Something for them to do

kw: observations, peerage

Last evening, my wife persuaded me to view the final installment of Jane Austen's Emma on PBS with her. It is a comic tale of well-intentioned meddling gone awry, but with the almost obligatory happy ending.

What I found interesting is the window into the lives of the "leisure class" of Georgian-Regency England. Other than a few servants, the characters are all filthy rich, living on named estates and having little to do but plan marriages for one another and enjoy various outings. They are rich enough to get away with being useless.

It occurred to me that England has possibly been able to survive rather unfortunate levels of political upheaval precisely because they found something for their otherwise useless Peers to do. Until certain reform acts of the past 100 years, the aristocrats (the men, that is) were all members of the House of Lords (now only 92 of nearly 700 Lords are hereditary). Any time one wished, he could travel to London for a few days or months, attend Parliament, enter into debate (including fisticuffs) as much as he could stand, and generally make a show of making legislative mischief, without really doing much good or harm. The quorum being set at 40 allows lots of leeway.

The general inertia of such a body results in a huge amount of de facto conservatism, regardless of the political leanings of individual Peers. I have long held that a government governs best when it governs least, and particularly so when it is hobbled by a combination of divided sympathies and encrusting tradition. The US Congress swings to-and-fro between lethargy and only modest alacrity. Slower is better.

The US does best when the Senate, in particular, is at its slowest. Many urgent matters tend to solve themselves if simply left alone. The US could learn something from England. We need not worry about term limits and such if we recognize that to be in the Washington is to be out-of-touch, and the best remedy for most of the nation's ills is for the politicians to fight one another, making a good show for us peons, and quite by accident give us a great many ideas as to how to get ourselves out of our dilemmas.

"If any two people agree on everything, one of them is redundant."