The Problem With Monarchy and Democracy

And why Churchill was right that Democracy is the least bad solution

[Note this post also appears at According to Hoyt]

Winston Churchill had, I think it is fair to say, mixed feelings about democracy. In addition to the quote above he also said that the best argument against democracy was a five minute chat with the average voter. This no doubt explains why he considered democracy to be the least bad as opposed to being actively good.

Anyway, I don’t recall a Churchill writing where he explained why democracy is least bad so I’m going to explain.

The fundamental positive of the democratic process is that it solves the succession problem. I should note that this is not a new thing thought up by me, it’s a moderately well known concept in political science and similar fields.

What is the succession problem?

The succession problem is the issue of how to transfer power from one leader to the next. It’s an issue that affects any organization from a local volunteer club to a vast nation state/empire but it is generally more important for the nation state. If a gardening club gets the wrong leader then typically it fails and some of the former members form a new one (making a note to absolutely NOT allow crazy to join). If a nation state tries the same thing that’s a civil war and those rarely end well.

Monarchies are well known for having good kings/queens and bad ones. Often a bad one is the son/grandson of one of the good ones. That’s because monarchies usually use direct primogeniture (oldest son is next king) as the way to ensure succession. This has the advantage of being easy to understand but it has the major disadvantage that not every oldest son is the most competent or wise. Hence the bad king. It also suffers from the failure mode of “no sons” which leads to various nephews, cousins and so on fighting it out. I.e. civil war. See also “king dies while heir is still a small boy” and the installation of a regent to rule until the child comes of age. Regents may be competent and loyal but history suggests they often aren’t.

Monarchies that try to avoid the single heir issue by splitting the kingdom between all heirs rapidly end up with dozens of pocket kingdoms that are ripe for takeover by a neighboring realm that has primogeniture and therefore is larger. No successful monarchies have extended the “split the kingdom” trick beyond a single generation. It can work fine as a once off (see William the Conqueror splitting his Norman and English lands, though that wasn’t a massive success) but never more.

Some monarchical traditions (see e.g. the Ottoman Empire) allowed someone such as the previous ruler or a council of elders to select the best son of the previous king. Sometimes they could even (in IIRC the Mongol tradition) pick nephews and other relatives who were not direct descendants of the previous ruler but were part of the royal family. This seems to solve the “oldest son is a moron” problem and potentially the “no sons” or “too young a son” problems, but it comes at a clear cost because there’s an obvious literal game of throne to be played in which potential future rulers have a strong incentive to kill off all their siblings. This is actually worse than the traditional primogeniture system. The “oldest son is a moron” issue gives you a chance of a bad king which is somewhat random. The “kill all your relatives before one kills you” issue pretty much guarantees the king will be a paranoid schemer because all the non-paranoid schemers will have been killed by their relatives. Paranoid scemers rarely make good monarchs.

Monarchies have one other problem. King goes ill/senile/mad but doesn’t die. At which point you are looking at the regent problem only often the “regent” is some combination of heir, queen and courtiers who spend much of their time fighting each other and/or other potential regents.

These problems are inherent in how monarchy is defined. A single ruler for life, followed by another such. There is rarely a system to replace the monarch and if there is one (see Japan and the various retired emperors) it generally results in monarchs being forcibly “retired” prematurely and a power struggle as they object to this.

People who don’t like kings and don’t like democracy may try other approaches but so far all the ones tried seem to suffer from the succession problem too.

Your standard issue dictatorship always hits the problem of who succeeds the glorious leader. It is actually worse than a monarchy because there is no particular expectation that the eldest son inherits so as soon as the glorious leader is unable to exercise authority the would be successors start fighting it out. Plus every glorious leader knows that competent underlings are likely to replace the glorious leader before the glorious leader is willing to step down so (see Putin) glorious leaders tend to arrange accidents for underlings who might make good successors. That means that the next generation is almost certainly less competent than the current glorious leader. A couple of generations of that and (see Africa) you have really stupid rulers.

