Is America an Empire?
Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) Sept. 17, 2022
Given
the pomp and pageantry associated with the death of Queen Elizabeth II, it’s
easy to hold negative feelings about royalty, the children of royalty, and
their lifestyle. For instance, most members of royal lines have never worked a
day in their lives, or at least not the kind of work that the majority of
ordinary Brits and Americans have engaged in. It was the high living of
monarchs and their disdain for the working class that led to peasant revolts
throughout Europe for centuries.
To
the American mindset, shaped by the ideals of personal liberty and productive
labor, monarchy is galling. To a people who venerate the individual as opposed
to the state, and who believe in representative democracy, it is galling to
read of nations in which a family or families have ruled supreme. The best
examples of such are not in England or greater Britain but in Russia and Saudi
Arabia. In Russia a royal family ruled the nation for exactly 300 years. The
professing Christian Romanovs reigned over the peasantry that constituted 93%
of the nation’s population. No wonder Lenin and communism, though their ideas
eventually failed, found fertile soil in 1917. Three hundred years of hard
peasantry can make a nation try just about anything.
The
same is true for Saudi Arabia. In that oil-rich nation, literally the “land of
the Sauds,” the Saud family established an absolute monarchy in 1902 though the
family itself emerged in the early 1700s.
Equally
galling is the fact that monarchs around the world have lived and existed on
the public dime. For Elizabeth II this is only partially true. According to
most sources the Queen received a tax-payer funded sovereign grant each year
from the treasury, but she also owned estates and artwork inherited from her
father, King George VI, that are worth millions. In 2016 the Sunday Times
estimated the queen’s net worth to be 340 million pounds ($442 million). No
doubt this figure has grown since then.
Unlike
the Sauds, Elizabeth and her son, the new King Charles III, are constitutional
monarchs. Unlike England prior to the
Magna Carta, their duties are performed as heads of state but not heads of
government. It might surprise most Americans to know that while Britain
essentially gave her empire away, she still maintains a Commonwealth, a loose
held group of 14 nations that includes Canada and Australia. These nations are
bound by a common language and culture but are in no way subservient to the
British crown.
It’s
hard to contradict the argument that the British Empire, before dissolving,
exercised soft power upon its subject nations. Wherever her ships sailed and
anchored, high culture (education, medicine, pride, inspiring architecture)
followed. Who can argue that India, now the world’s largest democracy, or Hong
Kong, now a part of China, were not made better places because of the
ubiquitous English language and the benevolent rule of monarchs like, say,
Elizabeth?
In
2020 Black Lives Matter protested in several United Kingdom nations. They argued
that the UK was as guilty as America of slavery without acknowledging that
slavery was abolished there three decades before it was in America.
If
Britain gave the word empire a good name, America has given it an even better
one. Yes, America is an empire and has been since 1945. But like Britain,
America has not behaved empirically. After crushing Japan, America picked her
up. After soundly defeating Germany, America cleaned her up. Empires can do bad
things, but good things as well. It was the pulpits of New England that ended
slavery in America and the nearly single-handed work of one man, William
Wilberforce, who ended slavery in Britain. But it was the British Empire that
spent the rest of the 19th century ending slavery around the world.
Just
who is still the world’s greatest military power today? The greatest economic
engine? The most charitable nation on earth? The answer is America. But empires
die. Rome did, Britain did, and the Soviet Union did. Americans should worry about how our behavior
in Afghanistan affected our world status (withdrawing without informing our
staunchest allies). If we are not concerned about the violence sweeping the
nation, we should be. And if we heed the leftist voices who denigrate our
nation at every turn, we’re finished.
It
is not a selfish act for either an empire or a small nation to first promote
the prosperity of its own people, but the most powerful actor on the world
stage must also seek the well-being of other nations. Americans best select for
leadership men and women who fully understand this and are fully committed to
this noble imperial task.
Roger Hines
September 15, 2022
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