Hello? A Davidic Monarchy, Anyone? OK, Going Once, Going Twice…
Mainstream Charedi media are so ashamed of the actual Torah, they will publish long articles glorifying some Goyish institution, without ever mentioning the Jewish, er, “connection”. Case in point: Monarchy.
Hamodia Prime of 25 Elul, p. 66-74 had an article by Rafael Hoffman titled “Pretending, But Not Make-Believe“.
This trivial trivia-filled trove emphasizes just how many people worldwide still thirst for a proper monarchy (many royal hopefuls have “bands of admirers and, in some cases, even small political parties advocating for their restoration”!), quotes economists who recover some of monarchy’s reputation (missing Hoppe’s classic “Democracy: The God That Failed“, of course), and so on.
But even the obligatory “Torah angle” piece by Rabbi Avraham Y. Heschel carefully avoids the topic of a Davidic monarchy or even an Exilarch.
Surely, at least in this time of seeming political chaos, we ought to be seriously rethinking this “quaint” Parsha?
“Advocates of monarchy have pointed out that even if the tsars were considered tyrannical, the number of political prisoners held in Imperial Russia was in the hundreds, while under Lenin that number multiplied to tens of thousands, and under Stalin to millions — a sign of the limits of monarchy versus other power structures.”
“Monarchical governments, especially if they have some constitutional element, have better records of maintaining stable environments,” Dr. Lee Walter Congdon, author and former professor of history at James Madison University, told Hamodia. “Monarchies are systems that won’t be totally changed by votes, and as such provide more stability to let people live their own lives than democracy.”
So, why won’t they dare apply the same logic to the Jewish people?!
The article quotes a royalist:
“Monarchy will bring an order, good government, prosperity, safety, peace of mind, longevity, wealth, and the good life in our mutual country,” he said. “Monarchy, of course, isn’t perfect — nothing is — but it can make an impressive contribution to the wellbeing of society by providing strength and stability, a calm and dignified center, luster, continuity, unity, traditions, oneness, and even greatness. Perhaps this is because it is patterned after the order of Heaven where the Supreme Creator is the King above all kings.”
Is the Israeli regime of faux-democracy patterned after Heaven, then? No!
And here are the economists:
The man considered by many to be the intellectual grandfather of modern monarchism, Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, was himself the heir to a defunct Austrian aristocratic line. A prolific writer, he was a master of many languages and was known for his encyclopedic knowledge. Until his death in 1999, he traveled the world warning of the dangers of mass rule and attempting to demonstrate through many books, papers and lectures that monarchs have historically been more effective guarantors of personal liberty than their elected counterparts. In one of his major works, Liberty or Equality, he argues that it is chiefly the drive of the modern world to artificially impose an egalitarian society that robs man of his personal freedoms. He dedicates an entire section to his theory that Nazism was only able to rise to power as a result of the dissolution of monarchical rule in much of Europe following the First World War.
There’s a study, too (obviously):
Last year, Dr. Mauro Guillen, a professor of international management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, released an in-depth statistical study of 137 nations showing that a monarchy generally has a higher standard of living than a republic.
“I was surprised myself,” Dr. Guillen told Hamodia regarding his paper’s results. The economist went on to discuss the theory behind the apparent fact that citizens of monarchies are better off than those living under governments whose heads have all been elected.
“Monarchies limit the power of politicians and reduce social conflict which undermines economic growth,” he said. “A lot of people think of monarchies as anachronistic, but if you move away from focusing on the human being who might be the monarch and look at it as an institution and the political culture it creates, you have a system with more checks and balances that prevent politicians from becoming corrupt or getting carried away with their agendas.”
…
The economic theory at the core of the study pins itself on the idea that strong protection of property rights is the most essential ingredient in a healthy market, as these incentivize investment and foster growth. In its 40 pages, the paper argues that monarchies have done a better job of this than republics.
Another piece of evidence is the relative moderation of monarchies in the Arab world and their greater resilience during the “Arab Spring” turmoil as compared to their republican counterparts.
The paper also shows that constitutional monarchies have far outperformed absolute monarchies. Dr. Guillen cautions that the culture of unity and stability he feels monarchy can bring will only occur in a country that has an established tradition of a hereditary sovereign, saying that attempting to re-create such a system in the United States or Switzerland “would not work.”
Even the faithless refrain of “What will the Goyim think?” loses its luster upon noting plausible, positive theory, and the existence of many, many royalists worldwide.
But would an empowered Jewish king be unprecedented in modern times? Not by much.
From Hamodia, again:
Spain was without a king for more than 40 years following its Civil War and the rule of the Franco regime, but in 1975, Juan Carlos was restored to the throne, which is now occupied by his son, Felipe VI.
Montenegro’s story might give even more hope. Following nearly half a century as part of communist Yugoslavia, followed by 10 years of regional strife, in 2006, the small Balkan nation voted to secede from Serbia and declare independence. In 2011, the royal status of its Crown Prince Nicholas was given official recognition, and he now shares some of the powers of the nation’s presidency.
This is the “Daily Newspaper for Torah Jewry”…
Read the rest here of the original article…
By the way, both the article and its title (Pretending, But Not Make-Believe) are thoroughly confusing, because the paragraph explaining the term “pretender” only appears three-quarters in:
The term “pretender,” despite its mocking ring in modern English, is actually not a pejorative. In its original Latin and French forms, the word simply means “one who presents a claim.”