Americans are perhaps the world’s most democratic people. From the earliest days of our War for Independence, we have embodied what Thomas Jefferson once described in an 1826 letter as “the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” The US Constitution even explicitly forbids titles of nobility. Born from revolution, our kind of republicanism does not take kindly to the claims of hierarchy or the privileges of birth. Many of us consider the “one man, one vote” principle a sort of gospel truth.

　　It may be difficult, then, for us to understand the magnitude of the constitutional tragedy afflicting our Mother Country today. Since 1997 and under the pretext of “modernizing reforms,” the Labour Party has endeavored to eliminate virtually every aristocratic element of the British constitution. Earlier this month, they finally won a vote to remove the last few hereditary peers from the House of Lords. No longer will the great families of the United Kingdom, who have governed for centuries, have a say in the legislative process. Britain will retain an upper house—for now—but it will be increasingly subject to the same democratic swirl and churn of the House of Commons.

　　“But what use,” Americans may ask, “is a titled aristocracy anyway? After all, we are celebrating 250 years of freedom, and we have never had one.” It is a fair thing for a republican people to wonder. And given the manifest decadence of elites (titled and otherwise) across the Western world, it may seem untimely to praise their virtues. But these circumstances alone do not invalidate aristocracy altogether. In fact, many of the constitutional woes of the English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic have something to do with the general denigration of aristocracy. 

　　Take, for example, the baleful effects of the Seventeenth Amendment on the upper house of the US Congress. Until its passage, of course, senators were chosen by state legislatures—a mechanism that filtered popular sovereignty through a kind of aristocratic check, balancing the will of the many with the guardianship of the few. Progressives attacked this feature of the Constitution as “undemocratic” and successfully changed the method of choosing senators to a direct election. But instead of elevating the deliberative process, this alteration degraded the Senate. There is little difference now between it and the House of Representatives. Both have descended into vulgar demagoguery, and, judging by years of opinion polling, the American public is less-than-satisfied with these results.

　　A titled aristocracy would be ill-fitted to governing republican America, to be sure, but it has admirably preserved a virtuous liberty for generations in Britain.

　　After more than a century of this atrocious experiment, partisans on both sides of the aisle seek to further “reform” and democratize the Senate by abolishing the filibuster. They are impatient to legislate their agendas and find traditional procedures for debate slow political machines far too much for their liking. But as Yuval Levin and others have pointed out, the rules making the Senate a less majoritarian branch of Congress elevate debate and necessitate coalition-building and dealmaking. To reduce every question of public life to competitions of mere electoral power would undermine the deliberative elements that the Framers ensured would animate the US Constitution. In this sense, American advocates of filibuster abolition are making precisely the same mistake Labour is making with House of Lords reform. Democracys terrible simplifiers simply do not understand what makes Anglo-American institutions strong.

　　Eliminating the filibuster or hereditary membership in the House of Lords will certainly make lawmaking more democratic, but that is not the same thing as making the laws more just. Even more than the US Senate, the upper house of Parliament is meant to be what some have called a “revising chamber,” a body dedicated to scrutinizing and improving bills passed by the representatives of the people in Commons. Hereditary members used to contribute in meaningful ways to that deliberation, representing the historic interests of British society that may not have always been expressed by raw democracy.

　　But critics of this hereditary aristocracy often contrast it with meritocracy. They assert that we cannot know who is best by birth, and so it is better to trust that the skilled can rise naturally through the hurley-burly of democratic life. And yet, as the unapologetically republican Publius points out in Federalist #68, that kind of merit often amounts to little more than the “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” In the long run, has democracy truly produced wiser or greater leaders than aristocracy with anything resembling regularity? A survey of the world’s democracies today cannot inspire much faith. Nor could reading the history of the past’s democracies, ancient or modern, have been just as likely to produce a Buonaparte or Cleon as they were a Lincoln or Pericles. A blind faith in any absolute principle, be it democratic or aristocratic or even monarchic, fails to account for the innate flaws of human nature or the perennial problem of ambition.

　　What the hereditary principle provides that the meritocratic myth does not is the concept of leisure. By contrast with the meritocrats who must scramble for position and wealth and popularity, those born to seats in the House of Lords were provided an education for rulership over their entire lifetimes. The upper classes did not merely ride horses and play cards at schools such as Eton or Harrow; they studied their tradition and learned how to govern according to it. For centuries, privilege enjoined responsibility. The children of the British nobility, by and large, had a sense of duty to their ancestors, the living nation, and to future generations. Their role in the House of Lords was to defend tradition and liberty, and for the most part, they achieved just that. Needless to say, not every titled aristocrat lived up to this ideal—but have the meritocrats who replaced them done any better? And now the aristocratic voice of continuity has been silenced.

　　Of course, abolishing the hereditary principle is only the latest in Labour’s long train of constitutional abuses. As Daniel Pitt has written for these pages before, the ruling party has effaced ancient English liberties, including jury trials and the rights of local government, as it seeks to impose its rationalist vision of “political geometry” on the country. Since coming to power, the current prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and his supporters have proven over and over again that leveling ideology matters more to them than the traditions of their forefathers. Slogans about “democracy” and “equality” are intoned to justify these massive, perhaps irreversible changes to British society.

