It ain't popular, but I've been intrigued by the idea of limiting the vote to something like those that ACTUALLY pay taxes. If you net more money from the gubmint then you don't get to vote.
A thread for the Civilized Discussion and Debate on Monarchy
- Thread starter VictortheMonarch
- Start date
There is no reason to give legit monarchists the benefit of the doubt in this day and age.
Call them the fools they are.
Ah, yes, actual poll taxes, no way that could go wrong.
yeeeaaaahhh...that's why I'm just intrigued by the idea. The potential downsides are pretty enormous.
ShieldWife
Marchioness
I don’t necessarily have an objection to poll taxes.
The lowest in society, whatever metric we want to judge them by, aren’t actually even the major problem we have with our modern first world democracies. It’s the super rich elites which have essentially subverted our democracies and who rule us with more rigid control and far less accountability than even an absolute monarch might.
In modern democracies, the rulers face no accountability at all, the simply hide behind puppet politicians and when one becomes unpopular, they are replaced with another. There is the illusion of choice at the ballot box and an illusion of accountability when one politician replaces another, but in reality there is none. The same elites continue to rule, to enrich themselves at the expense of the people, and to push policies that are against the interests and unpopular with the majority of citizens.
I’ll admit it, I don’t like the idea that the dregs of society have equal vote with people who are intelligent, informed, and productive. In practice, a democracy doesn’t actually give those people representation, because they are too ignorant to represent their own interests with their votes, but it gives the people who are best at manipulating them huge amounts of disproportionate power.
The lowest in society, whatever metric we want to judge them by, aren’t actually even the major problem we have with our modern first world democracies. It’s the super rich elites which have essentially subverted our democracies and who rule us with more rigid control and far less accountability than even an absolute monarch might.
In modern democracies, the rulers face no accountability at all, the simply hide behind puppet politicians and when one becomes unpopular, they are replaced with another. There is the illusion of choice at the ballot box and an illusion of accountability when one politician replaces another, but in reality there is none. The same elites continue to rule, to enrich themselves at the expense of the people, and to push policies that are against the interests and unpopular with the majority of citizens.
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
Whether invention is automatically a good thing could be debated as well, but I am not really seeing it. Some of the most inventive states in 19th century were monarchies: see the German Empire. Hell, even Austria-Hungary was far more inventive than many people give it credit for: the problem was implementation, but that had absolutely nothing to do with the country being a monarchy, and everything to do with Hungarians putting their foot in whenever anybody wanted to have something done (look at how much it took to approve the Tegetthoff class dreadnoughts). Austro-Hungarian agreement was a disaster for the Habsburg Monarchy (and, ironically, for Hungary as well as it had lost many of the freedoms it had hitherto enjoyed).
??? I do not see any difference there. Literally everything forming any political system is an "accident of self-preservation" by certain parties - including the existence of political systems in the first place. With time, such accidents become calcified and thought of as being inherent to the system - which at that point they are, but did not start out as such.
Are you talking about national or supranational monarchy? Because answer could be very different based on such variables. But anyway, they do have some common principles...
1. Something akin to literally any premodern monarchy would be basically perfect (Holy Roman Empire, e.g.). Or failling that, something akin to German Empire or Austria-Hungary. Fundamentally, one would leverage the emotional and psychological advantage of monarchy, which is loyalty to the monarch and the ruling line, to effectively replace some of the bureocratic centralization with symbolic centralization. Because of the emotional significance of loyalty to the throne, and authority of the king or the emperor, monarchy could get away with significant practical decentralization. When it comes to single-ethnicity monarchies, they would be more unified, but again with significant local autonomy.
2. Monarch at the top, serving as practical and emotional center of the state. Majority of day-to-day work would be done at the local level, with little to no interference by the monarch: in fact, ideally individual counties would have their own laws except for areas under authority of the monarchy such as defense and transportation. Monarch would, in such day-to-day affairs, serve primarily as a final judge: presiding over the court and solving various disputes between local and regional entities which lower levels of government failed to solve.
3. See above. Fundamentally, it is about balance of power: instead of local governments being merely extensions of the central government, local governments actually govern.
4. Again, explained above. Monarch cannot interfere in internal affairs, but he is the final authority whenever disputes cannot be solved by the levels of government below him.
