Amerika

We know democracy is on its last legs because it across the world democracies are deeply in debt, experiencing social instability, suffering from falling birthrates, and cracking down on dissent. These things happen when a system is dying just like the Soviets faded away or the French Revolution obliterated itself.

This means that alternatives from the past are back on the table, including monarchism, since in a recent poll 13% of people aged 30-44 supported monarchism, and 10% of African-Americans did.

Monarchism avoids contentious elections and ruling bodies which act for their own short-term interests. With a monarchy, the only success is long-term health; the monarch cannot quit and will be held accountable by time for the quality of his decisions. This is the opposite of democracy, where no one is ever really accountable and nothing is remembered.

It turns out that interest has been rising in parliamentary monarchy or monarchy that overseas a parliamentary state and forces its bickering sides to come to a conclusion, which we can see through European monarchies that have made nicer places to live than regular democracy:

European monarchies — such as the Danish, Belgian, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, and British — have ruled over countries that are among the most stable, prosperous, and free in the world.

This would shock most people, since the “big” countries are democracies or dictatorships, but it turns out that if you want a relatively stable society with high quality of life, having a monarch to unite the chaotic forces of politics and keep accountability to reality in the picture works out better than raw Constitutional republican democracy!

When we look at it critically, the whole point of democracy is to evade accountability. The voters can always blame the other side; politicians can do the same; bureaucrats are just following procedure. No one wants to match their intent up against reality itself and try to come out ahead or at least sane.

Even more, a monarch is from the society he represents; he is actually of the people (genetically) and a representative of culture, not the political system which manages society from outside of it. He is not a means-over-ends guy, but an ends-over-means guy: by any means necessary, including beheading if relevant.

Despite parliamentary monarchy and constitutional monarchy being neutered forms of the institution, they still achieve what makes monarchy great: pick the best quality of person, not the meritocratic “best” for an artificially narrowed role, and strap them to something where success only comes from making everyone else succeed, too.

No wonder a trend toward monarchism reflects the learning we have had through the failure of the democratic era:

All political leaders must serve as prime ministers or ministers of the ruler. Even if actual power lies with these individuals, the existence of a monarch makes it difficult to radically or totally alter a country’s politics. The presence of kings in Cambodia, Jordan, and Morocco holds back the worst and more extreme tendencies of political leaders or factions in their countries. Monarchy also stabilizes countries by encouraging slow, incremental change instead of extreme swings in the nature of regimes. The monarchies of the Arab states have established much more stable societies than non-monarchic Arab states, many of which have gone through such seismic shifts over the course of the Arab Spring.

Fourth, monarchies have the gravitas and prestige to make last-resort, hard, and necessary decisions — decisions that nobody else can make. For example, Juan Carlos of Spain personally ensured his country’s transition to a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary institutions and stood down an attempted military coup. At the end of the Second World War, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito defied his military’s wish to fight on and saved countless of his people’s lives by advocating for Japan’s surrender.

Fifth, monarchies are repositories of tradition and continuity in ever changing times. They remind a country of what it represents and where it came from, facts that can often be forgotten in the swiftly changing currents of politics.

On top of these advantages — continuity of identity and purpose, ability to make unpopular decisions, and unification of warring internal elements — monarchy also offers something more tangible, namely property rights as the basis of law, which is a saner understanding of law than “human rights” or other airy egotistical nonsense:

We argue that, relative to republics, monarchies protect property rights to a greater extent by reducing the negative effects of internal conflict, executive tenure, and executive discretion. In turn, a better protection of property rights results in greater standards of living. Using panel data on 137 countries between 1900 and 2010, we formulate and test a model with endogenous variables. We find strong evidence that monarchies contribute to a greater protection of property rights and higher standards of living through each of the three theoretical mechanisms compared to all republics. We also find that democratic-constitutional monarchies perform better than non-democratic and absolute monarchies when it comes to offsetting the negative effects of the tenure and discretion of the executive branch.

