It strikes me that one argument in favor of constitutional monarchy is that the social isolation and from-birth indoctrination might be the psychologically optimal way to ensure that a sort of “swordholder for democracy” — IE, the monarch whom we expect to bail out democracy from authoritarian attempts — can make the correct but hard decision about when to execute a particular threat.
I’d note that this is mostly theoretical, since although you’ve provided some examples here, it’s not remotely a reliable mechanism judging from the rest of the historical data set.
But the main example on the “pro” side is that of the institutional GOP capitulating to MAGA. The core dynamic that drove this was social: people in a political party who could theoretically brush off an authoritarian insurgency find that their entire social lives and livelihoods are based on loyalty to the party, and they balk at destroying their lives just to save democracy, and then make up a whole bunch of excuses about how they’re going to undermine the movement from within while functionally doing nothing but enable that movement. Vanishingly few GOPers were willing to buck MAGA; we call those who did “The Bulwark” and their staff numbers in the dozens.
Anyways, perhaps the solution to this is to take a random family, isolate them from the rest of society, make sure they never have to question their livelihood, and comprise their entire social life — from the lowliest servants to the highest ministers — of people reminding them every single day that their sole purpose in life is to command a special guard of royal forces to round up and murder any burgeoning fascist leadership before they’re able to commit a coup.
I’d be willing to pay some minuscule fraction of my taxes as this kind of insurance policy if it meant I wouldn’t have had to deal with the last decade of insanity and watching my country destroy its world-historic record for “Most Enlightened Evil Hegemony To Ever Exist”.
I used to think there was some benefit like that, a monarch whose only power was to dissolve Parliament. Turkey seemed to have a reasonable military version of it, throwing out dictators and fading back into relative obscurity. But in too many other countries, the military becomes the dictator, and I don't know why Turkey's acted with such constraint.
My Chartertopia has a legislature and no executive; when the legislature creates and budgets for an agency, they can interview and hire agency chiefs. If they start a war, they can interview and hire chiefs for that war. They can fire chiefs at any time. But I wondered about having some kind of last resort monarch to fire all legislators and make them be re-elected from scratch. I called him the Royal Naysayer, whose only power was to dissolve the legislature and immediately abdicate. Elections maintained a list of "crown princes", so the line of succession was by popular choice, not hereditary.
But there was no way to make it work in practice. It was too easy for a wayward Royal Naysayer to dissolve the legislature just for fun or if he got bored, and if the only consequence was abdication, what better way to have some fun on the way out?
I don't believe your scheme is immune to that, and in fact more prone to it if isolated from society except for anti-sycophants. Who selects the anti-sycophants? Who selects the royal guard? And why is your royal guard only there to protect against fascists? Why not Marxists? Marxists have done far more to wreck society than the pitiful handful of Nazis. Even before WW II, American Nazis had no hope of rebelling, and Marxists had already infiltrated all levels of government. That alone shows how useless the idea is in general, and your scheme in particular. (ETA you don't mention the Democrats being taken over by the near-Marxist woke brigade, or the self-proclaimed-and-proud -of-it socialists like Bernie and AOC. Your focus on Trump and the GOP does you no favors and really shows the weakness of your scheme.)
A Praetorian guard is a sure route to dictatorship.
I disagree with the shade at Marxists, but the rest is mostly agreed and mostly the reason why I don’t actually agree with monarchism.
Perhaps (theoretically) though, an accountability mechanism for your “dissolve+abdicate” dilemma can be the demos itself having a veto over the monarch. It’d have to be some supermajority threshold referendum, since a bare majority would be liable to be the same majority that voted in the rotten legislature in the first place.
I’d also explore pairing it with some sort of culling/sortition mechanism. Maybe the dismissed parliament would be permanently banned from office to reset the table, and you’d then randomly select citizens to populate a new constitutional review convention to agree on new “rules of the road” for resolving the impasse or otherwise curing whatever rotten electoral dynamic enabled the authoritarian threat.
If that convention failed to convince the citizenry to pass a new constitution, the previous monarch’s heir-in-waiting would also fail to be crowned, and the process would start over as many times as it took to resolve the gridlock.