　　To make matters even worse, Labour has paired these acts of constitutional vandalism with an ugly cultural self-loathing. Though it may appear trivial, the government’s decision to remove images of great British heroes such as Sir Winston Churchill from its currency is a concrete illustration of a prevailing iconoclastic spirit. Labour is generally uninterested in preserving British heritage—if not downright hostile to it. Tradition and long-established usage apparently have no rights under Starmer’s government. A politics of passionate class envy has crowded out cool deliberation about the common good. The nation’s right-wing parties, including the insurgent Reform populists and more established Conservatives, exploit patriotic anger over these offenses, but none seems particularly poised to truly restore Britain. Has the spirit of British liberty been lost forever?

　　In the end, neither cold rationalism nor demagogic rage is a substitute for the kind of aristocratic virtues necessary to maintain a free constitution. No political thinker understood this better than Edmund Burke, who held the democratic revolution at the end of the eighteenth century in contempt. Although the Whig parliamentarian was passionately committed to reforms to root out corruption and oppression, he understood the destructiveness of unbridled democracy. Throughout his works, the Irishman consistently argued that true liberty is best understood as an inheritance we must carefully preserve rather than an abstraction we must make real. Even if one could make a theoretically sound argument for abandoning the traditions and mores of our ancestors, Burke would caution skepticism toward such speculation because it is in precisely those institutions that freedom comes to have its real, substantive being.

　　Burke argued this point most profoundly in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. He asserted that, however valid their grievances may have been, the Jacobins were mistaken to throw out all of the institutions of the ancien régime because doing so would undermine society itself. In Britain, he wrote, “it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity.” Rather than relying on arguments from mere nature or raw power, Burke contended British liberty was all the sounder for being practically embodied in a series of institutions reliant on the hereditary principle. “We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage,” he went on to argue, “and an house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.”

　　The inheritance of the House of Lords may look different from what the Commons has received, but Burke demonstrated that it is only when these heritages are combined that liberty might be preserved. “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views,” he wrote. “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” Even when extraordinary action is necessary to defend freedom from would-be tyrants, such as in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Burke contended that the hereditary principle could serve as a check and a balance on such power. In a 1791 pamphlet, An Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old, he elaborated on the contrast between the Glorious Revolution’s affirmation of the hereditary principle and the French Revolution’s total rejection of it:

　　Both revolutions profess liberty as their object; but in obtaining this object the one proceeds from anarchy to order: the other from order to anarchy. The first secures its liberty by establishing its throne; the other builds its freedom on the subversion of its monarchy. In the one their means are unstained by crimes, and their settlement favours morality. In the other, vice and confusion are in the very essence of their pursuit and of their enjoyment.

　　To put it another way, inherited titles provide Britain with the social stability necessary for practical liberty. Even when constitutions are in need of reform, it is wise to preserve their essential aspects—including aristocratic elements. But now the Labour government has seen fit to cut off the British people from their heritage. As Burke may have prophesied, degradation and chaos will surely ensue.

　　Not even the American Founders, revolutionary as their circumstances may have been, were so radical as to completely reject their history. Independence may have severed the formal ties between the United States and Great Britain, but Americans still cherished the political institutions and experiences they inherited from the Mother Country. The federal Senate and upper houses in state legislatures, for example, are vestiges of the House of Lords. America may have had no formal, titled, heritable aristocracy to put in those seats, but the power of the few to check and balance the impulses of the many was nonetheless enshrined in the American Constitution.

　　Americans might still learn from the constitutional tragedy across the pond. We do not have to watch our inherited liberty pass away as in a dream.

　　Among the Founders, it was John Adams who best understood the place of aristocracy in the new republic. He shared something of Burke’s moral imagination and his faith in prescription and experience; when he endeavored to make or explain new constitutions of government in the wake of Independence, he looked to the lessons of history. From the long centuries of British and colonial political experience, Adams learned the importance of balancing the power of the one, the few, and the many—no faction, whatever its numbers, could be trusted with absolute sovereignty. Each constituent power in society, he believed, needed to have its pride of place as well as an ability to check the ambitions of the others.

　　Adams’s admiration of the British constitution made him a subject of derision among many of his generation. Some derided him as “His Rotundity,” and portrayed the Massachusetts man as somehow nostalgic for the era of imperial decadence and ambitious for titles. Despite the prevalence of these caricatures, Adams was no such would-be aristocrat. As scholars from Richard Alan Ryerson to Luke Mayville have demonstrated, he was in fact a great opponent of oligarchic pretensions—Adams did not seek to impose foreign institutions on the American people. What he admired about the British constitution was not the grandeur, nor even the antiquity, of its titles, but rather the way prescription and inheritance carefully arranged power to preserve liberty. He saw something of this constitutional wisdom reflected in America’s institutions and sought to bring it to the forefront of our self-understanding.

　　The ultimate lesson is that a people’s constitution must be suited to its character and history. A titled aristocracy would be ill-fitted to govern republican America, to be sure, but it has admirably preserved a virtuous liberty for generations in Britain. There is no single “best regime”—not even democracy—humankind can call down from the heavens to perfect society. Rationalistic politics in its most revolutionary forms always undoes the careful checks and balances through which our tradition secures freedom.

　　His Majesty’s present government clearly does not understand this teaching, and the British people will suffer for it in the long run. But Americans might still learn from the constitutional tragedy across the pond. We do not have to watch our inherited liberty pass away as in a dream. As Burke put it once in a letter to a political mentee, “I would add my part to those who would animate the people (whose hearts are yet right) to new exertions in the old cause.” Rather than indulge egalitarian and meritocratic myths, we should seek to understand the true wisdom of our political constitutions in their fullness. Democracy and aristocracy both have a role to play in safeguarding the freedom and happiness that are the chief ends of the American political tradition. Our ancestors bequeathed us something beautiful; it is up to us to reclaim that patrimony.