Okay, here’s what happened.
I was reading a book. I saw a line in this book. I thought the author made a blunder. I posted about it on a message board.
I thought maybe somebody would get a brief laugh out of this. I didn’t see how anybody, other than perhaps Piers Brendon, would get offended. I didn’t think that anyone would seriously debate the issue.
Well, it was obvious that you were never serious.
Were you serious?
How far would Charles III get if he started acting like el donald?
I read Brendon’s quote differently. I think the OP question springs from a misreading of it. Brendon didn’t say the British government is democratic (that would be erroneous). He was using “democratic” to describe the style of ceremony only. It means that the Georges’ ceremonies were more inclusive of the people than Hitler’s. The British royal ceremonies were meant for all the people, whereas Nazism explicitly excludes some people. One of the definitions of democratic is “Exhibiting social equality; egalitarian.” Yet this is the definition that more narrowly means the respective styles of state ceremony.
Not far. The British monarch doesn’t have anything like the range of powers and functions that the US President has, even nominally. And he can’t claim any kind of electoral mandate for violating legal or conventional norms in the way that he exercises the powers he does have.
A singular advantage of having a non-elected Head of State, I would have thought.
And, parenthically the primary reason why Australia did not proceed with a directly elected presidential model during the Australian Republic Convention.
This was part of the argument in Australia. If we moved from having an appointed head-of-state (Governor-General, selected by the government in power), to an elected HOS, it would give the GG a mandate to interfere in government. I think the argument was strong, and the counter belief was that the elected president should have executive power (there is a section of Aus politics that has never accepted Parliamentary Democracy) The alternate argument was that the Irish President hasn’t interfered with Irish government (there is a section of Aus politics that takes Ireland as the role model for politics and everything else).
Well….
I struggle to characterise this as Ó Dálaigh interfering with the government. The other way around, surely? A government minister attacked Ó Dálaigh for the (entirely proper) way in which he exercised his constitutional functions.
I’m just chipping in to add something about the parliamentary republics of Europe, which include most countries on that continent that aren’t monarchies; there is no American-style presidential republic in Europe but there are a few French-style semi presidential systems that are an odd in-between.
These republics basically emulate everything the monarchy does with an elected president. The president appoints a prime minister based on who has the support of the majority of Parliament; other than that, the president’s job is mostly to give speeches, award orders and medals, visit schools and hospitals and shake people’s hands. The fact that the republics do the same as the monarchies, just under a different label, shows that it’s firmly part of the constitutional system.
I saw multiple people getting what he was claiming wrong. He never in any way compared America’s democratic nature to the democratic nature of other countries. He never claimed Britain (or Japan) was less democratic for any reason. Most of the actual anger seemed to come from these misunderstandings.
I did also notice the OP missing other people’s arguments though. Others were saying, basically, that sure the monarch isn’t democratically elected, but so are many other parts in a democracy. What’s important is that they have limited power because of democracy.
Cervaise seems to (in his final post) be agreeing with both claims made: that yes, having a King is not democratic, but so are many other parts when you remove them from the system as a whole. So having a king is in fact part of a democratic system.
I presume most of the anger is due to the OP seeming not to recognize other positions, as well as any perception of American exceptionalism. The latter led some people to misread the OP.
And, of course, I may be wrong in my summary, but I hate it when people seem to be talking past each other and getting into squabbles.
Yes, my entire position here is this: a hereditary monarch is not chosen by democratic means.
Which is not an answer to the question that is the title of this thread.
I think that’s part of the problem here. I feel some people read the thread title and assumed they knew what the subject of the thread was going to be. So they opened the thread with a response already in mind and only took a quick glance over the OP, which is where I explained what I was thinking.
To be fair, you repeat that exact question in the OP.
So people could be forgiven for thinking that that was the question you were asking.
The second question which you pose as an alternative is perhaps a false dichotomy. A democratic system can include elements which, viewed in isolation, are not democratic, or are less democratic than they might be In fact, this is common. That doesn’t mean that those elements are not “part of a democratic system”.
If one or two people misunderstand you, they are at fault. If everyone misunderstands you, you have to look at why.
If that were truly the case, how is this not incredibly obvious to anyone familiar with the word “hereditary”? That is literally the definition of the word.
You posed a poorly written question and then when challenged you doubled down on it.
Excellent post. The point that Americans often miss is that there are numerous important reasons for having a Head of State who is non-political, impartial, and whose duties are mostly ceremonial in their capacity as a respected statesman rather than some disreputable political hack, but who also possesses important so-called “reserve powers” that can be invoked in special circumstances or emergencies.
One practical example that comes to mind in parliamentary systems is that proroguing parliament – ending a session of parliament without dissolving it – requires the permission of the monarch, and in constitutional monarchies in the Commonwealth that means the Governor General, and it’s a real, actual decision they have to make.
Likewise, if a political party wins an election with a plurality of seats but not a majority, it’s theoretically possible in a parliamentary system for several other parties to band together in a coalition and demand that the coalition form the government. Again, in that sort of conflict situation, the impartial Head of State must rule on who forms the next government.
Exactly.
So why waste everyone’s time by asking a question that you had absolutely no interest in hearing their answer?
And why should anyone take you serious from now on?