Impossible Owls: Essays

by Brian Phillips

Stability, tradition, the repetition of symbolic gestures, the preservation in politics of an identity with roots sunk in myth: These are advantages monarchy offers over more republican forms of democracy. In the United States, for instance, the election of each new president occasions panic and fury from the losing side, because the question of what the nation is, how the nation is to be imagined, is forever an open one. It is possible to go to sleep in a country in which one believes and wake up in a country one no longer recognizes. To her subjects, she offers herself as a check against paroxysm, as a continuity. This symbolism has limited efficacy, perhaps, but it has efficacy, and over a long time its influence is enormous. An empire or an island, in Europe or out, what we are is to be found not in a party or a manifesto but in the cohort of things that last.