Louis XIV essentially single-handedly ruined it for monarchies everywhere and forever. Not just for monarchies, but also for society in general. If it weren't for him and his absolutism and his wars, there would have been no French Revolution. And seeing how French Revolution is the original source of literally all evils that exist in the West today, that would have been a very good thing.
Or maybe some are simply aware that a system / society where nobody looks beyond the next four years has no future? So to answer to this remark:
We are today being ruled by the fools, who are elected by the fools, but in reality represent literally anybody that had bought them. And none of these factors (the fools electing the representatives, the fools doing the representation, or the plutocrats controlling the latter) have any long-term perspective, and latter two groups also have no emotional investment in the well-being of the state either.
So who is the fool here?
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Sorry, no, the change from the Muromachi to the Tokugawa was not a simple "new dynasty begins to rule" scenario. Between the effective end of the Muromachi and the rise of Tokugawa was 148 years. That is to say there was a period of civil war lasting nearly SIX GENERATIONS, which was a longer period than the Muromachi ruled for and in that time you had various serious contenders for unification, none of whom really succeeded until Tokugawa. That the Emperor was still symbolically around and respected doesn't change that, and when you look at the ways the Tokugawa and Muromachi governed they were fundamentally different, with the Tokugawa being much more centralized and systematically undercutting local rulers and using various means to prevent them from acting independently or against Tokugawa interests.
Likewise the end of the Tokugawa and rise of the Meiji government was not simply a "new dynasty takes command" situation, it was a fundamental and dramatic change in the way the government of Japan was structured and the islands ruled. You went from a military dictatorship to a, well, technically a Constitutional Monarchy.
You want to say that there's continuity between the Stuart, Hanover, and Windsor in England? Sure, I'll grant that, as the system of rule in Great Britain only slowly changed and developed and you had no real interruption of central rule akin to the Sengoku Jidai. However, to claim that the Japanese monarchy showcases stable continuous rule flies in the utter face of history.
TheRejectionist
TheRejectionist
The only country I am in favor of a monarchy is the ancestral homeland of my mother's maternal side of her family (Spain) and our country Brazil.
Simonbob
Well-known member
I have a question.
The old monarchy operated in an enviroment with vastly less info exchange and avalability. If I want to know, well, almost anything about all sorts of figures, with today's tech, I can look, and often find.
Can the Cult of Personality that allows Royalty to be the symbolic center of a nation work nearly so well, with social media and the like, compared with hundreds of years ago, when they heard so little? When even senior nobles often saw little of said royalty?
Can the Mystique survive exposure? I'm not sure the existing royals count much, they have bugger all power, and still have to really control themselves, just to keep what they have.
The old monarchy operated in an enviroment with vastly less info exchange and avalability. If I want to know, well, almost anything about all sorts of figures, with today's tech, I can look, and often find.
Can the Cult of Personality that allows Royalty to be the symbolic center of a nation work nearly so well, with social media and the like, compared with hundreds of years ago, when they heard so little? When even senior nobles often saw little of said royalty?
Can the Mystique survive exposure? I'm not sure the existing royals count much, they have bugger all power, and still have to really control themselves, just to keep what they have.
TheRejectionist
TheRejectionist
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Straight feudalism will not work, because feudalism is a government that works most effectively in situations where you have terrible communications and poor infrastructure (oddly enough it makes perfect sense in a number of various space!feudalism settings because they're far-flung space colonies with terrible communications and no infrastructure in-between planets). Monarchy itself does just fine, there's a decently long list of thriving monarchies now, most of them some sort of hybrid with elected parliaments or constitutional protections to be sure.
Simonbob
Well-known member
Eh.
There's movements about getting rid of them, and they generally have zero real power. How can they still be considered Monarchy? Although, there was and is a great deal of Royal watchers.....
Hmm. I'm going to think about this.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Can you name any significant nations where a Monarch holds and wields effective authority?
The only ones I'm aware of are in the Middle East.
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
Maybe. Look at literally any celebrity today. If anything, information exchange enhances cult of personality. And unlike modern celebrities, pop stars and politicians, actual royalty would have something solid to stand on, something that is not a media-created soap bubble.
Greater problem, I think, is modern egoism. Everybody wants to be a king.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Yeah? There's been quite a few mentioned in this thread. Off the top of my head...