What "shade at Marxists"? Are you claiming Marxists are not a threat or not despicable, or that wokism in general is enthrall to Marxism?
(I don't give two rat's arses whether BLM founders and other leading lights of the left know what Marxism is by any definition; they proclaim themselves to be Marxists, government cannot be too socialist for them; and arguing over the reality of their Marxism is as productive over arguing that Fascism only truly applies to Mussolini's party, not to Hitler.)
You make some interesting points, but Romania is a really bad example for this because my understanding is that the king very deliberately push the government into crisis in order to gain power and fascism would have been a smaller thing without him doing that. In fact, he might have given the fascist movement more power, if it weren’t for the fact that his mistress was Jewish and they hated that and this pissed him off. He did show much more hesitation in making an alliance with Hitler than the government that came after him, but in general, I would say on net he helped fascism more than he hurt it. After all his, turning the country into a dictatorship ended with him effectively, having to run from the country after giving power to a fascist general in an attempt to appease them, which ended up not working.
You’re absolutely correct; the larger practical problem with any attempt to install constitutional monarchy is that democracies tend to only backslide into outright autocracy, not voluntarily opt for even limited monarchy.
Maybe one way to democratically institute one would be to induct the immediate families of all former executives into the royal household. The latest ones go to the back of the succession order, which incentivizes them to marry into older families, and maybe we cut off those older families at 2 generations — IE, Bush’s or Clinton’s grandchildren would be eligible, but not great-grands. That keeps the line of succession from getting diluted and overgrown, while also keeping new blood constantly coming in. Intermarriage would be completely optional if not discouraged.
Can a system remain moral while defending itself against those who would destroy it?
What struck me here is that Bryan seems to move, at least briefly from libertarian moral clarity into something closer to tragic political realism, entertaining the possibility that extrajudicial action might be rational in survival terms. That tension feels unavoidable rather than resolvable
It strikes me that one argument in favor of constitutional monarchy is that the social isolation and from-birth indoctrination might be the psychologically optimal way to ensure that a sort of “swordholder for democracy” — IE, the monarch whom we expect to bail out democracy from authoritarian attempts — can make the correct but hard decision about when to execute a particular threat.
I’d note that this is mostly theoretical, since although you’ve provided some examples here, it’s not remotely a reliable mechanism judging from the rest of the historical data set.
But the main example on the “pro” side is that of the institutional GOP capitulating to MAGA. The core dynamic that drove this was social: people in a political party who could theoretically brush off an authoritarian insurgency find that their entire social lives and livelihoods are based on loyalty to the party, and they balk at destroying their lives just to save democracy, and then make up a whole bunch of excuses about how they’re going to undermine the movement from within while functionally doing nothing but enable that movement. Vanishingly few GOPers were willing to buck MAGA; we call those who did “The Bulwark” and their staff numbers in the dozens.
Anyways, perhaps the solution to this is to take a random family, isolate them from the rest of society, make sure they never have to question their livelihood, and comprise their entire social life — from the lowliest servants to the highest ministers — of people reminding them every single day that their sole purpose in life is to command a special guard of royal forces to round up and murder any burgeoning fascist leadership before they’re able to commit a coup.
I’d be willing to pay some minuscule fraction of my taxes as this kind of insurance policy if it meant I wouldn’t have had to deal with the last decade of insanity and watching my country destroy its world-historic record for “Most Enlightened Evil Hegemony To Ever Exist”.
I used to think there was some benefit like that, a monarch whose only power was to dissolve Parliament. Turkey seemed to have a reasonable military version of it, throwing out dictators and fading back into relative obscurity. But in too many other countries, the military becomes the dictator, and I don't know why Turkey's acted with such constraint.
My Chartertopia has a legislature and no executive; when the legislature creates and budgets for an agency, they can interview and hire agency chiefs. If they start a war, they can interview and hire chiefs for that war. They can fire chiefs at any time. But I wondered about having some kind of last resort monarch to fire all legislators and make them be re-elected from scratch. I called him the Royal Naysayer, whose only power was to dissolve the legislature and immediately abdicate. Elections maintained a list of "crown princes", so the line of succession was by popular choice, not hereditary.
