From the Editor October 2006

Sometimes I think I would have made a good monarchist. Back when I wrote my book on the influence of French propaganda on the theory of royal absolutism in Elizabethan England (a real page-turner, let me tell you), I often found myself siding with the Crown, and becoming really quite infuriated with those who questioned its sovereignty. There was this one guy named Robert Persons, a Jesuit priest, for instance, who had the crazy idea that a country’s form of government should be determined by its people:

Persons really got my goat. His lousy spelling aside, I’m not sure he even believed all that; what he wanted was to justify the replacement of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth by a Catholic monarch so that England would be brought back into the good graces of the Pope, and for this he was ready to foment rebellion, lead an invasion force into England, and even enter into cahoots with the Spanish. The treasonous dog. After spending months immersed in the royalist tenets of another time, it seemed almost obvious to me that all of Persons’s activities, and his republican sentiments, flew in the face of the way things were supposed to work—into the face of nature itself.

There is, after all, something reassuring about having your leaders appointed by divine right. Just as with a democratically elected president, senator, or representative, a king’s handling of his job may be excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor (for some cases, we might add pathological), but the difference is that there is nothing anyone can really do about it. How comforting that must be—the stability; the predictability; the total lack of responsibility on the part of the people.

These notions have come back to me recently as we have entered the final weeks before the midterm elections. In the last few elections, I have been increasingly troubled by how capricious the process seems to be, as expressed through the polls. Gas prices go up; voting intentions change. Osama bin Laden comes out with a new video; voting intentions change. An especially high number of casualties in Iraq in any given month is enough to affect the outcome of a vote—or not—depending on what month it is. Release a Swift Boat ad, and you may as well hurl a grenade into the electorate. And then there’s that business of the congressman sending dirty emails to teenagers, and the question of what did the Speaker of the House know, and when did he know it?

And the poll results change, and the whole democratic process goes into a spin because this has come out in October in an even-numbered year—as if we didn’t already know what kinds of leaders the incumbents are, and how well they do or do not deserve our votes, based upon the years they have served, the causes they have championed, the legislation they have passed. Every November, I find myself thinking, if only _____ had happened a week earlier (or a week later, or on a slow news day, or with Paris Hilton in the vicinity), the vote might have gone quite a different way.

The fate of a nation, decided by the kneejerk of a moment.

The divine right of kings, now—it had its disadvantages, but, you have to grant, there was nothing capricious about it (except, possibly, on the part of the divinity). The odd insurrection or civil war aside, everybody knew that the kings, queens, and hereditary emperors were exactly who they should be, as they had been from time immemorial, as they would be for time out of mind.

And for the public, what a deal. No one had to think. No one had to pay attention. No one had to feel the least bit responsible when the leader turned out to be corrupt, or three years old, or mad as a hatter, or, God forbid, a woman. Of course, it helped that the vast majority of the population couldn’t read and didn’t know what was going on. But I digress… we were talking of sixteenth-century England.

You won’t find anything in this issue of Public Opinion Pros about polling on the Congressman Foley mess, or the North Koreans’ nuclear bomb test, or the release of a new study that says that 655,000 Iraqis have died as the result of the war, or whatever terrorist attack might have taken place in the Middle East between now and when this issue is posted. As a monthly publication, we just can’t keep up with all the slings and arrows that seem to keep our country’s outrageous political fortunes twisting in the wind; we are better at looking back on them.

But you can be sure that, unlike us, the American voter will stay on top of things in the next few weeks, and, if something new and particularly colorful does happen, plenty of them will, once again, reassess their votes at the drop of a hat. In these enlightened times, nothing is preordained; they have been given the choice, and by God, they are going to make it.

A Royal Pain