Thailand
Morocco
Swaziland
Brunei
Liechtenstein
Monaco
One can make a reasonable argument for North Korea being a monarchy regardless of how much they stress that they're a democratic people's republic.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
we've got modern American royalty they are called career politicians and well if we liked them or respected them, we wouldn't exactly be on this site now would we. Seriously take a look at the history of these politicians. 99% of them have never been on a farm, worked at a entry level office job or drove a truck. it's also filled with nepotism. Bush the Son's grandfather was a freaking oil baron in WW2 his no good "read my lips no new taxes" son stared out as an oil equipment salesman and then quickly fell into politics like his old man and then W followed in the family business.
I almost guarantee you that if we accepted a "Royal family" tomorrow the moment it blows up in our face the first thing we'd do is go "Well they weren't REAL royalty." it's the "no true Scotsman/no real communist fallacy. The only reason why you aren't counting these politicians as royals is because they don't meet your personal expectations. The royal families of old were VERY much political.
CK2 isn't historically accurate just in the nature of it being a free for all, but it leads you down a rabbit whole where you learn some stuff especially when you research some of the campaign scenario's
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Bear Ribs
Well-known member
One of the odder things, but an advantage for monarchies, is that the monarch is generally apolitical. Yes, I realize that sounds like an oxymoron, but it's true. Monarchs normally leave the political parties and shenanigans to the lords under them while the monarch is above such things. You won't find the Queen of England picking between the Tories and Labor, f'rex, the monarch represents all the people and not just the ones who voted for them.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
at least until sibling rivalry gets involved. If you ensured that the royal family only ever had one child per generation and also made sure he (or she I guess) was consistently exposed to the needs of the peasants, then it might work in terms of the realm being peaceful, but the odds of that happening and staying are very low. Not to mention ruling an entire continent. is hard as crap if not impossible. Heck the only reason why America is as stable as it is because we are (supposed to at least) have 50 semi-autonomous zones that are really only supposed to come together in cases of war and national relations. if it wasn't for the governors and mayors telling the current wannabe king to go take a flying leap, we wouldn't be that much different from Australia and that's not even taking into Rivalries amongst the lesser nobles.
I'm not saying that our system is perfect and doesn't have its issues. I mean as of now it's still currently trying to enforce a false since of binary choice (Republican or democrat, corporate power or government power. Collectivism or anarchy) but I don't think Monarchism is going to bring about this "and the lion shall lie with the lamb once the heir of Gondor takes his rightful place on the throne" that seems to be often implied when monarchism is giving a sales pitch. At best, you are going to exchange one set of problems for a whole new set of problems, and that seems like a trade you take only if you have nothing to lose. Maybe some at are at that point. Maybe for some it's either Revolution or Suicide. But personally, I have a lot to lose from a bloody French, German or lord help me a Russian revolution.
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Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
??? What you described is actually an aristocratic republic, not a monarchy, much less a feudal monarchy. Also, fact remains that these politicians still depend on somebody else (campaign donors, corporations etc.) for their political power, and that their rule is formalized through elections. So what you get is a hereditary oligarchy / aristocratic republic that is pretending to be a democracy / republic.
These people don't see the country even as their property, they see it as an oil well, a source of resources... and once it dries up, they move onto another one. Hence globalism and internationalism, to open up more wells.
I'm going to point out here that Semmelweis' idea was a mere flash in the pan which completely failed to catch on anywhere else in the world. . . because his theory of "cadaverous particles" was factually impossible, and not only could he not provide any scientific explanation for his results, he ultimately became violently paranoid and lashed out violently at anyone who asked him to explain anything.
This was really not a scientific advancement of any sort, it was more, "Doctor stumbled across a method of reducing fever in one specific situation, couldn't explain how or why it actually worked, became crazy shouty man, accused everyone who wanted actual science of being murderers, escalated to the point of being justifiably thrown in an insane asylum."
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
and who do you think will prop up these new royals, God? Call me the devil if you wish but givin that God has very often rebuked violent revolution I press X to doubt. No the people who will be propping up these new monarchs will be lesser lords, businessmen all of which will probably have their fingers in the pots of globalist trade, unless of course you somehow thanos away all tech that makes long distance communication possible. What's likely to happen is the king will be a puppet, and if he dares protest against the evils of those that made him, they'll laugh him off.