Writing about Australia's referendum to become a Republic some 20 years ago, the estimable Mark Steyn points out that governments run nations, and those nations stand for more than top marginal taxe rates.
This was an important victory for western society's real silent majority: those people who dissent from the notion that career politicians should carve up all the most visible offices of state for themselves. Some of this silent majority are monarchists; some believe in a directly elected president; a large proportion are just average contented folks who aren't obsessed about politics. But they have far more to bind them to each other than they do to the establishment republicans who believe that the presidency should be just one more gift in the ruling party's box of baubles. If Australian voters tell us anything, it's that a political state isn't enough. At heart, most of us are romantic enough to demand more — either the mystique of monarchy or the rawer form of democratic politics in which a man must embark on his campaign to win the presidency by pressing the flesh in the Elks Lodge. Constitutional monarchy and a US-style presidency don't have much in common — except insofar as, either way, you find yourself sitting next to me come early November — but both speak to something larger in a nation's sense of itself.Even in 2000, Queen country, the Union Jack and the Southern Cross meant something to the Aussie Normal. The Common Law, the weird pride in the nation's penal colony past, the shared sacrifice in the World Wars with the Brits, Kiwis, Cannucks and even the Yanks, a modern nation-state carved out of a savage continent.
It's a vague notion, isn't it, but an important one. Australia is British.
Australians said no to becoming a Republic, by the way. As Steyn points out the Republicans still lurk Down Under, bitterly clinging to their dream, as do the Remainers in Britain.
The Global Elites just won't take no for an answer.
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