For several years, my tactic for navigating debates about the tedious younger members of Britain’s royal family (Did you see the Harry interview? Isn’t William awful?) has been to align myself with their dad.
I’m not interested in being pro-this kid or anti-that kid. I’m pro-Charles.
That stance usually draws a puzzled reaction, and reasonably so. Who in the United States feels enthusiasm for the new king? Americans who care about him usually dislike him. Far more people are focused on the War of the Sussexes.
The funny thing is, I mostly mean it.
The monarchy is a silly institution, no matter how hard Netflix tries to convince Americans that it performs a vital social function. But if Britain is determined to invest this web of dysfunctional personalities with quasi-spiritual meaning, then surely it’s better to have a monarch who also cares about some issues that matter.
In Charles there is a king who cares deeply about climate change, the most important political issue of our time. Would any of his siblings have talked about net-zero goals from the throne?
Regent Street is decorated with flags ahead of the coronation of Britain’s King Charles III, in London, Friday, April 28, 2023.
Alberto Pezzali/AP Photo
That argument usually gets some heads nodding. Not energetic agreement, but a version of: Well, that’s fair enough.
The political reporter in me cannot help admiring King Charles III for another reason, and that is his sheer durability as a public figure over decades of humiliation (much of it self-inflicted) and seething public scorn.
In this respect he is a fitting monarch for our times.
We live in a golden age of male political endurance. It is a trait the 74-year-old Charles richly embodies: not merely longevity, but rather a kind of stubborn resilience that slowly heals political wounds and obscures personal shortcomings with the passage of time.
In America we are surrounded by men who have defied the political actuarial tables and weathered hard years of ridicule to claim great power late in their lives. Chief among them are Joe Biden and Donald Trump, two old men who have been prematurely buried many times over by people who took them less seriously than they deserved.
They have so much company: Bernie Sanders, once a perennial candidate in Vermont and now the leader of a mighty national movement at 81; Mitt Romney, driven out of Massachusetts and defeated in a presidential election, entering his late 70s as a trumpet of moral clarity on the right; Jerry Brown, the quirky “Governor Moonbeam” of the 1970s, now at 85 an admired statesman issuing stark warnings about the U.S.-China relationship.
This brand of political tenacity is not exclusively male. It was in her 80s, a dozen years after being thrown out of the speakership for the first time, that Nancy Pelosi enacted some of the biggest climate, tech and social-welfare laws in modern times, sealing her status as the most productive legislative leader in generations. But in our society, there is no question this kind of staying power is far more readily granted to men. Seldom is a man in his 50s asked if he is past his prime.
Endurance is not a trick that anyone can pull off just by hanging around. The political scene is littered with men who missed their exit cue decades ago and lost the chance to make a dignified end to their careers. Consider Rudy Giuliani, now fixed in memory as the shuffling front man of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping news conference and other self-abasing stunts. Hair dye will be running down his flushed face for generations in the public mind.
It helps to carry yourself with dignity as you age.
Rudy Giuliani is now fixed in memory as the shuffling front man of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping news conference.