Chapter 17: Monarchy or MoneyChristian Democrats need to reverse power flow; Theocratic State not the way; Idea of a Christian Society; Presidency improvement on Monarchy; America should grow by division; Christian Democrats and Monarchy.
So it should now be clear that the logic of the Christian Democrats position has to be a structural one. Without fundamental changes in the flow of power through the seven great mechanisms of society, no reversion of society is possible.This does not mean calling for an ayatollah with his peculiar brand of theocratic state. God forbid (and why didn’t he? If God is God he is not good and if God is good he is not God, as the old saying goes.) The theocratic state is a closed system and Nature should have taught us how vulnerable such systems are to changes in their external environment.
The Idea of a Christian Society desired by the Christian Democrat and defined in T.S.Eliot’s essay requires a hierarchy of dominance with values at the top of the heap directing human action. Francis Bernadone did not achieve this by standing for the Parliament of Assisi.
Monarchy has sometimes come close and Thomas Jefferson and his friends wisely retained the monarch in their constitution, even though he was called ‘President’. Somebody they reasoned had to be there to represent all the people or there was no hope. They believed that by electing their king instead of acquiring him by the accident of birth or the wheeling and dealing of priests, courtiers and their financial advisers they had improved on monarchy.
Perhaps, but the signs are not looking good two hundred years on. But then what makes sense with an electoral college sent to deliberate on such a subject by three million geographically dispersed citizens looking for a commander-in-chief to lead them in war against a belligerent imperial force bent on revenge and retribution is most unlikely to make sense two hundred years later and some six or seven population doublings later, however laudable the basic principle might seem to be.
How much more sensible it would have been to replicate the Declaration of Independence throughout a confederation of North American states with each governor, a president, ruling over his own principality, itself a confederation of duchies.
Indeed the Christian Democrats could do worse than embrace monarchy and seek to put in the Swedish national parliament a Royalist Party committed to abolishing Democracy and replacing it with a wise aristocracy staffed by the dukes of Buen Consejo and schooled (of course) by Christian priests.