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Comment by billyruffian | Hacker News Reader

I think it was Niall Fergusson, perhaps in 'Empire' or maybe 'Civilisation', who argued that the modern purpose of monarchy is to protect the citizenry from its government -- particularly the emergence of extreme forms of government. You might not agree but I found it quite persuasive.

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As an Irish person I don't find it persuasive at all. There's pretty much nothing a monarch can do that a non executive president can't, and the UK's monarch didn't protect anyone in Northern Ireland from gerrymandering or the B-Specials.

My take on it, personally, is that the primary benefit of a monarch is precisely that they are inherently illegitimate, in a way. This means that every day they have to justify to the people and keep answering the question "Why do we keep these people around?"

A president only has to convince (fool?) the people twice, and can always hide behind a "mandate" from the people to justify bad behavior. A monarch has to fight to earn that legitimacy every day. Plus they have the incentive of not screwing their kids' inheritance up. That's the value I see in it anyways, I don't know if there's a more sophisticated articulation of this idea out there.

So they have to behave so they can continue to lord it over us.

In reality it takes a huge amount of propaganda from the British media to keep them in place. If there was anything resembling an objective assesment of them then they would be gone.

I'm pretty sure they would fear an extreme form of government as much as the rest of us.

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