I know I'm coming late to the this thread but ...
PeterC wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 1:38 am
...What america does have, which is at the core of its society, is an aristocracy. Large parts of society are organized in such a way as to entrench it.
I was going to say something like that in response to an earlier post.
America has dynasties and dynastic succession - the Kennedys and their connections being only the most obvious of many, with the Bush family as runners-up. Australia, also nominally democratic and egalitarian, has them too, although not quite to the same extent.
And I think the root cause is pretty simple: privilege accumulates.
The proverb says "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" but it applies to far more than money. If you're the child of a family with power, you know others like yourself and can leverage that in all sorts of ways. If you're a lawyer, ditto. If your parents are even reasonably affluent you get to go to a rich kids' school - and there's your social network ten years later. If your parents can 'help you out' with a loan to buy your first house, you're in the housing market way before anyone else your age. Etc, etc, etc.
Some of it is intergenerational, some not, but the net result after five or ten generations - even if everyone started out nearly equal, which has rarely (never?) been the case - is the haves and have-nots, the aristos and the peasantry, the kings-in-all-but-name and the commoners.
And the only way I know of overturning that scenario is a good old-fashioned blood-in-the gutters revolution ... which is not nice, we know. (I suspect technology has made it impossible, anyway, since a few dozen people with high-tech gear could kill thousands of people without it.) In theory, wealth and inheritance taxation could keep the disparities under control but of course the foxes are in charge of the chicken-coop.
Sigh.
/rant
I personally detest the idea of both. The only monarchy that makes some kind of sense is the Nordic model, where it’s cheap, limited to ceremony only, and apart from two people the rest of the royal family works for a living like normal people. The UK form continues to be repellent, partly because it still holds way too much power and wealth, and partly because it produces such mediocre people. But I doubt it will survive the imminent death of Elizabeth Windsor in its current form.
Agreed.
Kim