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A Barnes Review editorial
One might wonder why an American journal of Revisionist history, one with a specifically populist bent, would run an article defending and praising monarchy. Were not these men and women tyrants, running a country soley for there own benefit, ignoring completely the needs of the people? Such a question betrays a lack of knowledge about populism as well as betraying a more serious problem concerning the extent to which the assumptions of liberal democratic ideology control the thought processes of those even on the political right. The reason monarchy needs to be defended-among others-is that liberal democracy is a failure.
Liberal democracy is a system of government, or, more accurately, a view of society, that claims that social life, of itself, has no substantial existence. This is to say that the only real entity in a society is the individual, defined usually as a self-interested bundle of desires motored by something called the will. Therefore, politics becomes a matter of those self-interested and self-willed units forming groups that represent their specific desires, and the governing structure weighing the public support of each group of desiring individuals, that is, to what extent those desires are shared by larger elements in the population. Public policy, then, in the pure form of this view, is the result of the larger group predominating, having more influence or succeeding in convincing the state that their desires are most worthy of favor.
The American republic (we might call it a "conservative democracy") was something different. There were few "liberal democrats" at the Constitutional convention, the acceptance of that ideology among the American ruling class was a much latter development. Conservative republicanism (as opposed to democracy) of the American variety was based on a notion of "ordered liberty," wherein the specific responsibilities of landholders and professionals within the community were just as important as "rights" if not more so. Knowledge and virtue are more important in American classical republicanism than the self-interested individual demanding satisfaction of his desires.
Liberal democracy is not a society or a government at all. It is merely a state of anarchy among various pressure groups. Society does not exist-except as any group of self-interested individuals whose only relationship to one another is based also on this self-interest--and thus human desire is the sine qua non of politics and ethics. Of course, such a view of the person and society simply means that, over time, the wealthiest and most powerful will soon rule. Their ability to implement their desires is greater than that of the average man, and thus they will be the ones who will get heard; and then they are the ones represented in the halls of government. Assuming a standpoint of the liberal democrat, there is utterly no ethical standpoint by which such a system can be criticized.
Monarchy is based on the idea that society has rights as well as duties and that the central unit of that society is the family (that is, a duty-bound rather than a rights-bound social organism), rather than the individual. Given that society has a purpose, identity and function to play in the world and manifest to its members, and this identity is an objective reality, then democratic elections make little sense. The puropse and function of society is not amenable to democratic vote. A belief in natural law, itself a powerful component of monarchy, also is not open to democratic discussion. Men discover it and conform themselves to it; they do not create it and certainly do not vote on it.
The purpose of a monarchy is to represent that identity and function domestically as well as to the outside world. The monarchy is primarily an insitiution of representation, due to the fact that its ultimate job is to continually synthesize and symbolize the national character, history, language, religion and vision of public virtue. The monarch continually reminds the population that all members of society have their place, differing in function but equal in value; that is, that individual desire is not the sine qua non of ethics and politics. The monarch is the very principle of national unity personified. This is the reason why monarchy has been continuously popular for centuries (particularly among the lower middle class and the poor) and fascinates the world to this day.
Democratic and republican rule fails for several reasons: First, both systems are open to oligarchic domination, whether from economic and financial elites, or even the undue control and manipulation of the society through privately owened media empires or other entities not amenable to collective control. Second, the bureaucratization of the state , a specifically onerous phenomenon in the 20th century, nullifies the notion of representation in democratic states. Third, if individual desire becomes the primary focus of politics (as the Enlightenment enshrined), then no constitution is stable or safe, for there is no way to know when self-interest will seek its overthrow. This is something well known to American Constitutionalists and patriots and makes a rather invidious criticism of even the most healthy republics.
Forth, with no substantial moral idea of a broader society to be found in liberal democracies, the individual atrophies. He becomes a rootless and alienated cog in the economic machine, believing more in the power of commodity consumption and political sloganeering than in building lasting social institutions.
Many well-meaning populists need to more closely examine the assumptions of liberal democracy, if for no other reason than that it is the official ideology of the American ruling classes, having taken over from an ill-fated Constitutional republic many generations ago. Monarchy deserves a second look as the embers and ashes of liberal ideology suffocate us.-MRJ
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