In the person of-take your pick-Donald Trump or Joe Biden, the need to respect the persona-often called the “office” of the presidency-can complicate an American’s need to honor the country while holding the president to account. In the person of George Washington, this unification brought magnanimity to the newborn republic through Washington’s own personal virtue.

The head of state-the face of the nation-was brought into politics. As Roger Scruton put it, “the constitutional monarchy is the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere.” America’s Founders merged the prime ministerial and monarchical office into one, as Harvard’s Eric Nelson’s brilliant work The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding has shown.

Perhaps, once unyoked from constitutional requirements to be subject to the monarch, Americans found renewed appreciation for what the monarchy means. Far from being defined by race, the culture in its DNA is polyethnic, its tongue a bewildering yet beautiful mixture of languages now spoken by over 2 billion people. The genius of British culture is its plasticity, as Russel Kirk argued in America’s British Culture. There is between Americans and Britons, as John Adams put it to King George III in 1785, an “esteem, confidence and affection-or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor between people, who, though separated by an ocean, and under different governments, have the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood.” Britain and America’s kaleidoscopic flourishing of ethnicity has not toned-down this bond. Americans expressed genuine affection toward an office to which we are connected by “the mystic chords of memory.” 30 million Americans watched Prince Harry wed the American Meghan Markle, and the outpouring of condolences from Americans-including every living President-upon Queen Elizabeth II’s death showed more than mere diplomatic discretion for the passing of an allied head of state. Nowhere is this tendency more seen than in Americans’ love of the monarchy and royal family. There is something, Hitchens noted, about the two countries that reinforces the conservative. Buckley invited Christopher Hitchens and John O’Sullivan to parley over England’s continued influence on America. In a charming old Firing Line episode, William F.

Nathaniel by John Saul