perfidy

It figures that I would finally get around to blogging about Anti-Democracy, Reaction, and allied topics, and Moldbug would stop blogging for a month and a half.  So it seems that I have no recourse but to point at old Moldbug material.

I've already mentioned a couple - the open letter series, for starters.  Another interesting series, equally long, is the Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations (in my head, I can't help but think Unreserved Qualifications.  Maybe Moldbug brings out my inner dyslexia.)  If you want a convenient gateway into the prolix thought of Moldbug, some dude created a table of contents for UR, with all the posts organized into categories, with handy links to the books that Moldbug references in his posts.

So there's that.

One of the things that really caught my eye, and imagination, was his claim to be a Jacobite.  MM seems to have become bored by this idea, he hasn't mentioned it in a while.  But a while back, he had this to say:

I suggest a Stuart restoration in an independent England. Through some beautiful twist of fate, the Stuart succession has become entangled with the House of Liechtenstein, who just happen to be the last working royal family in Europe. The father-son team of Hans-Adam II and Hereditary Prince Alois are not decorative abstractions. They are effectively the CEOs of Lichtenstein, which is a small country but a real one nonetheless. As you'll see if you read the links, the last "reform" in Lichtenstein actually increased the royal executive power. Take that, 20th century!

And Prince Alois's son, 13-year-old Prince Joseph Wenzel, just happens to be the legitimate heir to the Stuart throne - illegally overthrown in a coup based on the notorious warming-pan legend. Therefore, the structure of a restoration is obvious. The Hanoverians have failed. They have become decorative pseudo-monarchs. And as for the system of government that has grown up under them, it makes Richard Cromwell look like a smashing success. Restore the Stuarts under King Joseph I, with Prince Alois as regent, and the problem is solved.

Unrealistic? Au contraire, mon frere. What is unrealistic is "a sense of purpose as a nation, a uniting ethos which will restore our sense of pride..." Frankly, England does not deserve pride. It has gone to the dogs, and that may be an insult to dogs. If England is to restore its sense of pride, it needs to start with its sense of shame. And the first thing it should be ashamed of its the pathetic excuse for a government that afflicts it at present, and will afflict it for the indefinite future until something drastic is done.

For example, according to official statistics, between 1900 and 1992 the crime rate in Great Britain, indictable offenses per capita known to the police, increased by a factor of 46. That's not 46%. Oh, no. That's 4600%. Many of the offenders having been imported specially, to make England brighter and more colorful. This isn't a government. It's a crime syndicate.

Ideally a Stuart restoration would happen on much the same conditions as the restoration of Charles II, except perhaps with an extra caveat: a total lustration of the present administration. It has not partly, sort of, kind of, maybe, failed. It has failed utterly, irrevocably, disastrously and terminally.

Therefore, the entire present regime, politicians and civil servants and quangocrats and all, except for essential security and technical personnel, should be retired on full pay and barred from any future official employment. Why pick nits? The private sector is full of competent managers. You can import them from America if you need. Don't make the mistake of trying to sweep out the Augean stables. Just apply the river. (If a concession must be made to modern mores, however, I think this time around there is no need to hang any corpses.)

Now isn't that fun? When Prince Joseph becomes ruler of Liechtenstein, he will be the first heir of the Stuarts to be since James II to be ruler of an actual country. A small country, to be sure, but a real one. Interesting too, is that before the Stuart line stopped claiming the title of King, they always claimed to be Kings of England, Scotland, Ireland and France.

I've read a couple sf novels that involve the Stuarts scheming to regain the throne, maybe we need another one, set in the current day - though it'd be an odd set of circumstances that could possibly lead to young Prince Joseph claiming his rightful throne of England.  And I don't think Liechtenstein is about to invade across the channel.

Still - there is something about monarchy that exerts a fascination upon the mind, maybe even especially the American mind.  The evolutionary psychologist angle would imply that there is something in us that responds to things like kings.  I think it's possible that the key difference between a modern dictatorship and a older style divine right monarchy is not just in the attitude of the autocrat, but in the culture of legitimacy that supports a kingdom in a manner that no dictatorship can ever expect.