November 08, 2005
A real-life Monarchist
Last night I met, and spent two hours debating politics with (in the bar Coyote Ugly!), a professor of philosophy at the New School. He's very interested in the same issues I am and he is a MONARCHIST, hating democracy and loving kings. He hates bush for the same reasons the leftists do, and also he hates the leftists for the same reasons the rightists do. Very smart guy. I asked him what government has his ideal government and he said florence in the 16th century, and I said, "no, I mean, what current government has the closest to your ideal government" and he said, "the Scandanavian social democracies - and it's not a coincidence that they have strong ties to the monarchies of their countries."
This conversation was noteworthy for a few reasons, including the fact that there actually do exist monarchists today. The most interesting meta take-away points I learnt, while thinking about the conversation post facto, are this:
- He used in every sentence the rhetoric of reason and logic. Any deviation from his views was illogical. He sounded a bit like a stereotypical Randian (she was unyielding in her emphasis on logic, too) in this way, and it is precisely this comparison that was so interesting: there are a variety of people with very differing views who are obsessed with logic (and obssession with is good!) but who believe that their logic is so infallible that their view is the right one and anyone who doesn't believe it is illogical--which is a weird view for me, because, at any point in your thought process, maybe you're committing some sort of logical fallacy so you might be wrong! I love the Popperian falsification model, where you must always try to demonstrate your own ideas to be false. (Yes, Alex, I know what you're thinking: how do you falsify falsification?). Last night, this professor wasn't able to convince me that we should replace our democracy with a king, for example, and is it because his logic is weaker than mine or because my beliefs too strong?
- He's Argentine and this is an important and interesting point. The evolution of his thought is the evolution of what happens to rightist intellectuals in Latin America--or any society, I would posit, without a libertarian tradition (which is the whole non-Anglo-Saxon world, I believe). We all know Churchill's line about young men being socialist and then conservative as they get older (heart/head). In the US, when you become more mature and conservative (a la Churchill's quote), that's when you become libertarian, Randian, neo-con, or some other similar variation. This is in fact the history of the neo-con movement, beginning as disillusioned Jewish socialists. But in Argentina, there is no libertarian, Randian, neo-con, or any movement of these sorts at all. So the intellectuals there rebel against the leftist tradition and instead become monarchists. I will point out that the great Argentine intellectuals and writers -- Borges and Cortazar, at the top of the list, for example -- are often criticized deeply for being, effectively, monarchists (the leftists would always claim that they were so "conservative" that they wanted the traditional European kings to continue ruling Latin America; I don't know what they actually believed publicly, but I just know the criticism always used against them). There is a pattern here and I don't think these are arbitrary data points: in societies without a libertarian tradition, intellectuals rebelling against the dominant leftist tradition turn to the tradition of the kings.
Posted by Morgan at 09:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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The man who would rebel against the leftist tradition such that he would endorse the social model of sweden is, indeed, something other than libertarian in his outlook. Actually, many countries that could be described as socialist or social-democratic have monarchs, like he says- Norway, Sweden, Denmark- the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom under Clement Atlee, or even pre-WWI Germany all had monarchs as titular heads of state.
The real question is whether or not the monarchist is a constitutional monarchist...
Posted by: oghe at November 9, 2005 06:43 AM
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