Month of Monarchy and Democracy

This month marked the centennial of the birht of Archduke Otto, and the Austrian-based Schwarz-Gelbe Allianz has marked the occasion. So did a weblog named 100 Years Ago Today. Yours truly had a tribute run through the LRC Blog.

Royal World gives a review of A Royal Affair. Royal World also reviews a book; Christopher Ferrara's Liberty, the God That Failed.

The Mad Monarchist quotes King Harald V of Norway from 2005:

We have been given an assignment as a monarchy, and we do as well as we can…We try to be as little populistic as possible. We don’t do anything on the spur of the moment to win an opinion poll, or short-term popularity.

The same blog also quotes Pope Pius VI:

In fact, after having abolished the monarchy, the best of all governments, [the French Revolution] had transferred all the public power to the people - the people…ever easy to deceive and to lead into every excess…

The same Texas monarchist considers the recent American election and says amongst other things:

Most people said that government should be smaller and that raising taxes would not solve the debt problem yet these same people voted for the President who promised bigger government and raising taxes to deal with the debt problem. In other words, the public doesn't seem to have any sense at all. You can blame the politicians for plenty but the public that keeps voting for them cannot get off totally blameless either. Sure, the choices the public are given don't help. I was never a fan of Romney or Obama (and didn't vote for either of them).

Over at LewRockwell.com, writes Dr. Gary North:

The Constitution was established in order to strengthen the powers of the Federal government. It strengthened them vastly beyond what the British had attempted to impose on the colonies in the early 1770s.

Also over at LewRockwell.com, writes Mr. Justin Raimondo:

If President Obama goes down in history as the incarnation of one of his distinguished predecessors, it will likely turn out to be the 28th president of these United States, whose name has become a byword for preening self-righteous interventionism on a global scale. I refer, of course, to Thomas Woodrow Wilson, a towering icon of “progressive” liberalism who dragged us into a war that was the downfall of European civilization.

Writes Jacob Lyles:

Democracy is like a business that outsources its management decisions to its customers.

Over at Taki's Magazine, Taki Theodoracopulos himself gives some thoughts on democracy:

We seem to have regressed, as our political leaders promise us everything before and give us absolutely nothing afterward.

He concludes:

Most people say they want to be free. But one of the greatest Greek thinkers of all time asks: Free to do what? Freedom from state coercion and interference, or free to shape their future by participating in the governing process by writing the laws and deciding when and if to go to war?

Well, let’s face it. We are not free from the state’s coercion, and we have the surveillance by millions of cameras that watch us at all times to prove it. And we certainly do not have the power to participate in major decisions such as going to war or writing laws. We are sheep led by knaves and con men, and this is why the electoral process we call democracy is one big joke.

Over at Alternative Right, John Maelstrom ponders and then concludes with:

The desire to expose the seductive pull of the Left’s soulless egalitarianism is what calls us to the Right. Conquering that Hellish impulse within ourselves is what may ultimately unite us. None of this is possible without also listening to the voices of our dead.

The Counter-Revolutionary gives us Prof. Niall Ferguson on the Great War: