Society Without the Mother

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has raised many reactions in the United Kingdom and elsewhere about her role in society. One prominent comment has been that she was a mother figure, a unifier for a kingdom, where she was seen as the head of a family of subjects.

Americans are raised on the assumption that a democratic republic is the best form of government, but one clear defect to democracy is that its leader changes every few years. There is no consistent father or mother figure to pull a nation together.

Over centuries in the United States, this absence of a king-like parent-figure has not been seen as a major problem on the grounds that American society sits solidly on the basis of shared ideals. These ideals are summarized in the physical document of the American Constitution, which many leaders (like former Justice Stephen Breyer) are fond of carrying in their coat pockets. The UK famously has no written Constitution; almost all of its democratic principles are based on oral tradition.

So here’s the contrast: the US has a written document which is supposed to unify it as a government, but it has no living long-term unifying leader; the UK has the unifying leader in the person of the monarch, but no written document. Which is better?

Americans tend to be inclined to value the US Constitution highly. But let’s not forget that document was written as a compromise between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states, with many compromises which, directly or indirectly, centered around slavery. Non-whites were not citizens, and not even counted as full human beings; women didn’t count either. Many other major deficits existed, some of which have been rectified by amendments over two centuries. But to say that the US Constitution is a wonderfully enlightened document is an overstatement, to say the least.

Americans tend to be resistant to such criticism, but British observers are more objective. The weaknesses of the US Constitution were most clear during the American Civil War of the mid 19th century. During that period, the British writer Walter Bagehot captured what Americans often fail to see. He wrote: “We cannot regard the American Constitution with the admiration with which all Americans used to regard it…We admit that it has been beneficial to the American Republic…but it has always contained the seeds of disunion….We see too that the American Constitution was, in its very essence, framed upon an erroneous principle. Its wise founders wished to guard against the characteristic evils of democracy; but they relied for this purpose upon ingenious devices and superficial subtleties. They left the essence of the government unchanged; they left the sovereign people, sovereign still….the effect has been calamitous. Their ingenuities have produced painful evils, and aggravated great dangers; but they failed of their intended purpose – they have neither refined the polity, nor restrained the people.”

This commentary is worth pondering in the highly polarized America of today. There definitely is a large proportion of the population who would believe, if democracy really means that the people have the power, that they should even have the right to storm the U. S. Capitol and physically attack its legislators. Bagehot was writing in a time of actual civil war, with hundreds of thousands of deaths. The US Constitution had failed to prevent civil war then, and it stands to reason that it likely will fail again, if tested.

In contrast, in a constitutional monarchy, any such move to violence would have to overcome the person of the monarch. Normally , a constitutional monarch stays out of politics, but not at a time of war. King George VI was a major source of British strength in the face of German attack in the Second World War. Perhaps the greatest recent example is how the newly reinstalled King of Spain, Juan Carlos, was the main resistance to a military coup d’etat attempt in 1981, which sought to reinstall a fascist regime as had existed previously with General Francisco Franco. If there had been no King of Spain, the military coup d’etat would have been harder to defeat.

Democracies are at the mercy of demagogues. The people supposedly rule; but if the people are fooled by a demagogue, they can give their freedom away voluntarily. Adolf Hitler was elected to office; he did not need to use violence to achieve power because he was able to subvert a democracy; one might say that the Weimar Republic had existed only a decade and was too malleable, but the principle was proven. A democracy can elect to become a tyranny. And in Germany, the process occurred more easily because there was no Kaiser, the last monarch having been dethroned 15 years earlier. Recent history only confirms ancient history. The Roman Republic is a classic example of the devolution of democracy to autocracy via demagogy.

The German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich published an influential 1963 book after the Nazi experience titled “Society without the Father.” His Freudian assumptions may not be valid, but his general concept was interesting. He held that German society had been “father-dominated” while American society was an example of the absence of a father-figure, leading to a kind of social sibling rivalry.

He saw benefits and harms in both extremes, and argued for the need for the freedom of a fatherless society but also the stability and security of father-like leadership. He made these points in relation to actual fathers in individual families, and emphasized the importance of their role as well the need to limit their influence, but he also extended the metaphor to society and its leaders. One might extend his analysis to government and say that in a pure democracy there is no father; in an autocracy, the father has too much power; and a constitutional monarchy gets it just right.

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Freud spoke of the importance of the father in psychological life. The superego is essentially an internalization of one’s parents, their values, their teachings. The father and the mother both matter of course, and in individual psychology this importance is obvious. It’s notable how in social psychology the topic has tended to be ignored.

What is said about fathers applies to mothers; it applies to kings and queens; it's about parenthood.

Who are the parents in a democratic society? In the most stable constitutional monarchy in history, it's clear that the British monarch plays that role, but who can it be for multiethnic, diverse nations like the US? The president is a temporary parent figure, and that won’t do. A parent has to be there all the time, even for 70 years if possible, as Queen Elizabeth did.

Perhaps this factor is another reason why the politicization of the American Supreme Court has been so disappointing. That’s the only American institution that had the long-term continuity that could be seen as parental in its consistency. If it too becomes another political plaything, the stability of the republic is weakened even further.

Americans tend to identify democracy with its specific American form. The example of Queen Elizabeth should remind us that there are different forms of democracy, one of which is a constitutional monarchy, and that the latter form has at least one psychological benefit; it provides society with a parent figure, who is a benevolent parent in good times, and a guardian of democratic government in dangerous times.