Muddling Back to
Monarchy
by Dan Sullivan
Chapter : The Essence of Monarchy
The literal translation of "monarch" is "one ruler."
However, that translation only defines traditional monarchies by their most
conspicuous symptom, giving undue attention to form over
substance. This book focuses more on the essence
of monarchy in contrast to democracy. It examines forms in the context
of
how they reinforce or undermine substance.
The folly of fixating on form is that systems of
privilege and power mutate in order to adapt to changing conditions,
just as viruses mutate in order to slip past antibodies that are
sensitive to the old forms of the viruses, or to infect hosts that
differ from earlier hosts. Thus, a country can be democratic in form
and monarchial in substance. (We will explore this in the next chapter,
"The Essence ofDemocracy."
Monarchy is essentially a system of rule by power. It has never been
the case (at least not for long) that a single strong-man's personal power held the rest of a nation in sway
against their will. Rather, a monarch is placed
in power, and kept in power, by a privileged elite. History has taught
elites that they can only maintain their privileges if they act in
unison, and that it is much easier for them to act in unison if a
representative body (representing them, not the general public)
legislates for all of them and a single executive acts on their
behalf.
While legislative bodies deliberate on the public record in open
chambers (and often on camera, these days), executives meet with
whomever they choose act based on private deliberations. Therefore, the
more a system vests power in an executive, and especially in an
executive who is independent of his legislators, the more monarchial
and less democratic the process becomes.
We will more closely examine America's penchant for strong executives
under the chapter "Hamilton Restores the Monarchy." For now I only
note that most European countries learned from our mistake and vested
more power in legislative bodies, including the legislative prerogative
of hiring and firing chief executives.
We
will also examine how monarchies became hereditary - another feature
that is more symptomatic than essential. Hereditary succession was
intended to lessen political in-fighting between elites, for deaths of
early monarchs had resulted in great intrigues and, sometimes, all-out
wars between powerful factions. Hereditary successon solidified the
pecking order of the elites and reduced opportunities for internecine
strife. None the less, the history of monarchy is rife with regicide,
including plots to prevent succession of those thought to be unfriendly
to the factions.
Some monarchies have been established abruptly by conquest, and others
have slowly developed out of relatively free tribal societies. We will
look at England, whose common-law tribes changed into a major monarchy
by a combination of gradual internal changes and abrupt conquests. The
point of this examination is to show analogies between that the changes
taking place in modern democratic societies and the slide of earlier
democratic societies into monarchies.
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