An American View of Britain’s Constitutional Tragedy
Americans are perhaps the world’s most democratic people. From the earliest days of our War for Independence, we have embodied what Thomas Jefferson once described in an 1826 letter as “the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” The US Constitution even explicitly forbids titles of nobility. Born from revolution, our kind of republicanism does not take kindly to the claims of hierarchy or the privileges of birth. Many of us consider the “one man, one vote” principle a sort of gospel truth.
It may be difficult, then, for us to understand the magnitude of the constitutional tragedy afflicting our Mother Country today. Since 1997 and under the pretext of “modernizing reforms,” the Labour Party has endeavored to eliminate virtually every aristocratic element of the British constitution. Earlier this month, they finally won a vote to remove the last few hereditary peers from the House of Lords. No longer will the great families of the United Kingdom, who have governed for centuries, have a say in the legislative process. Britain will retain an upper house—for now—but it will be increasingly subject to the same democratic swirl and churn of the House of Commons.
“But what use,” Americans may ask, “is a titled aristocracy anyway? After all, we are celebrating 250 years of freedom, and we have never had one.” It is a fair thing for a republican people to wonder. And given the manifest decadence of elites (titled and otherwise) across the Western world, it may seem untimely to praise their virtues. But these circumstances alone do not invalidate aristocracy altogether. In fact, many of the constitutional woes of the English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic have something to do with the general denigration of aristocracy.
Take, for example, the baleful effects of the Seventeenth Amendment on the upper house of the US Congress. Until its passage, of course, senators were chosen by state legislatures—a mechanism that filtered popular sovereignty through a kind of aristocratic check, balancing the will of the many with the guardianship of the few. Progressives attacked this feature of the Constitution as “undemocratic” and successfully changed the method of choosing senators to a direct election. But instead of elevating the deliberative process, this alteration degraded the Senate. There is little difference now between it and the House of Representatives. Both have descended into vulgar demagoguery, and, judging by years of opinion polling, the American public is less-than-satisfied with these results.
Read more in Law & Liberty.
