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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35344 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Citation needed. Or at least some kind of argument. You're just stipulating this as though it were fact.

Actually existing actual monarchies tend to produce lackluster economic growth while offering much higher stability and avoiding the dumber mistakes of their neighbors. Granted, the only place where you really see monarchy and demotism side by side is the arab world. But still; it's probably fair to say that monarchy tends to avoid the worst mistakes a government can make in ways that other forms of government do not, but is also not a magic bullet.

while offering much higher stability and avoiding the dumber mistakes

Strong disagree on both of those statements. Democracies are the most stable form of government in existence since they allow for peaceful transfer of power. Hybrid regimes like those in the Sahel or Central America are notoriously unstable and chain coups like they're going out of style. More totalitarian states like Russia and China are more stable overall, and can seem even more stable than democracies... until they aren't. They're brittle and tend to shatter rather than undergo painful reforms. The biggest threat to democracies is rarely a big civil war, but rather descending into Orbanism.

And autocracies make stupid moves all the time. Zero Covid? Also, the whole Communist flavor of autocracies from 1945-1991 was a major unforced screwup.

They're brittle and tend to shatter rather than undergo painful reforms.

What do you call Chile, Singapore, South Korea, or Taiwan, if not "undergoing painful reforms"?

Hybrid regimes like those in the Sahel or Central America

Calling them "hybrid" sounds like cope to avoid accountability for the failures of the system.

The biggest threat to democracies is rarely a big civil war, but rather descending into Orbanism.

The biggest threat to democracies is getting locked into a path constant deterioration that can't be plausibly changed through voting, like South Africa.

‘Monarchies’

Monarchies were just the dictatorships of old.

This is a very modern misunderstanding. Most European kings did not historically have anything like absolute power, but were beholden to a law above their own authority. Their prerogatives were sharply circumscribed in all sorts of ways.

Check out Missing Monarchy if you haven't. https://www.amazon.com/Missing-Monarchy-Correcting-Misconceptions-Democracy/dp/B0D6FGC9YF But not the audiobook, which is auto-generated and awful.

There are several cases of countries speedrunning from mediavel to modern through a dictatorship, are there any success stories like that with democracy?

Also, your metric is rather confounded. It only makes sense to use it, if you assume all people in the world are fungible. The question is if these monarchies would fare better as democracies. Various recent experiments by the US cast a large doubt on that theory, in my opinion.

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