All Hail the King

Unless you live in America.

Welcome back to The Burnett Breakdown. This edition is coming a day late and may be shorter as I have been battling some sort of sickness that has brought with it a pounding headache. It turns out that writing with a headache is nigh impossible, but with the help of the wonderful modern invention of Advil, I have done my best.

BBC News

Conserving the Monarch

Unless you live under a rock, you have likely seen something about the coronation of King Charles III of England that took place yesterday. There may be some of you that eat up every ounce of coverage over the British royal family. Then, there may be others, like me, who don’t care in the slightest bit about an immensely wealthy family that has done nothing to earn its wealth other than be born. (For an in-depth analysis of my thoughts on the royal throne, here is a newsletter I wrote after the famous Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah).

While I didn’t watch or keep up with the coronation ceremony at all, I was exposed to a lot of the coverage through the many news outlets that I read to keep up with the news. In almost every story I read about the coronation ceremony, the presence of anti-monarch protesters was mentioned. This wasn’t necessarily surprising as I know there is debate in England about whether to keep the monarchy or not; however, I was surprised by my gut-level opposition to these anti-monarchy protesters, even though I don’t care about the monarchy in the slightest bit.

This curious gut-level reaction took me down a rabbit hole of thinking about the nature of conservatism and its different cultural manifestations (as one does when your spouse and baby leave you for the weekend).

Burkean Prejudices

First, Edmund Burke, considered by many to be the father of modern conservatism, wrote about what I call gut-level reactions in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. He refers to them as “prejudices,” but he does not mean the word in the same way we mean it. To Burke, “prejudices” were things that one believed to be right without having rationally thought them through.

For example, Americans just assume that it’s right to have red octagon stop signs. If somebody were to suggest changing the shape and color, then many Americans would probably be against the change even though they have never rationally thought about why stop signs should be a red octagon shape. In the words of Burke, this would be a prejudice.

While prejudices can obviously morph into something sinister, like believing a stereotype applies to someone without having any reason to believe such a thing, Burke actually praises his home country Great Britain for how they cherish prejudices. He writes,

YOU see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we [British] are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.

Burke was writing in response to the revolution taking place in France at the time, as he believed the revolutionaries had no respect for prejudices. He was proven right as the revolutionaries went on to change street names that had the word “saint,” the names of the days of the week, the names of the seasons, the 7-day week into a 10-day week, and executing the king just to name a few.

Burke wasn’t against all change, but he was against a flippant attitude toward changing long-standing traditions even if there were no “rational reasons” for maintaining them. In other words, there is a very high bar that one has to meet in order to justify changing a long-established tradition and if the bar isn’t met, then the tradition should remain intact.

This explains why, if I lived in England, I would be opposed to the anti-monarchy protesters in England. The British monarchy is one of the most well-established institutions in world history, which makes the bar for getting rid of the monarchy remarkably high. I may not have a rational reason for keeping the British monarch intact, but my Burkean prejudices would make me very hesitant to get rid of it.

American Conservatism

This made me contemplate why I would be so against the anti-monarch protesters in England while caring so little about the monarchy. The answer lies in the differences between cultures.

One of the most important questions for conservatives to answer is: what exactly are conservatives trying to conserve? It turns out that the answer to that question vastly differs based on the culture in which one lives. For example, political conservatives in North Korea would be those who attempt to conserve the total dictatorship of the Kim family. Economic conservatives in the Soviet Union would have been those attempting to conserve Marxist economic policies.

What are American conservatives attempting to conserve? This is a very fraught question that American conservatives have debated for decades, so I am not going to attempt to provide a comprehensive answer here; but, at some level, American conservatism seeks to conserve elements of the American Revolution and the founding of the American nation. Well, at the very core of the American Revolution was resistance to monarchical rule.

That doesn’t mean that everything about the founding of America is worth conserving. For example, the institution of slavery was wicked and deplorable and deserved to be radically eradicated. However, the resistance to centralized power, implicit in America’s resistance to monarchical rule, I believe is a worthy thing to conserve.

As I explained earlier though, I would likely be supportive of the British monarchy if I were a British citizen. But, I guess that’s just the complexities of the world in which we live.

God Bless,

Hunter Burnett