Randoms of March

Over at LewRockwell.com, says Dr. Thomas Sowell:

[Lee Kuan Yew's] example was especially striking in view of many in the West who seem to think that democracy is something that can be exported to countries whose history and traditions are wholly different from those of Western nations that evolved democratic institutions over the centuries.

Also at LewRockwell.com, writes Prof. Walter E. Williams:

The Economist magazine recently published “What’s gone wrong with Democracy … and what can be done to revive it?” The suggestion is that democracy is some kind of ideal for organizing human conduct. That’s a popular misconception.

Over at Target Liberty expresses Mr. Robert Wenzel:

Oh yeah, this really improves the functioning of government. Argentina, the Congo and Greece are among the 22 countries that coerce people into voting.

Over at The American Conservative, Prof. Kevin R.C. Gutzman reviews F.H. Buckley's The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America and Eric Nelson's Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding.

Randoms of September

Over at LewRockwell.com, writes Dr. Michael S. Rozeff:

The White House lawyers create their own judicial and legal interpretations so as to give the presidents what they want as justifications for their wars, their torture, their assassinations, their anti-constitutional activities, and their executive orders.

Also at LewRockwell.com, Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan gives his thoughts on the RMS Lusitania.

Again at LewRockwell.com, Dr. Ralph Raico gives his take on the outbreak of World War I.

Further, “Bionic Mosquito” provides a list of historical myths.

The Daily Mail reports that Emperor Hirohito was opposed to war according to a new biography (via LRC).

Over at The American Conservative, Mr. Alan Pell Crawford writes of George Washington's fear of political organization.

Also at The American Conservative, Dr. Lee Walter Congdon reviews Daniel J. Mahoney's The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth About a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker.

Further, Dr. Patrick J. Deneen says:

Tocqueville expresses discomfort of how best to call this kind of government, since at all times in the past, a tyranny implied a form of government imposed by force upon a people against their will. But this new specter, “democratic despotism,” arises through the invitation and desires of the democratic citizenry itself.

The Mad Monarchist most fortunately ends his strike and gives accounts of the British and Russian armies of World War I.

P.D. Mangan makes a case for stop subsidizing degeneracy.

The host blogger of Tea at Trianon has read Gareth Russell's The Emperor's: How Europe's Rulers Were Destroyed by the First World War and gives an insight.

The Great War a Crusade?

Over at The American Conservative, Richard Gamble reviews Philip Jenkins' The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade.

Burke & Paine

Over at The American Conservative, Jesse Norman reviews Yuval Levin's The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right.

The American Union and Rethinking

Over at The American Conservative, Joseph Baldacchino reviews Donald Livingston et al.'s Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century.

The Audience

Easter Eve yours truly went to see the play The Audience at the Gielgud Theatre in London. If you don't mind spoilers, please continue reading.

It was indeed a fascinating experience to watch this play.

The play consists of a number of audiences Her Britannic Majesty hosts for her British Prime Ministers. As the real audiences that have taken place are all strictly confidential, the audiences in the play are all intelligent speculation on what might have been said in real life.

Although the audiences are the centerpiece and bulk of the play, there are a few other elements. There are three actresses playing younger versions of Her Britannic Majesty. There is a scene with Princess Elizabeth's speech in South Africa on the occasion of her 21 ^st birthday. There is talk of praying that the King and Queen have a boy.

But even without these other elements, The Audience is about much more than just these individual audiences. At a couple of occasions the Prime Minister is met with fierce opposition from the Sovereign, but when the Prime Minister asks the Queen whether she supports the Prime Minister, the answer is always that the Prime Minister will always have her support.

The audiences in the play come in a non-chronological, but the chronologically first audience – in real life – was with Winston Churchill. Churchill wants the audience to be with the Sovereign seated and the Prime Minister, just as Queen Victoria sat at Privy Council and the advisors standing. It ends with him sitting.

Moreover, Churchill gives clear instructions on how the audience is to be conducted, after all he is the one who has experience as Prime Minister from the reign of George VI. The Prime Minister is to talk, and Her Majesty is to listen. The Queen then gives a statement of frustration on her diminished role.

The scene brings thoughts to many incidents in British and European history. When George V ascended the throne, he was pressured into accepting Parliament Act 1911 in a way Edward VII refused. Edward VII's son-in-law Haakon VII of Norway came to the throne in 1905 after Norway had decided to retain the monarchy. Behind the scene there was a fight for power between the monarch and the politicos. The monarch lost on several points, and he is known to have said about his handkerchief that it was something he was allowed to poke his nose in. It is also said about the Emperor Charles of Austria that some of those behind the coup against him would not have dared depose the old Emperor Francis Joseph. Also, when the Swedes emasculated their King in the 1970s, they waited for Carl XVI Gustaf to ascend the throne.

