A Republic is inherently un-democratic.

A Republic is inherently un-democratic. 

Democracy means government by the people.  When we vote for our representatives, whomever they may be and by whatever method, we should be passing our power, as the people, upwards to those representatives, but that is not what is happening.

In ancient times, tribal leaders ruled the mob like the pack leaders in many social species of fauna.  By Neolithic times, this had become institutionalised in the form of Monarchy, with hereditary claims able to be challenged by competition of military might.  Power always devolved downwards from this single powerful ruler.  The first Parliaments and Ministries were the Monarch’s personally chosen advisors.  We, the people had very little actual power.  Some power devolved further down to Local Government, but even there, all our lives remain regulated by this form of power that devolved downwards.  There is no recognition of the individual rights of all living beings to have power over their own selves and the right to exercise their own free will.

True Democracy places individual power at the top of the social system.  Instead of a mathematical model that represents power like a cone with an apex at the top and an ever increasing lowest level, the further you go down, we see it as it is mathematically correct, with an upwards cone as well, with the apex at the bottom and the largest (previously the lowest) level at the top.  Here, power is delegated down to our parliamentary and ministerial representatives. 

While passing, we must not confuse the parliament and the ministry.  They look similar, having the same people doing much the same things, but they are two of the three arms of government, the other being the Judiciary.  The Legislature and the Executive are distinct, though now days indistinguishable.

‘Progressives’, as the intellectual elite that rules the ‘western’ world is now called, believe they are functioning democratically, on behalf of the people, a significant part of Lenin’s justification of totalitarian rule under the guise of egalitarianism.  Arguments that won in the debates amongst the various movements of the ‘left’ early last century leading to the Bolshevik rule in Russia instead of the Mensheviks, and it is worth comparing Russia with Germany where the same debate occurred amongst the many groups on the ‘left’ in Germany, but with the opposite choice. 

The clearenst demonstration of the actual totalitarian nature of the contemporary Australian, and world ‘left’ is their arguments for a Republic.  They persist with the idea that Australia should have an Australian as ‘head of state’, which presumably means ‘highest sovereign entity’, in our case HM the Queen.  The consequent dispute over whether the G-G is the de facto head of state, or actually the de jure head of state in some circumstances, or anything else is really irrelevant.  What would be lost by becoming a Republic for purely ideological reasons of having a pure, socialist self-image makes any other issue meaningless.  But those arguments are too extensive to elaborate on now.

The very term ‘head of state’ clearly represents the ancient idea of the single, great tribal leader, who deputises those who administer us and to whom loyalty is due.  What the present Australian republicans are saying to us is: ‘We want one of us to tell us what to do.  Pick one of us to rule over us.  Make one of us monarch over all of us.’

It might be thought that our present arrangement, with an hereditary monarch as sovereign that we would have a socio-political system that was feudal in its application, but the opposite is the truth.  Through a thousand years of wars, revolutions and coups, the system we inherited with the birth of the various colonies that became our states, developed into something closely approaching the ideal societies described and debated by philosophers since classical times, and the key is the concept of the Democratic Monarch, the keystone of the entire structure.

Her Majesty reigns but does not rule.  Nor does the power of Her Majesty’s parliemants, ministeries and courts come from the person of the Monarch, as it did in olden days.  Yet the Monarch, as a person, now represents all of us, existing only though popular acclaim as in the past.  As one of us, our Sovereign is the source of all socio-political power, but it is a power that we distribute with our ballots to our representatives.  They are still beholden to us, the people, through the Crown, because it is rarely repeated that the Monarch is ‘first servant’ of the people. 

Mathematically it might look like a circular argument, but it is still more like the double ended conical shape, with a single point at the apex of the cone on each side.  While the mathematical shape appears to exist on both sides at once, really they can only exist in isolation, yet both must be existent all the time.  It is like the wave/particle paradox.  Reality is counter-intuitive.  What this means is that power can devolve up or it an devolve down, but we cannot have both at once, yet in some way both do exist at the same time.  In our quest to improve our society, it would be a risk to abandon a system that has turned into a large to small direction of power, through the re-interpretation of the point pinnacle and the swivelling it to a point base, for one that purports to recreate it, but instead reverts to the old, totalitarian concept of sovereignty, long lost from what we have now, and entrenches them in a simplistic idea of giving one of us or anyone total power over all of us, to be delegated to people we might have some say over, like letting prisoners select their warders.

It is micro-equality we need now, the inter-personal acceptance of everyone by everyone, not macro-equality, the distribution of our collective personal power to those who rule on our behalf.  We need not a republic or any other totalitarian system, but to be united and supportive of the system we already have.  Endless argument for unpopular change is divisive in a world that need reasons for unity. 

It is the popular acclaim that most distresses republicans, because it clearly demonstrates the democratic nature of modern monarchy.  Yet, apart from its significant political nature, the monarchy provides great pleasure to a large proportion of the population, and it is parsimonious, disingenuous and nasty to deprive people of this pleasure for the sake of ideological purity, let alone for the devious purpose of thwarting true democracy and retaining an elitist autocracy.