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.
