In Defense of Monarchy

[Metaphor]

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

The continued existence of royal families is a stain on humanity and an absurd appeal to people's base conservative predilections--from the obviously degenerate and evil monarchs in North Korea, to the corrupt theomonarchies in Saudi Arabia, to the snowflake lèse-majesté royal family in Thailand, to the pompous, twee, agonisingly stupid inbred Windsors, to the almost complete waste of time except by symbolically undermining meritocracy figureheads of state (like the Queen of Australia and all her heirs and successors).

 

[laughing dog]

According to Thomas Sowell, it is much more normal not to have democracy than to have it. And if anyone would know it would be Thomas Sowell who spent his long life studying all the cultures and histories of the world.

Even the fathers of our own Constitution knew how fragile maintaining a democracy would be. Which is why that document was written to limit the power of government.

So to answer your question we are probably doomed. But I dissagree with you that Trump supporters are the real issue. The issue is that our present government has strayed too far from the Constitution which is never followed anymore.

Um, if it was NEVER followed, Trump would still be president. The invasion of the Capitol was driven by the fact that the Constitution was followed.

The same government that is now building fenced walls around its capital and is now afraid of its own citizens.

Now, why would that be? Hmmm.


To return to the OP, Max Weber noted that there is inherent contradiction in democracy that the people do want a charismatic leader (a "monarch") which leads to demagogues.

 

[DrZoidberg]

W

You're also making a mistake to equate monarchy with dictatorship. In a constitutional monarchy the monarch is nothing but a symbol.

In my dialect of English, "monarchy" means autocracy. The word for constitutional monarchy — a very different system — is "constitutional monarchy."

Correct. I did not mean constitutional monarchy. That was close to what initially replaced the Ancien Regime in 1791. But I doubt that is what De Bonald had in mind. He was a supporter of the Ancien Regime not the Assembly that drafted the 1791 constitution.

What is interesting is that there was a strong movement to restore the monarchy in some fashion after the end of the terror, but the future Louis XVIII would only hear of it if he was given full powers. 19 years later though he accepted a modified version of the 1791 constitution. But he was the last King to die in office. His younger brother and Louis-Phillipe were both driven from office by uprisings. Once the mob knew it could take down a king, it never really stopped.

De Bonald didn’t live to see the final destruction of the monarchy in 1848. He died in 1834, living long enough to see Charles X run off.

Perhaps another example is ancient Roman Republic. Towards its end, it served only the elites, who often tapped the mob for support. Sulla, Caesar and Augustus were elites who tapped into the growing frustration of ordinary people and used the mob to basically install themselves as autocrats. But is that inevitable? I keep going back to the mob that stormed the capitol. Were they much like the mob that stormed the Bastille?

Ok, good that you clarified. Nah, it's not coming back. Or it might. But not for sensible reasons. I'm a big fan of representative democracy. Not direct democracy. What I want is a king for a short while, and then a new king. The problem with monarchy is that it's a bit of a raffle of who ascends the throne. Just because you were a competent ruler, the chances that your son also will be, is actually quite slim. That's why the position of Lord Chancellor (or equivalent) was introduced. This is in practice is the president of a democracy. But elected by the king, not the people. So the only difference is in what direction wealth travels. Either it is slowly migrating towards the king, or it's slowly migrating down to be spread among the people. I don't know about you, but I like money. And then you also have the kings that are such awful rulers that they elect incompetent Lord Chancellors. Then we're all truly fucked, including the king.

Add to that that kings were historically trigger happy and went to war for the flimsiest or reasons.

 

[bilby]

Monarchy is just a subset of dictatorship, in which the dictator is a hereditary member of a lineage that can at least pretend to have held power for longer than anyone can recall.

Constitutional monarchy in a representative democracy is just a way to keep the razzmatazz, while removing the vast majority of power from the monarch, and handing it to a government.

Governments can, obviously, take many forms. The trick to government is to balance merit based decisions against popularity based ones.

The British model post-war until the ubiquity of the Internet is (IMO) an excellent one; As 'Yes, Minister' and later 'Yes, Prime Minister' satirised beautifully, this model consists of ministerial government, in which ministers are specifically expected to be ignorant of their areas of responsibility, but are subject to popular opinion; While their advisors are expected to be experts, who are accountable only to the minister, who is only trivially competent to judge the value of their advice. The result is that smart people are recruited to the civil service to ensure that absolutely nothing changes (with the clear exception of an ever increasing civil service), while ministers are elected based on the popularity of their ideas, but have almost zero chance of getting those popular (but probably stupid) ideas implemented.

The downfall of this system was that people who wanted democracy finally discovered (thanks to the Internet) that they didn't actually have one, without having first been trained (as junior civil servants were) to understand that that was a feature, not a bug.

An ideal system of government gives nobody any real power, without first giving them a sound education in why actually using power would be a disastrous and stupid idea.

Constitutional monarchy works better than absolute monarchy because, in a constitutional monarchy, the monarch can't do anything.

Representative democracy similarly prevents the use of power by the people (which direct democracy does not).

The only system of government that's really worth having is one in which nobody's able to get anything done. Getting something done is almost invariably a terrible and highly dangerous situation, and should be avoided unless absolutely all other options have been exhausted.

Power corrupts. Absolutely no power for anyone to do anything is therefore the best we can hope for.

 

[Bomb#20]

You're also making a mistake to equate monarchy with dictatorship. In a constitutional monarchy the monarch is nothing but a symbol.

You're making it sound like either/or; it isn't. Britain has had a constitutional monarchy ever since Cromwell's son got overthrown, but turning the monarch into a figurehead was a gradual evolution over the next hundred and fifty years. The Restoration Stuarts, William of Orange, and all those Georges, had a power sharing arrangement with Parliament. One of those kings got too uppity and Parliament fired him, but that didn't stop his successor from having a great deal of control over public policy.

 

[DrZoidberg]

You're also making a mistake to equate monarchy with dictatorship. In a constitutional monarchy the monarch is nothing but a symbol.

You're making it sound like either/or; it isn't. Britain has had a constitutional monarchy ever since Cromwell's son got overthrown, but turning the monarch into a figurehead was a gradual evolution over the next hundred and fifty years. The Restoration Stuarts, William of Orange, and all those Georges, had a power sharing arrangement with Parliament. One of those kings got too uppity and Parliament fired him, but that didn't stop his successor from having a great deal of control over public policy.

True. I was thinking a constitutional monarchy coupled with a liberal democracy. Either way, a constitutional monarchy is always better than an absolute monarchy. Montesquieu nailed it. Whatever system of governance you set up it's going to be a corrupting force. The fact that the type of ruler than has the lowest status, is a ruler in a liberal democracy. That's a good thing. That's what we want.

 

[lpetrich]

Monarchy does not have to be hereditary. Kings in Poland were democratically elected I think. In other places as well.

That's early-modern Poland, around 1600 or so. When a king died, the Polish nobility then elected a new king. So the king was a sort of President for life.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Monarchy does not have to be hereditary. Kings in Poland were democratically elected I think. In other places as well.

That's early-modern Poland, around 1600 or so. When a king died, the Polish nobility then elected a new king. So the king was a sort of President for life.

Same deal with Viking kings. They were also elected. But elected out of the nobility. So a far cry from democratic