There can probably be found even more examples of politicos securing their power when a new monarch is on the throne. Although this is not the only time emasculation of the monarch happens, it is a vulnerable phase of a reign, and this is why this scene with the reign's first Prime Minister with his instructions is so particularly relevant for history of monarchy, not only in Britain and the Commonwealth but all over the world. It gives us a reminder to keep a watch when a new monarch comes to the throne.

Churchill also has a discussion with Her Majesty on the name of the royal house, considering the tradition that it is the man's surname that gets passed on. With another pre-Thatcher Prime Minister Her Majesty has a conversation on “reforming” the House of Lords, Her Majesty communicating her disapproval of a weakening of the hereditary principle. The play could certainly do with a short intellectual argument for hereditary elements in the constitutional system instead of just a simple, non-argued statement in its support.

This play is a wonderful example of how one can take a concrete concept – in this case the weekly audiences with the Prime Minister – and make it about so much more; about events at a particular time, political philosophy, roles of constitutional institutions, etc.

The play runs live in London until mid-June. It will be screened in movie theaters around the world.


Cross-posted at The Monarchist.

A Few on the Great War for Democracy

Over at Alternative Right, Brett Stevens reviews Prof. Paul Gottfried's War and Democracy. So does John Derbyshire over at Taki's Magazine.

Over at LewRockwell.com, Joel Poindexter laments the apparent upcoming celebration of the centenary of the start of same war.

Over at The American Conservative, Adam Hochschild reflects on that same very deadly conflict (H/T: The Pittsford Perennialist, see also by same blogger).

Reading and Democracy

Foseti has some reading tips for 2013, in which we are also referred to an old review of Foseti's on Sydney George Fisher's The True History of the American Revolution.

Foseti quotes Mr. Fisher:

[I]f loyalists could come back from the grave, they would probably say that their fears and prophecies had been fulfilled in the most extraordinary manner; sometimes liberally; in most cases substantially. There is no question that the Revolution was followed by a great deal of bad government, political corruption, section strife, coarseness in manners, hostility to the arts and refinements of life, assassination, lynch law, and other things which horrified Englishmen.

Foseti also tipped about Alexander Boot's thoughts on democracy and totalitarianism a while ago – and further thoughts on democracy.

Mr. Boot starts off:

In most people’s minds, totalitarianism and democracy are antonyms. Yet the two can happily coexist not only on the same planet but also in the same country. To understand this, we should focus on the essence of totalitarianism, not its incidental manifestations, such as violence.

And this is a candidate for the one-liner of the year (2012):

The benefits of unchecked democracy are held to be self-evident, which is just as well for they would be impossible to prove either theoretically or empirically.

Mr. Boot also says:

[O]ne has to be a citizen to serve in the army, and a taxpayer to vote, but one neither has to have the vote nor to pay taxes to be a citizen. One-man-one-vote isn't a sine qua non for a society of citizens -- and neither is it the sole possible alternative to tyranny. The opposite belief made its historical entrance only in the 20th century, not coincidentally the most murderous period of history.

And he asks a poignant question:

Who, pray tell, will make the world safe from 'democracy' before a real catastrophe befalls?

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:

The War of the Vendée

Over at his weblog Fr. Z's Blog, Fr. John Zuhlsdorf reviews the motion picture The War of the Vendée.

Mr. Theodore Harvey also does a review over at his weblog Royal World.

A German Work on the Great War

Over at Taki's Magazine, Prof. Paul Gottfried has a review of a book by Prof. Konrad Canis, Der Weg in den Abgrund.

Vanished Kingdoms

Over at Alternative Right, Mr. Derek Turner reviews Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-forgotten Europe by Norman Davies.

So does Mr. Trond Norén Isaksen over at his blog.

The Servile Mind

Over at The American Conservative, Professor Paul Gottfried gives a review of Professor Kenneth Minogue's The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes The Moral Life.

Reagan Born

A century ago today, Ronald Wilson Reagan was born.

Over at Mises Daily, Jeff Riggenbach goes through the man and his policies and rhetorics.

George F. Will had a review of an olympiad old book almost an olympiad ago.

Wrote George Will:

[N]ostalgia for Ronald Reagan has become for many conservatives a substitute for thinking. This mental paralysis – gratitude decaying into idolatry – is sterile: Neither the man nor his moment will recur. Conservatives should face the fact that Reaganism cannot define conservatism.

