[Epistemic status: This is a quick attempt to work something out based on what I already know, but I haven’t done a lot of research yet.]
Americans broadly disapprove of monarchy, and yet we love monarchy in popular culture.1 The popularity of Disney princesses, Game of Thrones, and the literal British monarchy all speak to a fascination with the idea of absolute rule. We yearn for the unity of power and goodness within a single person, and we feel a sense of loss that our own institutions are so young, historically discontinuous, and incapable of acting with single-minded clarity and purpose.
I first noticed this tendency in myself when I took a class about politics in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare has written some truly humiliating depictions of royalty, and his histories depict British monarchs as flawed and sometimes despicable. Still I found myself arrested whenever a character named king was speaking, not because those characters were especially wise or interesting, but because they were so powerful. A moment in Richard II captures my feeling perfectly. Richard has just sentenced Henry Bolingbroke—later to become Henry IV by violently displacing Richard—to ten years of banishment, but when Henry’s father intervenes on his behalf, Richard reduces the sentence to only six years. Henry says in an aside,
How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word: such is the breath of kings.
Henry is at once humiliated, jealous, and awed. This is how it feels to recognize a sovereign power.
There are endless disputes about the identity politics of Disney Princesses (literally ™), but how often have you heard people criticize Disney for depicting so many princesses to begin with? Besides that The Lion King, probably the most popular Disney animated movie, is fully a monarchist film. When the divinely chosen hereditary monarch is on the throne, the Pride Lands are phenomenally beautiful. Lions rule over the other animals in a just hierarchy which ultimately benefits everyone. When a usurper takes the throne, nature itself revolts against him, as the Pride Lands inexplicably suffer a drought until the end of Scar’s rule. The movie borrows numerous beats from early modern monarchist literature: The device of nature revolting across a false king is straight out of Macbeth, and other works suggest that it’s acceptable for the king to hoard wealth because he, too, will eventually die. (Sorry I don’t have a source for this—I just remember it from a college class. I think it’s somewhere in Hamlet in Purgatory.) Compare the scene where Mufasa tells Simba that when the lions die, their bodies become grass which is eaten by the antelopes. Incredibly, the entire concept of the “circle of life” is based on a morbid soliloquy from Hamlet—“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king.” This is fascinating because the creators of the film are almost certainly not monarchists; they created a monarchist film because that was the natural result of creating a beautiful film. If the movie had problematized the divine right of kings, then it wouldn’t be nearly as wonderful or compelling.
Democracy has an aesthetic, too, but it’s generally much less beautiful than the aesthetic of monarchy. Under monarchy, we can fantasize about the monarch combining wisdom, virtue, and power within a single person; under democracy, it’s just too difficult to imagine that all of our legislators are wise and virtuous. At best, we can fantasize about opposing sides working together to compromise for the good of the country. This is sometimes quite nice—Parks and Recreation, The West Wing, the Simpsons episode “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” and numerous campaign ads are good examples—but it’s never phenomenally beautiful. Ideal democracy is also less compelling and efficient than ideal monarchy: “The king speaks and it is so” is more interesting than “Our democratically elected officials argued for a few hours before reaching a compromise.”
As I was writing this post, my friend Jake Wasinger pointed out that I had overlooked the most aesthetically compelling part of democracy: Narratives about protests that begin with ordinary people who succeed in making a positive difference. Selma, The Hate U Give, How to Survive a Plague, Les Misérables, Hamilton, All the President’s Men, and Spotlight are compelling in part because they help the audience to feel like citizens. Ideal monarchy invites us to enjoy the idea of being cared for by a wise sovereign; ideal democracy invites us to feel powerful and then urges us to do something with our power. I agree that this is an important aesthetic advantage that democracy has over monarchy.
My views about the aesthetic of fascism are more speculative because I don’t spend a lot of time watching fascist media, but my impression is that fascist media depicts a world that is frightening and disordered because no one is powerful enough to prevent evil. The divine monarch is the crown jewel of a well-ordered universe, but the dictator is the only thing standing between his people and an unstoppable threat. Although both aesthetics serve to make absolute rule seem desirable, monarchy accomplishes this by inspiring awe and gratitude, while fascism provokes fear and then offers to resolve that fear. I think that this interpretation fits well with actual Third Reich propaganda as well as more recent fascist media such as Dirty Harry.
(A friend who has read one million Wikipedia articles says that Nazi aesthetics never resolved the tension between “returning to an imagined idealized, idyllic, pastoral past on the one hand and valorizing youth, energy, technology and violence on the other.” This is fascinating. What tensions exist in the aesthetics of contemporary American democracy?)
What do you think, and what should I read next? I think this topic is wonderful, and I’m excited to hear what you think about it.
1 As I was writing this post, I was surprised by a poll which shows that 5%
of Americans think that an American monarchy would be a good thing, and that
only 69% said that it would be bad. I’m guessing that most of these people want
a symbolic monarchy rather than a true monarchy, but I wonder if true
monarchism is also more popular than I thought.↩
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