The Perils of a Republic
The damndest things occur to you in the shower.
I was thinking mostly about the transition of power of Boris Johnson to whoever it is they're going to get next. The transition of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden of course was infamously terrible, resulting in the January 6 hearings where all the dirty laundry of democracy-in-strife has been getting an airing. Nobody is going to try and break into Parliament House just because Boris Johnson is being removed from office of Prime Minister. Equally, nobody rioted and pretended that Scomo had been robbed of a winning election night. Things might be dire in the UK and Australia when it comes to democratic values, but they're not as bad as they are in the USA.
January 6 happened exactly because the transition of power between democratically elected heads of state turns out to be vulnerable to intrigue. This is the way of Republics and Presidents. The final authority of government is the President and there's a moment when one is vacating the seat for another - or is supposed to at any rate - and the other has to take that seat where there is a blank moment where authority goes to a metaphorical empty chair. The Constitutional Monarchy model only has that moment when one king or queen dies or abdicates and the crown moves from one head to the next, but because the royal personage wearing the crown is not a political figure it is not vulnerable to intrigue. Allegedly.
The January 6 event then is merely another entry in the long annals of republics that have come under assault from authoritarians. This isn't ancient Rome, neither is the Senate in Star Wars episodes 1-3, although it bears some thinking upon just why it is that republics are so vulnerable to coup attempts. It is almost as if if you have a republic, then at some point in its history a coup will be attempted. Maybe it's not the system that's the problem but human nature. Even so, the frequency with which republics fall to coups is not something of which I am a fan.
And then there's the Constitutional Monarchy which get a lot of attention thanks to the UK being the UK.
The Downsides of a Constitutional Monarchy
There have been any number of politically motivated monarchs and princes, since 1800. All the same, it's not like democracy itself got torn asunder in the UK by a prince. It's interesting in that light that the Whitlam dismissal is a rare moment in history where a Governor General as representative of The Crown exercised the Crown's reserve powers to remove a democratically elected Prime Minister. Australian republicans have been clamouring since then to close that loophole by turning Australia into a republic. It has occurred to them that the problem isn't the structure so much as the person - Sir John Kerr in this instance - who was problematic.
All the same, the Monarchy can be an all-too-fallible backstop - that much is true. I'm sure those born to the family business of the Monarchy do their best to fill their roles, but clearly some do it better than others. The net effect can be quite shambolic, as we've seen with the modern royals.
The joke goes, there used to be a line between duchy and douchey. Prince Andrew obliterated that line. Prince Andrew, whatever the hell pervert that he is, is still the Duke of York. It's entirely a medieval concept made flesh, walking around, befriending billionaires and shagging underaged girls from Florida. The entitlement of the man is indescribably obnoxious and let's face it, this is kind of what the Monarchic system is about: Privilege bestowed upon random genetics through inherited processes of history, unquestioningly. So, well might we praise Her Royal Majesty QEII for all her good works and long-live-her-reign and all that, the metaphorical slip is showing with her second son behaving like a medieval aristocrat. That is to say, with the stability you get with a Constitutional Monarchy, you also get Prince Andrew, the Douche of York.
The point is, to have that impartial final arbiter of officialdom, a king or queen is a very handy thing to have. After all, who can argue against the dumb random luck of somebody being born into one family and not another? The arbitrariness of it actually is weirdly fairer than the contests built on force and violence. And yet to have the one king or queen, you're committed to having a family of these people and the spare prince is always a problem figure. In the olden days, they would send the second prince off to the monastery to avoid him embarrassing the throne. And if the older brother should die, they would yank the spare back into public view. That's what happened to Henry VIII. Alas, no such luck for Prince Randy Andy who got to embarrass himself in public over and over again.
I'm not a big fan of the royal family as such but they do provide some back up to our fragile democracy - I'm willing to admit as much. You might be irritated by all the coverage of the royal family - and who isn't? - but on a broader view, it's all part of democracy. It's every bit as relevant as the idiots who stormed Congress on 6th of January last year. I never thought I would come to that conclusion.
It could be worse. We could all be living in Russia.
No comments:
Post a Comment