So people try ways to avoid the glorious leader dictatorship. Take, for example, communist countries where a politburo rules and the General Secretary (or President or…) is the leader. The General Secretary can, in theory, retire at any time and allow another member of the politburo to become the leader. There may even be rules that say that the General Secretaryship has to rotate or that it has a limit of some number of years. This is something that the post Mao communists of West Taiwan tried. It worked pretty well for the first two or three changes of leader and then Winnie the Flu engineered his rise to the top and, magically, the requirement to step aside for the next leader went away as did all the other checks and balances designed to stop someone becoming ruler for life.

About the only way that sort of works is the high priest model. But that only works well if the priesthood is somewhat democratic in how it selects the next high priest (see the Pope and College of Cardinals as an example) and it can often lead to a de facto monarchy as the high priest’s son becomes the expected next high priest.

Democracy Solves The Succession Issue

In a democracy representatives (and presidents / prime-ministers) serve for a limited time before having to be re-elected. Assuming that elections happen periodically and mostly honestly when the leader is too old he (insert your own “or she”s if desired) retires and a successor is elected. Moreover if the leader’s policies are unpopular he will lose the next election and power is transferred to a new leader who has different policies. Or maybe the same policies but is more charismatic and/or less corrupt.

A critical difference between democracy and monarchy is that democratic leaders expect to retire and live on in the country ruled by their successors. As a result the incentives for power transfer are quite different. A democratic ruler wants a trouble-free succession because he likely has several years if not decades of life ahead of him after he loses his position. That same factor of life afterwards, and often the possibility of a return to a leadership position after another election, means that he won’t want to prosecute his predecessors for wrong-doing either, unless the wrong-doing is so egregious that a majority of the electorate agrees that the predecessor needs to be punished.

With succession solved, and with regular elections to permit the option of change and provide feedback to the rulers by chucking the bastards out when needed, it would be hoped that democracy would be rather better than Churchill’s “least bad”, but it isn’t

Where Democracy Fails

Just because democracy appears to solve the succession issue doesn’t mean it is all sweetness and light. We can look at a certain swamp on the Potomac and see how democracies can fail at the successor problem to a degree. Lust for power and money has resulted in representatives that gerrymander districts to ensure their re-election and/or not retiring until death but so far - despite all the histrionics - changes of representative and president have happened without serious repercussions. Now we are right up against that line with the hate for OrangeManBad but so far the norms are holding and the US still has a form of representative democracy (yes I know “it’s a republic” - elections happen to choose rulers which is a basic bit of democracy, deal).

However, the US is not the only nation where democracy seems to be having issues. Not just the US but also the UK and much of Europe seems to be stuck in a situation where the faces at top may change but the policies don’t and where, if they look like they might change, the bureaucracy exerts itself to stop that. See Brexit, Trump, the AFD in Germany and so on. In the UK, Liz Truss was almost certainly set up for failure in large part by a civil service and related bureaucracy that feared what she wanted to do. In that regard, what she says in this video is absolutely fascinating (source)

A “democracy” where unelected bureaucrats have effective veto power is not a real democracy. The EU is by far the most egregious case of a bureaucracy pretending to be a democracy but it certainly is not alone. The way Trump was played by the federal agencies is another good example.

About the only (minor) positive of the bureaucratic state is that probably also solves the succession problem too because bureaucrats like to retire. Unfortunately (see Fauci, A) some bureaucrats seem able to stay on in positions of power and influence when they should have retired and some allegedly retired bureaucrats (e.g. Brennan and numerous other past CIA heads) seem to wield considerable power despite lacking an official position.

So far the only solution appears to be the Milei one - fire the entire bureaucratic establishment and deal with the fall out. However in order to get someone like Milei elected with a clear enough mandate that he can remove most of the bureaucracy you need to be circling the drain in failed state territory. That’s not a place we want the country to be in.