I don’t particularly want to continue yesterday’s thread, but let me just respond to this fairly representative email from a conservative at the London School of Economics:

Dear Mr Goldberg,
Your write: “British conservatism, which does have a lot going for it, is much more rooted in temperment and tradition, and is eager to defend such institutions as the monarchy which, needless to say, is not an institution America’s founders had much use for. “
I understand American objections to the monarchy, which are based on the despotism the institution symbolised prior to, and at the time of, the American revolution. But in the UK, and for British conservatives, the monarchy is as much an institution of liberty as one of tradition. In fact the latter necessarily informs the former as I think Burke might have argued.
I don’t want to write a long defence of the monarchy, suffice it to say that two very smart conservatives–David Frum and Mark Steyn–are extremely supportive of the monarchy. And neither of them are curmudgeonly traditionalists but firm believers in liberty.
A final point: the monarchy is, to me at least, a proxy for the British constitution. British lefties are eager to amend England’s unwritten constitution to fit the latest European fashions. Aside from the inherent benefits of a constitutional monarchy, of which there are plenty, by defending the monarchy British conservatives are protecting one of the bedrocks of the constitution, and therefore the principle that constitutions should not be easily amended.
God Save the Queen! And, incidentally, the House of Lords.

Me: Just to be clear, I take a back seat to nobody in my entirely irrational, almost hysterical in the grand American tradition, Anglophilia. I support the monarchy to the extent I think the Brits would be enormous idiots to get rid of it. I like British conservatism and find much to admire in it. My only point in this regard was that conservatives in different places want to conserve different things.