During our first winter in New York, I awoke one night to a loud “clang!” I listened, and soon heard it again. To me, it sounded like someone was hitting a pipe with a metal bat, repeatedly. In fact, I assumed this was the case; that somewhere in the building a child was whacking at the big metal pipe that ran through the floor and ceiling of our bedroom. I was annoyed but well, that’s apartment living for you. Kids are still kids even when they live in very close proximity to other people. Nowadays it’s my neighbors who have to put up with the crashing and screaming of my children.
Of course, on that night what I hard was not a child at all—it was the sound of metal expanding and contracting. A friend once joked that New York suffers from having never been destroyed by modern weaponry, the way many old cities in the 20th century were. As a result, we’ve got a decrepit stock of buildings with water heat radiator systems that clang loudly in the night.
As far as living is concerned, a new building with modern amenities is obviously to be preferred to an old one that clangs in the night. But obviously it is a good thing that New York did not suffer the fate of the European cities bombed during the war. Human lives are too high a price for quiet heating systems. The point is that, left to our own devices, there’s a certain complacency that sets in. There’s no precise moment at which you need to replace a bridge, for example. But if someone blows it up, well, then you’ve certainly got to replace it then—and you have the chance to take advantage of advances in materials science in the meantime. Here in New York we do replace our bridges, but we certainly take our time, at mounting risk of failure.
No bridge and no building can last forever. Nor can a regime. The British regime is quite old; its age must be measured in centuries at minimum. At a time when absolute monarchs were scrapping their parliaments, the English parliament won a military victory over their king and put him to death. The monarchy was restored, but the relationship remained rocky, culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when parliament gloriously accepted an invading power into their country and offered legitimation in exchange for power.
For the century that followed, Parliament set about using this power to turn the royal family from a fount of absolutist ambitions to breeding farm for mascots of the state. In the early days of modern representative democracy, legitimacy and stability were quite hard to find. The historical significance of the Crown, the symbolic conflation of those who occupied that office with government itself, was a very valuable source of both in the eyes of the British. The royal family did not surrender itself to domestication, but no overt conflicts broke out in the 18th century the way they had in the 17th, and by the 19th century the arrangement was more or less cemented.
The British were true pioneers, true innovators of political forms. Nor was this pure power politics or reactive; there is a rich intellectual history of wrestling with the implications of choices made and charting out potential paths ahead. The American founding generation were very much participants in that tradition, though they charted a different course. Where they developed the prototype of the written Constitution, the federal system, and presidentialism, the British developed the prototype of parliamentarism and party government.
The British prototype, sorry to say, still has a monarchy attached to it. Prototypes are funny that way; they have all kinds of quirks that are discarded in later generations of the product. Of course, a regime is not like a laptop; it is more like a bridge than that, but even harder to replace. You can tear down a bridge and be reasonably certain that you will put something in its place. Depending on the manner in which a regime falls, what follows may simply be a series of coups, an era of political instability, violence, even civil war. That shiny new generation of parliamentarism may well not be worth the price tag, if your old water heat radiator parliament is still puttering along for now.
Personally, I’d like that much newer version of Constitutional, parliamentary, federal government that they’ve got in Germany, over the British or American prototypes. But I would never pay the price in blood that they had to pay in order to get it.