But there was no way to make it work in practice. It was too easy for a wayward Royal Naysayer to dissolve the legislature just for fun or if he got bored, and if the only consequence was abdication, what better way to have some fun on the way out?
I don't believe your scheme is immune to that, and in fact more prone to it if isolated from society except for anti-sycophants. Who selects the anti-sycophants? Who selects the royal guard? And why is your royal guard only there to protect against fascists? Why not Marxists? Marxists have done far more to wreck society than the pitiful handful of Nazis. Even before WW II, American Nazis had no hope of rebelling, and Marxists had already infiltrated all levels of government. That alone shows how useless the idea is in general, and your scheme in particular. (ETA you don't mention the Democrats being taken over by the near-Marxist woke brigade, or the self-proclaimed-and-proud -of-it socialists like Bernie and AOC. Your focus on Trump and the GOP does you no favors and really shows the weakness of your scheme.)
A Praetorian guard is a sure route to dictatorship.
I disagree with the shade at Marxists, but the rest is mostly agreed and mostly the reason why I don’t actually agree with monarchism.
Perhaps (theoretically) though, an accountability mechanism for your “dissolve+abdicate” dilemma can be the demos itself having a veto over the monarch. It’d have to be some supermajority threshold referendum, since a bare majority would be liable to be the same majority that voted in the rotten legislature in the first place.
I’d also explore pairing it with some sort of culling/sortition mechanism. Maybe the dismissed parliament would be permanently banned from office to reset the table, and you’d then randomly select citizens to populate a new constitutional review convention to agree on new “rules of the road” for resolving the impasse or otherwise curing whatever rotten electoral dynamic enabled the authoritarian threat.
If that convention failed to convince the citizenry to pass a new constitution, the previous monarch’s heir-in-waiting would also fail to be crowned, and the process would start over as many times as it took to resolve the gridlock.
What "shade at Marxists"? Are you claiming Marxists are not a threat or not despicable, or that wokism in general is enthrall to Marxism?
(I don't give two rat's arses whether BLM founders and other leading lights of the left know what Marxism is by any definition; they proclaim themselves to be Marxists, government cannot be too socialist for them; and arguing over the reality of their Marxism is as productive over arguing that Fascism only truly applies to Mussolini's party, not to Hitler.)
“Sir, this is [a discussion about constitutional design].”
Ah, of course, my bad. Marxists don’t care about obeying constitutions, so they are irrelevant here.
You make some interesting points, but Romania is a really bad example for this because my understanding is that the king very deliberately push the government into crisis in order to gain power and fascism would have been a smaller thing without him doing that. In fact, he might have given the fascist movement more power, if it weren’t for the fact that his mistress was Jewish and they hated that and this pissed him off. He did show much more hesitation in making an alliance with Hitler than the government that came after him, but in general, I would say on net he helped fascism more than he hurt it. After all his, turning the country into a dictatorship ended with him effectively, having to run from the country after giving power to a fascist general in an attempt to appease them, which ended up not working.
You’re absolutely correct; the larger practical problem with any attempt to install constitutional monarchy is that democracies tend to only backslide into outright autocracy, not voluntarily opt for even limited monarchy.
Maybe one way to democratically institute one would be to induct the immediate families of all former executives into the royal household. The latest ones go to the back of the succession order, which incentivizes them to marry into older families, and maybe we cut off those older families at 2 generations — IE, Bush’s or Clinton’s grandchildren would be eligible, but not great-grands. That keeps the line of succession from getting diluted and overgrown, while also keeping new blood constantly coming in. Intermarriage would be completely optional if not discouraged.
Just a thought experiment tho.
Can a system remain moral while defending itself against those who would destroy it?
What struck me here is that Bryan seems to move, at least briefly from libertarian moral clarity into something closer to tragic political realism, entertaining the possibility that extrajudicial action might be rational in survival terms. That tension feels unavoidable rather than resolvable