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A big takeaway for me from this book was that no matter how bad things got, the commoners found ways to excuse even mad kings. All blame was directed at nobility later below the king. The purpose of a monarch is to be blameless source of hope to idiot commoners in misery.
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New post. Notes: A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman ribbonfarm.com/2020/07/06/not
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The purpose of marking one person “divine” and putting them above the law and impossible to blame is to preserve hope in elites. A sort of pilot light to reignite a “better” elite.
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I have zero issues holding trump directly responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but to those to whom he is an object of monarchical yearnings, he is going to remain blameless. Everybody else will be sacrificed for that if necessary.
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Monarchism might seem like a fun larp in LOTR, but actually living under monarchism (de facto or de jure) rots your brain. The contortions of keeping even an ordinary but fallible okay monarch blameless are too much. Pretending actual bad or mad kings are divine makes you mad.
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This book also suggested how girarduan scapegoat theory is actually a theory of rare exceptions. Scapegoats are nearly always lesser nobility and bourgeois. There’s an exhausting number of nobles tortured to extract “confessions” to various sins and then executed in this book.
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The American presidency has been a cult of personality for a while, with projection of monarchic yearning held in check only by the incumbent’s sense of their own limits and humanity. But it was inevitable that a mad potus incapable of that would eventually occupy the office.
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There ought to be an archetype you could call an anti-monarch. Like Sam Vimes in Terry Pratchett. The books create an anti-monarchist aura around him by constantly referring to his descent from the regicide who end monarchy in Ankh-Morpork.
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Nehru-Gandhi family was the only monarchical dynasty in India for a while. When they were out of power the opposition never rose to monarchic optics (even though one, V. P. Singh, was actual royalty). That changed with Modi, the first non-NG monarch. Fortunately he has no kids.
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Almost all indian states are ruled by multi generation political dynasties. Modi's team is full of them. It cuts across the whole political spectrum.