Slashdot Mirror
Geeks For Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries
Third Position writes "Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But there's a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme: they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French Revolution. Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy."
Like the folks who want a Christian Theocracy in the States. They are under the assumption that ALL Christians think the same way they do.
Relevant recent research FTW
Ezekiel 23:20
American here. I have a question for you – I know the Queen is the head of state and theoretically has vast powers. However, she seems to have delegated most of those powers. Beyond a tourist attraction what does she do? I live close enough to Canada, another one of her domains, but I can’t figure out what she does.
Canada here. The Queen is really "in title" only here. She technically has some power to try and influence our government and we ask permission of the Governor General for somethings, but it's really only a tradition thing. If she interfered... well, we wouldn't like her very much anymore. At the moment we're on good speaking terms and she's an ok old bird. Skips a generation though, I don't think anyone likes Charles, but William gets the ok.
Disclaimer: I'm French.
At school I was taught how the French Revolution was an amazing thing. It freed us. It was the end of a time of the absolute, divine right monarchy that France and other European nations had for almost a thousand years. I learned later about The Terror, where nobles would get their heads chopped off. Including the wives and kids, and I reckon some servants too. There's probably been a rape or two, as well, since that's what you get when a mob forms up and there's nobody to police them. They don't teach you much of that when you're at school. I guess it's understandable, since you don't want 12 years old to learn about rape and kids their age being killed just because they were born in the right family. Or do you?
Anyway, I learned much, much later, in my late 20's, that the actual History is much more cynic. It was not "we, the people" (to paraphrase an American concept) who started this. People got riled up by the bourgeois. A bourgeois is a very, very rich commoner. He can hardly hope to ever become a noble. That limits, right there, the richness he can ever hope to achieve. He'll always be looked down from the nobles. He can be killed for talking wrong to a noble. It's better to be a poor noble than a rich bourgeois. So, they didn't like that very much. They started the Revolution. They manipulated the peasants and poorly educated population to do the Revolution. Just so they could usurp the power from the nobles.
Note that I'm personally fine with the fact that we took the nobles out. Nobody should have a birthright over somebody else, just because. This is unfair, this is archaic, and it doesn't make the society move forward. The problem I have with the Revolution, besides the way it's taught (unless you do a History Major you won't hear much of this), is that it replaced one nobility with another. At least the previous one, the actual nobles, where honest about their absolute power. They said "I'm better than you, you're lesser than me, fuck you and fuck off." But the Bourgeoisie, which is still in power today (we call them Oligarchs, because they are the ultimate Bourgeois and there are not so many of them), is much more hypocritical. They will make you think you're in a Democracy, when really you're not. When the Banks can decide whether or not a state will default its credits, after pushing them towards into a mass debt, it's not a democracy. It's an illusion.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, as I just started typing with no set plans for the post. I guess my point is, I'm fed up of hearing we are in a democracy, and we should feel lucky, because more and more I feel I have no choice and no say. Even if my situation isn't as bad as a serf from 400 years ago, it sure as hell isn't as good as the people back them wanted my life to be.
My thoughts exactly.
We are getting a new form of Monarchy right now via the inequality in wealth distribution.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
To be honest, I always thought the Lords did a fine job of basically not being too politically tied to the morons in the Commons. This is almost certainly why they want to reform the Lords - so that the upper chamber stops being a reasonably impartial bunch of old guys who do what's right because its right, and starts being a bunch of young tossers who only got their because the political parties helped with their election campaigns.
All wrapped up in the guise of "but they're not democratic".
At worst the UK will get a form of democracy that rivals the US for stupidity, infighting and intransigence.
I can see one such a democratic split between the houses would work though - if the upper house was only made available to those who have never held membership of any political party. Then the cronies of the lower houses would not be allowed in, and would not expect a cushy "retirement" in the upper house either. Imagine if the upper house was stocked only with ordinary people, now *that* would be democratic.
In the 17th century as the Divine Right of Kings declined in legitimacy, the race was on for an alternative reason to obey the government (other than that they would shoot you otherwise). Both Hobbes and Locke constructed the idea that there is an implicit contract between the citizens of a country and its rulers: you do your job and we will accept your ordering of society. A small but significant element of this was the right to leave if you didn't like what the government was doing. Interestingly the refusal of this right to the subjects of Marxist regimes marks them out as nastier than their predecessors (the Berlin Wall and the rest of the Iron Curtain was a largely successful attempt to keep East Germans at home). For Hobbes this was the ONLY right of the subject; Locke argued that the contract implied a right to participate in the government, which was seminal in the American revolution.
Seventh-day Adventists actually can be categorized quite nicely into conservative evangelicalism. They step outside the mainstream on issues like the weekly sabbath, the state of the dead and by maintaining a historicist approach to prophetic interpretation. They also have an unusually strong emphasis on religious liberty and the separation of church and state. But their soteriology/christology/etc... tend to be very orthodox evangelical.
Source: Grew up Adventist, still am a practicing Adventist, MA in Religion, and I read the work of many non-Adventist theologians and scholars.
Capitalism does not lead to corruption, lack of character does.
No, they supported him, because he was far better than the communists, who would have most likely wiped out the royal bloodlines.
He also got called "little corporal" behind his back in a derogatory manner by conservatives. They viewed him with deep suspicion, and plotted against him. They also feared and loathed the strasseist wing of the nazi party, and especially the SA, most of which were young unemployed strasserists, and big well organized goverment allowed hooligans. There was even talk that the SA was going to replace the wermarcht as Germany's army.
The night of long knives changed that. The top SA leaders were assassinated, along with many influential conservatives, the strasserists, the SA's role as the nazi's political army was given to its former subdivision, the SS, which was more conservative and middle class in its economics.
After this, no one dared oppose Hitler. Hitler's version of nazism was unopposed. Hitler selected himself as monarch.
See, the thing about Monarchs is they never got selected for any fitness test, they selected themselves by taking the throne, either by force, or by treachery. That doesn't make a good or accountable leader.
This is addressed quite well in Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy. There's three basic forms of government: rule by the one, rule by the few, and rule by the many, each of which has a good form and a bad form. Rule by the one is monarchy when good, tyranny when bad. Rule by the few is aristocracy when good, oligarchy when bad. Rule by the many is democracy when good, anarchy when bad. The cycle of history is that each of the good forms will, over time, degrade into their bad form, until a crisis occurs that topples the government and replaces it with the next form in the cycle.
The idea of a republic is to have all three running at the same time (the executive is the rule by the one, the judicial system is the rule by the few, and the legislature is the rule by the many) in the hopes that if one went bad, the other two would hold it in check, making the government stable unless all three go bad at the same time.