The Spectator’s Notes | 24 January 2009

Living in a monarchy, one naturally compares the inauguration of a US President to our Coronation. It compares unfavourably. It lacks beauty, mystery, good order, and, although it is full of history, it lacks the fascinating complications and accretions of a country like ours, which has no theory, only its history. I could not help being disappointed by the way the speakers were announced on the Capitol on Tuesday as if they were performing in some awards ceremony, or by the incompetence and lack of ceremony with which the Chief Justice administered the oath to Barack Obama. Even the music was pretty useless, because it had to embody current compromises about ethnicity and culture rather than lifting everything to heaven. But this, broadly speaking, is how it should be. The United States is a republic, and one of the genuine republican virtues is a lack of grandeur and ornateness. When Americans refused to pay British taxes, they also refused to buy the rest of the monarchical act.