On Unitary Government

Practically everybody says they want good government.  Aside from a few anarcho-[fill in the blank] types, most folks seek for effective government that provides stability and protection for the people.  Yet, such a state of affairs is extremely rare in the world today.  Why is that?  What is it that we lack today that our ancestors had which gave them generally more stable and dependable government?

The answer, of course, is unitary government centered about the authority and legitimacy of monarchic rulers acting for their nations as whole units.

One of the greatest impediments to effective government, in any age, is the division of power into multiple, contradictory, and competing poles of influence.  This is typically the result of democratisation, a process which has been accelerating since its inception (in its most recent incarnation) in the Enlightenment of the mid-18th century. 

Democratisation necessarily entails the division of political power into smaller and smaller pieces, held by more and more individual people over time.  The result of this is ever-increasing tumult and disorder as ephemeral factions and alliances form and re-form, leading to greater and greater social strife between mass groups competing for power.  This was the process in ancient Greek poleis which eventually led to civil war and the imposition of tyranny.  Even in the United States, long thought to be one of the most stable democratic regimes, the rapid expansion of the franchise in the post “civil rights” era combined with mass immigration from non-Western countries has led to the rapid breakdown of American republicanism in less than two generations.

Democratic and popular government are naturally given to chaos and sooner or later will devolve into disorder, no matter how many constitutional and structural safeguards are incorporated into the system. This is the necessary result of mass factionalism that arises from the “popularisation of politics” that occurs with democratisation. Democracy begets demagoguery, and it is primarily via the intermediary vehicle of democratic forms that a state or civilisation transitions from legitimate monarchical forms to ad hoc and modernist autocratic forms such as fascism, military dictatorship, and so forth, which rely on the mass mobilisation of the proletariat.

The democratic framework exalts divided government as a supreme governing principle. Indeed, it is enshrined in most modern constitutions as a fundamental format for formal organisation. The result is usually that the various branches of government end up working at cross purposes to each other, jockeying for political advantages instead of genuinely trying to solve actual problems.  As a result, it is one of the faults of modern democratic regimes to be paralysed into inaction over anything of any real importance. Witness the current kerfluffle over border security in the USA and the inability of European countries to protect themselves from hordes of Muslims and Africans.  In both cases, matters of national security and the safety of their respective populations are on the line, yet half of the voters can’t be bothered to support even basic efforts at protecting themselves.

As noted before, divided government lends itself to more ready subversion by forces which do not have the good of the nation at heart.  Likewise, though democracy has trouble focusing on really important matters, it has no problem multiplying the areas in which it exercises power over the lives of its citizens.  Both of these arise from the same quarter – because the expanded franchise divides the zero-sum pie of political power into ever-smaller pieces, factions within the body politic will seek to expand the size of the pie itself by expanding the role of government, thereby making their pieces larger.  As modern democracies both social and capitalistic have shown, the end result is government whose extent and reach far surpass anything that a royal subject in a traditional monarchy ever had to endure.

Truly, the wisdom of Homer’s dictum that, “…a multitude of rulers is not a good thing. Let there be one ruler, one king” is being constantly shown.

The superiority of monarchical government has been understood throughout history.  Even though the Romans affected to despise monarchy, their earliest heroes – revered even at the height of senatorial republicanism – were the sacred kings of their foundation.  Further, when the Republic fell apart, monarchy (in fact, if not in name) was what they fell back upon to restore peace and order under Augustus. Likewise, when democratic forms began to destabilise the Venetian Republic, their quite proper and wise response was to retrench and centralise power back into the hands of the traditional aristocracy.  While not a true monarchy, the Dogeship gradually evolved into an institution closely imitating it.

One of the arguments made against monarchy is that it lends itself to abuses.  True, there have been autocratic rulers who abused their authority.  But then again, can we really say the record of modern democracy is any better?  After all, what monarchy – no matter how bad – has threatened to incarcerate law-abiding citizens for referring to someone by the wrong pronoun?  Further, there have been many, many good monarchs throughout history who have brought stability, order, and prosperity to their people. For every Nero or Caligula which naysayers can object with, we can point to an Augustus, any of the  Antonine Emperors, a Cyrus, a Louis IX, or a Han Wudi who proves the point.

Further, monarchy has the added benefit of being a natural and just form of government because it mirrors the obvious plan of God’s order for the world.  It is not without cause that God refers to His “Kingdom” and to Himself as “King” in the Holy Scriptures.  There is no talk of God as “President” or “Consul” of heaven.  All the nations of the world originally understood this primal fact.  Surely, the American revolutionaries who demanded that preachers refer to “the republic of heaven” committed a grave impiety in doing so.