Further:

The 1980s, he says, thoroughly joined politics to political theory. But he notes that Reagan's theory was radically unlike that of Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, and very like that of Burke's nemesis, Thomas Paine. Burke believed that the past is prescriptive because tradition is a repository of moral wisdom. Reagan frequently quoted Paine's preposterous cry that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Mr. Will continued:

Diggins's thesis is that the 1980s were America's “Emersonian moment” because Reagan, a “political romantic” from the Midwest and West, echoed New England's Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Emerson was right,” Reagan said several times of the man who wrote, “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” Hence Reagan's unique, and perhaps oxymoronic, doctrine – conservatism without anxieties. Reagan's preternatural serenity derived from his conception of the supernatural.

Moreover:

Reagan's popularity was largely the result of “his blaming government for problems that are inherent in democracy itself.” To Reagan, the idea of problems inherent in democracy was unintelligible because it implied that there were inherent problems with the demos – the people.

And:

As Diggins says, Reagan's “theory of government has little reference to the principles of the American founding.” To the Founders, and especially to the wisest of them, James Madison, government's principal function is to resist, modulate and even frustrate the public's unruly passions, which arise from desires.

“The true conservatives, the founders,” Diggins rightly says, constructed a government full of blocking mechanisms – separations of powers, a bicameral legislature, and other checks and balances – in order “to check the demands of the people.” Madison's Constitution responds to the problem of human nature. “Reagan,” says Diggins, “let human nature off the hook.”

This blogger would add that said founding removed an important check, namely the monarchical order, initially only domestically, but this was an important initial step, and it would have tremendous long-term effects, not only on America, but also on the world.

Mr. Will went on:

“An unmentionable irony,” writes Diggins, is that big-government conservatism is an inevitable result of Reaganism. “Under Reagan, Americans could live off government and hate it at the same time. Americans blamed government for their dependence upon it.” Unless people have a bad conscience about demanding big government – a dispenser of unending entitlements – they will get ever larger government. But how can people have a bad conscience after being told (in Reagan's First Inaugural) that they are all heroes? And after being assured that all their desires, which inevitably include desires for government-supplied entitlements, are good?

Concluded Mr. George Frederick Will:

If the defining doctrine of the Republican Party is limited government, the party must move up from nostalgia and leaven its reverence for Reagan with respect for Madison. As Diggins says, Reaganism tells people comforting and flattering things that they want to hear; the Madisonian persuasion tells them sobering truths that they need to know.

Aurel Kolnai

109 years ago today, Aurel Thomas Kolnai was born in the number 2 city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Dr. Francis Dunlop wrote a biography on Kolnai back in 2002. It was titled The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai. Prof. Graham McAleer reviewed the biography in Modern Age in the summer 2003 issue – A Neglected Political Thinker (PDF).

Graham McAleer writes:

Aurel Thomas Kolnai (1900-1973) passes with flying colors. Indeed, here is a twentieth-century thinker who understands America as a nation suffering still from the original sin of rebellion against King George III!

Further:

Readers who are introduced to Kolnai's profound reservations about democracy immediately want to know what his alternative might be, and the “Carta-Memoria” is quite an alternative. He proposes a mixed regime that includes the Crown, a “National Institute” dependent on the Crown and charged with the task of elevating public taste, and an “active citizenry,” about one sixth of the population, elected for life, who vote for candidates to parliament.

And:

The few scholars who work on Kolnai are divided in their judgments of how sympathetic he was to democracy and to liberalism. As the pages of this biography progress, it becomes clear that Kolnai's conservatism increasingly hardened and became a very subtle “Throne and Altar” position, far removed from either democracy or liberalism. That “Throne and Altar” conservatism could be arrived at by an original and inquiring philosophical mind in the middle of the twentieth century raises serious questions for those who confidently assert that only some version of liberal democracy is “historically available” to us.

On Power and Politics

The American Conservative reruns a review of Daniel J. Mahoney's Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity.

From the review:

Jouvenel introduces the startling notion, later amplified, that the modern democratic state is potentially the most dangerous regime that has ever existed.

Reflections on "Greater Europe"

Over at Taki's Magazine, Derek Turner reviews Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.

The State: Rise and Decline

Over at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Dr. David Gordon reviews Dutch-Israeli historian Professor Martin van Creveld's The Rise and Decline of the State.

The book is the story of the transition from personal to impersonal rule. Some years ago, before I had read the book myself, someone told me it was the story of the biggest highway robbery in history. He might have been right. I highly recommend the book.

The Near-Miracle of American Independence?

Over at Alvah's Books, Randall Radic previously this year reviewed Dr. John Ferling's Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence.

Amongst the older reviews is Masterful Analysis of the American Revolution by Col. Cole C. Kingseed.


Previously: American Independence – a "Miracle?"

Cromwell

Tea at Trianon reflects on the motion picture Cromwell.