point in my sense of nationality during a college semester in England. Although not yet a US citizen, I discovered that no matter how English I might feel, or what my passport said, I was American the moment I opened my mouth, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to change that. Moreover, people regularly said things to me like “Well, I hate America, hope you don’t mind,” unprompted and apropos of nothing. I traded my green card for a US passport within months of returning, and a 21 finally began to feel as, if not more, American than English. I retained my UK citizenship and later applied for my children to be recognized as British citizens as well — though the future utility of their passports was sadly compromised by Brexit — but I was at last a American citizen.

For the next twenty years, I didn’t think much about my divided nationality. Despite my deep misgivings about the contested election of George W. Bush and his many disastrously misguided policies, I was more narrowly focused (perhaps selfishly and somewhat blindly) on my own life’s progress. Graduate school, marriage, children and work kept me busy and engaged. But then came 2016. Like many Americans, I was roused to an unprecedented level of political outrage and awareness by that year’s election and the four years that followed. I’ve never been more appalled and angry about politics or more desperate about the direction of the country — which doesn’t reflect well on me, given the many outrages that preceded Trump. Nevertheless, my eyes opened, however late, to the fragility of democracy and the deeply cynical and evil motivations of so many, as well as the sad reality of how many of my fellow Americans have been damaged and manipulated by fear and bigotry. I don’t hate America and I am still proud to be a citizen — but I long for us to be a nation with more humility, more kindness, and more collective compassion for our most vulnerable. I want to claim a country that values humanity above greed and democracy above power; I hope I can help support progress towards those goals as long as it takes.

What does all this have to do with the death of Queen Elizabeth II? In part, these thoughts were prompted by the immediate reaction of my (American) friends to her death: some are very sad despite, as they say, “not even believing in a monarchy.” Others are even more dismissive, question why we even bother caring about her death, or say she deserves no respect as the head of a formerlynimperialist and colonizing state.

Americans have always had a weirdly bifurcated relationship to the British royal family — many fetishize its particulars while simultaneously rejecting it as a concept. It’s as if they know on a gut level that they wouldn’t exist without having renounced it. This echoes, in macro, my own internal conflict: I am who I am because of England, but I also wouldn’t be myself without having left it behind. I belong to both countries and to neither, so I find I criticize and defend them both.

I am argumentative by nature (though not confrontational), and hearing American friends say they “don’t believe in monarchy” prompts me to raise some objections born from America’s (very) recent history. Many Americans assume, with typical hubris, that our system of representative democracy is not just a renunciation of the British political system but an unimpeachable improvement upon it. I wouldn’t be surprised if many don’t fully know the limits of the British monarch’s political power, or that she is also the head of the Anglican church; she simply is not the “leader of the country” in the way Americans understand that role. And even for those who do know that the monarch’s role is largely symbolic, it’s very easy to sneer and declare the monarchy pompous, wasteful, elitist or obsolete — and many do, even more in England than here.

But to focus on the political inutility or wasteful extravagance of Britain’s monarchy is to miss its most essential and important function, especially from our current American vantage point. By having a symbolic head of state alongside a political leader, Britain separates the job into two parts that work together but also enforces an essential division between the people’s emotions and their politics. In the monarch reside her citizens’ deepest feelings of patriotism and national pride, their love of country and tradition. No one would mistake a prime minister’s renown for the celebrity of a Royal — they are two completely different things. The monarch also (ideally) provides stability and continuity, so that the Prime Minister and her government can shift and change with the winds of the day, responding to the needs of the moment without imperiling the country’s profound sense of self. Royal traditions continue, including the monarch’s meeting with the prime minister, whoever he or she may be and whatever their opinions on the monarchy itself, no matter which party is in power. Finally, the monarchy can be a uniting force when politics cause division. All of this is invaluable — as Americans in 2022 should understand better than most.

Just look at what has become of the Presidency in this country. For decades, especially as mass media gained power, we have increasingly treated the President not only as our political leader, but as the symbolic representative of the country: our Celebrity-in-Chief, our essence of what it means to be American.

Ironically, given the USA’s rejection of monarchy as well as our refusal to make the Presidency a lifetime appointment — a hotly debated topic among the founding fathers, some of whom begged Washington to stay on until his death — we now find ourselves, in 2022, dealing with the devastating aftermath of a President who actually wanted to be King. As much as Trump’s disregard for democracy and love of demagoguery can be attributed to greed or corruption or sheer stupidity, his actions are also rooted in a desire to be not our executive chief, serving a limited number of elected terms at the head of one branch of government, but our singular, supreme leader — for life. His inability or refusal to accept that the most vital aspect of democracy is the peaceful transfer of power from one elected official to the next can best be parsed as a desire to be not President, but King. The most devastating part of his Presidency, and the one we are still trying to understand and control, is how many Americans also wanted him to fill that role. They were willing to attempt a coup in his name, and I’m afraid they are going to keep trying to put him back on the throne he so savagely craves until he dies. The blurring of lines between our emotional and political leader has become deeply dangerous.

Americans in 2022 could learn this from the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest serving monarch in thousands of years of British history: a nation cannot and must not allow its sense of itself to be contained entirely in one figure. A President should never be mistaken for a King, lest he begin to see himself that way; we should try as hard as possible to separate our sense of nationality from our politics, because when the two get as inextricably tangled as we’ve allowed them to become, and when the veneration of a political leader reaches levels that have nothing to do with what they do and everything to do with who they are — or what they symbolize to us — we will be sunk. Right now, we are sinking.

It’s not accidental that monarchies traditionally mark the change from one reign to the next with the seemingly contradictory proclamation, “The King is dead! Long live the King!” It’s a profound recognition that the institution matters, ultimately, far more than the mere mortal who inhabits it, and that is one lesson Queen Elizabeth understood impeccably, to her very core.