The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction…

The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of that institution, and replacement with a republic. But what model of republic can escape outright populism, our current political plague? /1

Whether the people or the parliament choose a Head of State, both are populist decisions. One is just by proxy, and we’ve seen how the wallies we elect act already now, under the supposed checks and balances of the popular vote. In the US, elections are run by over 10,000…/2

…separate electoral agencies, and bizarrely often the person or people responsible for elections are themselves elected. It’s layer upon layer of populism, leading to reality TV stars becoming Presidents of republics. The root problem here is a belief. /3

An ideology even, of ‘democracy’ and what it means. It does mean governing for ‘the people’, but the people is not an actor in itself. The public is a shifting set of groupings, that varies from issue to issue. Democracy is the assessment of that shifting, from issue to issue. /4

Democracy is also entirely hierarchical, hierarchies of expertise formed by custom and tradition. It’s that hierarchy that does the assessment of the shifting of public sentiment, for different issues. It creates rules, regulations, legislation, in response. Not to oppress…/5

…anybody, but to give everybody the freedom to live with their interests taken into account in some sort of expert way. Populism bypasses all of this, and tries to pretend the sole arbiter of what is right is what is popular. Populists don’t even run their own families in…/6

…ways consistent with this belief, let alone their businesses. Nearly always a person gaining and exercising power on a strong platform of ‘for the people’ is a tyrant. Democracy is already for the people, it’s what it was set up to do. So back to the Head of State. /7

Edmund Burke used to say custom and tradition are our best guides, because history has tested them. Our customs and traditions aren’t chosen by any individual, even if popular, they survive if they have utility. That doesn’t mean you can’t have bad institutions. /8

But the test of that will not, ever, be a popularity contest. I was a teacher once, you couldn’t do 10 minutes work in a classroom using popularity as your benchmark. Society has expertise in all of its areas of operation, to tell others what to do. It’s not oppression. /9

The benefit of constitutional monarchies is the vesting of the Head of State inside a process immune to popular sentiment. While dynastic succession seems terribly ‘undemocratic’, it’s supposed to be. Dynasties can lead to oppression and corruption, but it’s why we…/10

…at the same time remove any really meaningful operational role for a constitutional monarch. I’m not sure what a republic can offer here as a replacement that again doesn’t just end up populism by another means. I Tweeted the other day that the most sane solution for…/11

…Australia would be to make the land we live in/on the Head of State, as indigenous people do. But that would also need a lot of thought as to how to make that land ‘speak’ to us in meaningful ways, as it did for them. But at the same time, do we have a choice?/12

Not knowing that land is what led to the climate catastrophe. Until we recognise again the criticality of expertise, and of hierarchy, and how that connects us with actual reality and ultimately our own land, we’ll just keep fucking up the world in various popular ways. /end