No King Without His People, the People Lost Without Their King

A quote from the good version of Fullmetal Alchemist. You know, the one that wasn't written by a 9/11 Truther.

So Big Hollywood was doing this thing about how Verhoeven is a worm for doing what he did to Starship Troopers. It's true, but they had some silly notion that the Founding Fathers wanted a "republican" form of government—in the sense of one that disenfranchises the "mob".

Frankly, if you're going to endorse the Tea Party, you cannot—it would be immoral—talk that way. The Tea Party is nothing but the mob. And it demonstrates something my people have known for hundreds of years: the mob is nearly always right, at least on principle, its only errors arising from matters of fact. And facts, of course, are typically delivered to the "mob" from the elite (save when the people inappropriately generalize from their own experience, as is generally the case in instances of mob violence against minorities).

Seriously, do you know why the English "liberal" tradition talks that way about the "mob"? It's because the English "liberals", which means the Parliamentary clique, knew the people were on to them, and they had the sense to know that meant their worthless lives were in dire peril. Recall, if you will, that the history of England's Parliament goes like this:

1. Deliberately subjecting royal power over lords in matters of criminal law to the authority of other lords (it's "a jury of peers", not "of one's peers", in the Magna Charta).
2. The deliberate alienation of the predominantly Catholic culture of England under Elizabeth and especially the early Stuarts, in order to prevent the monasteries' property (looted during the Henry VIII business) having to be restored.
3. The replacementof the Stuarts, when they noticed Catholics are human beings, with the tractable, because alien, Hanoverians—which transfer of power was effected by the worst domestic political violence in European history until the Terror, and unlike the terror, during peacetime.
4. The Enclosure laws, quite simply stealing the communal lands from the populace and giving them to members of that Parliamentary clique.

There's more, really; the Parliamentary clique was also the reason for the Boer War and England's role in causing the World Wars (had Parliament not been pacifist, neither war would ever have happened at all).

Oh but wait, you'll say, that's the aristocracy. Uh-huh. And again, republic is just Latin for aristocracy; haven't you ever seen how Aquinas' "On Kingship" is glossed? What about the fact the British Parliament is no longer hereditary, even in the Lords? That's worse. I said it before, a technocracy (and all European Parliaments have lately developed a tendency to be dominated by "experts") is even worse than a plutocracy, since there's even more opportunity for pride in expertise than in wealth. From Rome, when the Senate was exclusively a Patrician domain, to the Parliament, to the US Congress, to the French Senate, to the Soviet Republics: all republics immediately become the basest oligarchies mankind has ever conceived.

Why? Again, the reason was quite clear in the 13th century, when Aquinas wrote "On Kingship"—and remember, he not only knew more monarchs personally than you can probably name, his family were major nobles; Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, was his cousin. Find me, please, another political theorist who had personal experience with both the elective and hereditary forms of both monarchy and aristocracy.

In "On Kingship", he explains why the republic is the worst form of government, even though its corrupt form (oligarchy) is only middling in efficiency, of bad systems of government.

A republic is, by definition, a system with a ruling class. Its weakness, therefore, is that good people will go along with bad, "in order to keep peace within the class". We, nowadays, call it peer pressure (very appropriately); have you maybe heard the expression "Washington insider"? Yeah. Thus, the republic, though its corrupt form is not as bad as the corrupt form of monarchy (tyranny), is more likely to become corrupt.

Anyway, though, the Founding Fathers were not as stupid as their forebears. I chalk it up to a French influence, but, though most of them did not appear to understand that no Hanoverian could be a tyrant (because no Hanoverian was a monarch), they did understand that the legislature—the Parliament—is not incorruptible. And so they created the presidential system. The President having the power to place a check on Congress is not, as so many idiots seem to think, a bug; it is a feature. Any king who cannot check his lords is worthless as a king.

What, then, about the idea that "the mob" can't be trusted with the vote, as evinced in so many of the defenses of Heinlein's book (that's not really the point of the book, but hang on a second)? It's folly. All government, if remotely moral, rests on the assumption the community is ultimately sovereign. Now, the flaw in most electoral systems is that the community, unless almost completely homogeneous, is not truly represented in mere majorities. So some system of representation is required.

Now, of course, in practice, one might define "the community", and therefore the right to be represented, tribally, the assumption that forms the basis of the nation-state. But in such a system enfranchising minorities is not only illogical, it's actually immoral. Hence the moral flaw of all true nation states: in a community defined as German, Jews, even Ashkenazim, actually aren't members and should be disenfranchised (communism does the same thing, only with "class" substituted for "nation"—those not of the proletariat really are non-members of the community). Combine this fact, derived from that definition of community, with Nazism and Marxism's paranoid assumption that all aliens are enemies, and all enemies are non-persons, and the Holocaust and Gulags follow like a syllogism.

So you have to fall back on the Roman assumption, that all "responsible, resident adults" shall be considered members of the community in its political capacity. Now, there are different conceptions of what constitutes "responsibility", and Heinlein's Federation falls back on the ancient one, military (or other) service to the polis. Except that, y' know, unlike ancient (and "Enlightenment", but not medieval) systems, his Federation does not automatically exclude women from the category of "adults".

But, you know what? I, and the theorists of both the American and French Revolutions, still call Heinlein a quitter-bitch. Since the mob can be expected to behave responsibly—as when it self-organized for military resistance, in both the above Revolutions, or when it self-organized to protest economic policies it objected to, in the Tea Party—we may conclude that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, every adult with full legal membership of the community can be considered responsible. Hence, the full franchise—although the Enlightenment thinkers who founded the great Republics (both of them characterized, right up to the end of the 19th century, by enmity with Britain), retained enough of the pagan darkness of the "Renaissance" to deny the adulthood of women. Oh well; the oversight has since been corrected.

Oh, and let's point out, the Terror was the work of a very small legislature, the Committee of Public Safety. Once Carnot turned on Robespierre, it had to be dissolved: because it had lost public support. Quebec echo delta.