/lit/ - Literature

>>15901049
>I don't think monarchists are dumb. You basically always end up with an elite who exploit everyone else. The best you can hope for is to mitigate this exploitation and there are arguments that monarchy will be less insane than other forms of government.

This is why I have come around to monarchy and aristocracy.

I have been reading up on history and political theory for a few years now and it has made me an extreme pessimist about the prospects of any "revolution." It's all useless. It's all bullshit. There will never be a proletariat revolution. Marx's hazy dream of the elimination of class is as stupid and foolish as any utopia ever devised by any writer. It's all fucking bullshit.

We have spent 300 years trying to eliminate the concentration of wealth and power in the world, or at least in the West. And where have we wound up? We have wound up right back where we started: with a small collection of individuals and families owning the vast majority of wealth and political power in the world. I'd argue that it might be even WORSE than it was before the English/American/French Revolutions.

So fuck it. I'm done trying to push a string. Still being a Jacobin/Bolshevik/Communist/Leftist is a fool's errand in 2020. Fuck it all. No more trying to do what can't be done. We will always have a hierarchy, we might as well just have a de jure hierarchy if we're stuck with a de facto one.

I favor aristocratic republics. A mixing of monarchy and democracy. A middle ground between rule by one and rule by all. Seems to me that it manages to thread the needle and be Aristotle's "mean between two extremes." Basically, I think every polity on the planet should have the same government as the Republic of Venice. This is where my musings about politics over years has led me.

>>15583703
We should honestly just go back to aristocracies. The Ancients and the Medievals had it right all along. Aristocracy and monarchy aren't perfect, but NO system is perfect. What hereditary nobility is, though, is stable. it doesn't have the upheaval of mass democracy and so it allows for the general thriving of a society over a long period of time.

My own personal favorite system of government is an aristocratic republic, like the Roman Republic or Venice in its heyday. I think it manages to balance the strengths of a democracy with the strengths of a monarchy and it manages to avoid most of the weaknesses of both. It's the mean between the two extremes: not rule by one (monarchy) or rule by all (democracy), but rule by some.

The ideal system of government is an aristocratic republic. It worked for Rome, it worked for Venice, and it worked for the early United States, and it was precisely when the system was changed that all three of those polities started to go to shit.

>>13085938
The papacy is essentially an elected monarchy, only the electors are all aristocrats themselves. It's a bit like how the government of Venice worked when it was a republic. And Venice was pretty stable, it lasted for more than 1000 years and only fell when Napoleon conquered it.

SOME voting is fine, but allowing everyone with a driver's license to vote is just asking for trouble, as the current state of America makes plain.

>>12392286
Dumb fucking tripfag, let's look at your precious mass democracy. It's only been a thing for about 250 years and it's already on the verge of completely flying apart. Meanwhile monarchies can last for millennia, and aristocratic republics (like Venice) can last for a thousand years themselves. The study of history reveals that participatory democracy ultimately falls apart within a short period of time relative to the other systems of government. Are you going to argue with history?

The future of the world is obviously going to be, to a certain degree, authoritarian. I think it has been proved that the challenges of the 21st century, from climate change to AI to space exploration, are simply too big and too complex for mass democracy to solve. I consider myself a pretty smart guy, but I don't consider myself at all capable of addressing the rise of artificial intelligence.

Ideal governments of the future will probably be a kind of quasi-meritocratic aristocracy. I think a good model to keep in mind is the government of the Republic of Venice, which allowed the people a certain say in their government but still kept nearly all important functions limited to the nobility. It's worth pointing out that Venice lasted a thousand years as a republic. Aristocratic republics tend to be very stable.

>>10623299
>not supporting an aristocratic republic in the mold of Venice or Republican Rome

Reminder that abandoning democracy does not necessarily mean you have to become a full-fledged monarchist. There are many instances of non-democratic states without ruling families. Venice is my favorite example. Aristocratic republics are fine too.