Certainly, factionalism may exist in genuinely aristocratic monarchical systems. However, it is generally restricted to courtly parties which do not involve the lower castes.  In such cases, there is no reason in the world why farmers or artisans should be at all concerned about intrigues between dukes and counts. Generally, aristocratic factionalism only leads to political turmoil when central government has already been weakened by some means.  Unlike democratic revolutionism (which includes communist revolutions, being that democracy is merely entryism for communism) which seeks to undermine stable government with a view to replacing it in toto, aristocratic revolutions are a product of weakened unitary government that has lost the evident mandate of heaven.

Evola’s pattern of sacral kingship is an ideal template.  The king should embody the dual functions of the brahmin and kshatriya combined in his person and roles. He should unite both the priestly and the warrior functions.  This can be considered the ideal for kingship, whether in a Christian context or some other.  What is rather ironic, considering Evola’s disdain for Christianity, is that this is precisely what is proposed for the Lord Jesus Christ during His millennial reign after His second coming and the establishment of His Kingdom.

As Evola noted, the Ghibelline ideal of the Holy Roman Emperor was the least deviation from this template that was observed in medieval Europe. Ideally, at least, the Emperor was head of both church and state within his realms. While the two institutions were separate lines of hierarchy (representing the brahmanic and kshatriyan elements of aristocracy, respectively), each found its effective headship in the Imperial person.

This was in contradistinction to the Guelph doctrine of papal supremacy, which involved an inappropriate attempt to divide executive, unitary power. The early movement in this direction was seen in papal efforts to usurp traditional aristocratic and kingly prerogatives for appointing bishops within their realms, eventually culminating in investiture crises in Germany and England and the settlement of the Concordat of Wurms which largely removed investiture powers from secular rulers in Germany.

Eventually, the devolution in this direction was expanded through the introduction of the principles underlying the separation of church and state, more fully articulated in Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctum in which he expounded his doctrine of the “two swords” that sought to bring imperial and kingly power into subordination to the earthly power of the priestly caste (in this case represented by the Roman Catholic Church). From there, the path toward the recent, and current, cycles of modernism was paved in which complete separation of church and state would be “achieved,” the state would become truly secularised, and the church would become increasingly discredited without the protection of sacral kingship.  Theocracy, strictly speaking, and such forms as “clerical fascism” are simply not a viable alternative to genuine, legitimate monarchy.

The effect of this devolution was an inversion of authority that contributed to enhanced division and factionalism all throughout Germany and Italy. Indeed, one of the direct results of Gregory’s humiliation of Henry IV at Canossa was the undermining of imperial authority that led to half a century of civil war that raged across Germany. Thus, it’s not surprising that those two nations were nearly the last to be unified in Europe, and when it happened, it was not natural and organic as the result of the leadership of an aristocladic monarchy, but was the result of modernistic nationalistic forces centering around mass populism.

A greatly more preferable system would be a unitary one in which the spiritual and temporal powers are united at the head of the nation or empire.  In such a case, there would not be two separate and competing hierarchies of authority, vying with each other and introducing strife and confusion as were introduced by the Church hierarchy in the Middle Ages. Indeed, if the spiritual power remained informal and its organisational structure confined to the original local church polity that obtained in the first few centuries of Christianity, the church could perform its work of salvation and preparing the saints for their eternal reward without acting as a competing and destabilising force by introducing schism and undermining legitimate kingly power.

In all cases, a unitary power is to be desired over and above any scheme of divided government, whether introduced via secular constitutions or by competing hierarchies of authority attempting to intrude into each others’ perceived realms. The ideal kingship is one in which the king, resting upon his authority inherent in his aristocratic nature, rules for the good of his people.  Certainly, men may fail to achieve this ideal many a time.  However, this does not discredit or disqualify the ideal form itself.  This is certainly the case when the proposed alternative is one whose whole track record throughout history is one of eventual social discord, decay, and collapse. Simply put, monarchy can provide good government over the long run, despite occasional aberrations, while in democratic and republican systems, good government is itself the aberration.

So what does this really mean for us today?  It means that, given any Great Reset situations we might find ourselves in (and demographic-structural theory, as well as basic empirical common sense, suggest we may be headed for one), we’re going to need to seek out replacements for the current neo-liberal globohomogayplex democommunist system, the grip of which the West currently finds itself in. While going all the way to sacral kingship in one fell swoop is likely quite unrealistic, it can serve as an eventual long-term goal, especially should the Reset involve a large amount of warlordism and other near-apocalyptic social breakdown. As old forms are swept away, restored forms can begin to take their place, and the formula of “become worthy – accept power – rule” become a quite real thing.