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Jayson_Virissimo comments on Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity - Less Wrong
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Why wait until we live under a monarchy to start practicing for Ideological Turing Test tournaments? Let's start now: According to the CIA World Factbook, the forms of government of the three countries with the greatest GDP per capita (PPP) are a hereditary constitutional monarchy, an emirate, and a constitutional monarchy. Wait a minute...that was a little too easy.
It would be a better argument if it didn't rely on people not knowing what a constitutional monarchy is.
Good point. While the CIA is technically correct in referring to Luxembourg as a constitutional monarchy, it also has a large democratic component, making the description somewhat misleading.
Those who historically lived under monarchies relied more on the Divine Right of Kings, I believe.
Really? It was my understanding that the Divine Right of Kings was a recent (17th century) invention. Care to share you evidence?
Check out the relevant Wikipedia page, for starters. The Divine Right of Kings as a notion went back to medieval times, when rulers would only rule with the blessing of the Pope, though the theory so named was not spelled out until later.
Note that the Divine Right of Kings was refuted in 1689 by John Locke, and I've heard it said that he was kicking a dead horse.
I'm not very impressed with the Wikipedia article on the subject. It seems to conflate several different theories of civil authority that were historically used in opposition to each other. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, The Divine Right of Kings asserts that:
If I'm not mistaken, The Mandate from Heaven and medieval divine right theories were generally thought to limit a kings power (by making it subject to revocation by religious authority), whereas The Divine Right of Kings (the Post-Reformation concept; note the capitalization) seeks to expand monarchical power. In any case, it would be wise not to update very strongly on my vague impressions from my university days (which are somewhat hazy and long before I started using spaced repetition software).
Well, Egyptian Pharaohs ruled by divine right, if nothing else. I was referring to the general idea that the monarch rules by divine permission.
However, as noted below, the theology and so on became more explicit around that time, according to Wikipedia.
This was my understanding as well; the Divine Right of Kings is a 'recent' thing and was for European kingdoms specifically.
The oldest example I can think of that is sort-of-related is the Mandate of Heaven, and it seems to me like various forms of divine ancestry were the most common things to rely on to assert monarchic authority.
The Mandate of Heaven was double-edged though, unlike the divine right of kings.. The peasantry was considered a force of nature, and a rebellion was thus a sign that heaven revoked the ruler's mandate.
The on-topic point I attempted to make was that both were appropriate arguments of the form that would definitely pass an ideological turing test for "people who are rationalizing that their monarchy is the best thing ever".
IIRC, the Mandate of Heaven did help quite a bit in getting imperial rulers to not be total assholes, though.
patrissimo advises me that others have noticed Liechtenstein's (relative) awesomeness.