Not surprisingly, these “strong power” aspects lead to a system that resists changes/fads and tends to return to having a solid course, which makes for greater stability because it is turns out most fads are temporary and most people want to destroy order so they can hide in the chaos:

However, constitutional monarchy has one advantage over figurehead presidencies that is the final reason behind Elizabeth’s surprising success: its mix of continuity and tradition, which even today is tinged with mystical vestiges of the healing royal touch. All political systems need to manage change and resolve conflicting interests peacefully and constructively. Systems that stagnate end up erupting; systems that race away leave large parts of society left behind and they erupt, too.

Under Elizabeth, Britain changed unrecognisably. Not only has it undergone social and technological change, like other Western democracies, but it was also eclipsed as a great power. More than once, most recently over Brexit, politics choked. During all this upheaval, the continuity that monarchy displays has been a moderating influence. George Orwell, no establishment stooge, called it an “escape-valve for dangerous emotions”, drawing patriotism away from politics, where love of country can rot into bigotry. Decaying empires are dangerous. Britain’s decline has been a lot less traumatic than it might have been.

While some argue for the soft power advantages to monarchy, the problem with democracy is that it is soft power, and that leads to endless compromise, which creates the uniparty and “nothing ever changes” aspects of modernity, since soft power cannot make hard decisions like hard power can:

Most contemporary monarchs are not so much “born to rule” as “born to belong”, their once autonomous powers curtailed by national constitutions, their decrees now guided by prime ministers and parliaments. Yet as the hard power of constitutional monarchs has diminished (though not as much as we assume), their soft power – the power to persuade, to unite, to inspire, without the threat of punishment – has increased.

In this sense, the notion of “figurehead” rulers is misguided. We are better to think of a shift from coercive to persuasive powers.

“Persuasive powers” is a nice way of dodging the inevitability of stronger leaders. Soft power turns all decisions into committee efforts and creates an endless conversation that can never take a decisive direction, so we end up with the tyranny of inertia as we see in the current state.

This is why monarchism is best understood as a revolt against politics rather than perpetuation of the normal dysfunction we have come to expect in liberal democracy and its mixed economic system, both products of the bureaucracy and its desire for insurance and socialized costs rather than risk:

Republican heads of state, whether politically powerful such as those in the United States or France, or ceremonial like Germany’s, all wrap themselves to some degree in tradition and pomp. But they cannot rise above politics the way monarchs can. And even when the monarchies generate scandals of royal proportions — think Princess Diana — politicians tend to rank way below the royals in popularity polls.

The European monarchies all have a small but vociferous chorus calling for the abolition of the institutions, and most countries have steadily opened their rulers to greater public scrutiny. For their part, the rulers, especially the Scandinavians, have dropped their lifestyles almost to street levels. But even they have maintained the minimum royal trappings that generate symbolic value.

The point of the monarchy is to be apolitical and not manipulative. It is actually not a persuasive power, but a cultural power, although it is going to take the press clowns a few generations to catch up with that one. The point of monarchy is that, like populism, it escapes the committee mentality and aims for decisive realism instead, knowing that this will be unpopular yet also will represent the will of the people even if they, typically inarticulate, could not tell you what that will is.

On to the fun part; here are some rising monarchist organizations you can join to participate in overthrowing democracy, oligarchy, and dictatorship so that we can get something better:

• Monarchist Action
  

  Monarchist Action is a global organization dedicated to the promotion and expansion of monarchism through proactive engagement, activism, and international cooperation. We advocate for monarchism as a viable and compelling alternative to other prevalent systems of governance.

• Monarchy International
  

  The League’s purpose is, quite simply, to support the principle of Monarchy. It represents adherents of differing styles of Monarchy, from Constitutionalists to Absolutists, recognizing that differing traditions require differing styles of leadership.

• Black-Yellow Alliance
  

  The Monarchists – Black-Yellow Alliance are a future-oriented, non-denominational and supranational citizens’ movement. We strive for the introduction of a parliamentary monarchy and the closest possible cooperation between the successor states of the Danube Monarchy through democratic means.

Let us hope for more cheerful days ahead as the committee/bureaucracy/democracy fades away and strong power takes its place.

Tags: aristocracy, constitutional monarchy, monarchism, monarchy, parliamentary monarchy, royalism