Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

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I am from Brazil...

The monarchs here been very useful:

1. Pedro I declared our independence, and later helped Portugal with some crap and became known there as Pedro the Liberator.

2. Pedro II believed in technology, half of all railways in Brazil was built during his reign, he installed the second telephone in the world in Brazil (the first was obviously, Graham Bell`s one), built a research centre in the same place that produced awesome results (it is not heavily celebrated as launching rockets but most of the food production from Brazil, including exported things, are stuff developed by them at some point) and heavily defended that the education level should rise as whole. Also he, ironically, strengthened a lot Brazillian democracy, he himself believed monarchy to be useless and left basically voluntarily.

Brazil immediately after the coup derailed, the first republic was basically a crappy military dictatorship disguised as republic, it ended with another guy stealing the "throne" and becoming dictator himself, then a period of actual republic voting but with lots of instability and flirting with both fascists and communists, then another dictatorship, and now we have a republic where there were more failed to finish the rule than successes (1 president died, before taking power even, 2 were deposed, and only 2 actually got elected and finished their time in power)

The reason monarhy works, in principle, is because the monarch has to think long term, he can't fuck up the country or his heirs will be screwed. Of course there are always someone that go off rails but this apply to any system of government.

The advantage of democracy, in theory, is that there is less violence to choose who is the next ruler... That said our current president was stabbed during elections, a former president was in prison for a while, and politicians here have a knack of having very weird deaths in inopportune moments...

EDIT: I realized I should explain why Pedro I became Pedro the Liberator: Portugal was basically conquered by someone wanting to return Portugal to absolute rule, with the monarch having all the power. Pedro I despite starting with a heavy disvantage managed to free Portugal from the absolutists and put in power a Liberal government.

> The advantage of democracy, in theory, is that there is less violence to choose who is the next ruler... That said our current president was stabbed during elections, a former president was in prison for a while, and politicians here have a knack of having very weird deaths in inopportune moments...

I think you wanna say “the advantage of a republic” because a monarchy doesn’t mean lack of democracy. Many europeans countries are a monarchy and a democracy.

Monarchy and Republic are one thing. Democracy and Dictatorship is another thing.

Btw, great explanation about Dom Pedro II, many scholars call him “the magnanimous” and one of the best imperator of the modern times.

They are not really monarchies, they are democracies with a small amount of monarchic elements.

Monarchy in my understanding implies the rule of the monarch.

The Monarchs in most EU countries do not rule, through some have some restricted political influence.

I think the UK might be an exception, where as far as I remember the royalty still theoretically holds pretty much all the power just politely decide to pretend they don't know they still rule. But that might be a misconception of mine.

> They are not really monarchies, they are democracies with a small amount of monarchic elements.

The king is the head of state, so how this is not a monarchy?

> Monarchy in my understanding implies the rule of the monarch.

There are two types of monarchies:

- constitucional, like belgium, netherlands, norway and japan

- absolute: saudi arabia and the vatican city.

> I think the UK might be an exception, where as far as I remember the royalty still theoretically holds pretty much all the power just politely decide to pretend they don't know they still rule.

I would say that it is the rest of the country politely pretending that the Queen actually holds the enormous power she is legally entitled to. It is the law that is a polite fiction.

In the UK, Parliament is sovereign. As such, the British Monarchy can be abolished by an Act of Parliament. It is the popular will of the people that prevents that happening.

That the British people should choose to maintain the monarchy, or that Canada and Australia should choose to have the Queen as their Head of State, confuses outsiders (particularly Americans) no end.

No, they meant democracy. You are conflating the terms "ruler" and "head of state" if you think their comment is about monarchy vs republic. It's not as if no president has ever been assassinated either: people kill for power, not so much for ceremonial titles.

Going a bit on a tangent here, but it is for that reason that I personally prefer the European monarchies over the directly-elected presidencies of e.g. France and the USA: it's very hard to have a meaningful pluriform democratic society when national elections break down into a single-winner-takes-all outcome. I much prefer the democratic structures of e.g. The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, where the election outcomes (and, importantly, the media narrative surrounding the elections) are focused on the composition of the legislature, and the subsequent ruler is determined by negotiations between the winning political parties.

Of course, Germany is a good example of how to run a republic and still have a pluriform democracy, and the UK is a good example of how even a constitutional democracy can devolve into winner-takes-all outcomes (namely, by allowing a few large parties to monopolize the entire political landscape). But in general, I'd say that the countries that do not directly elect their head of state are much healthier democracies than the ones that do.

(yes, I'm aware that most countries that elect their head of state also have separate elections for their legislative bodies. But going by the media coverage of US presidential elections and the recent re-election of Macron in France, that seems an afterthought compared to the democratic processes in more representational democracies).

The someone was Pedro's brother Miguel. After losing the war, he was banished and his descendents removed from the succession line, but they now claim to be heirs to the throne of Portugal (which nobody really cares about).

This all happened after the royal family escaped the French invasions to Brazil and Rio de Janeiro became the capital of Portugal. The story of Pedro, the independence of Brazil and the Portuguese liberal wars is really interesting.

Make that hugely amusing. The absolutist king, Miguel, had the common people's support. The liberals were basically a bourgeois minority.

It took a foreign invasion - Pedro travelled around in English ships, and his troops had a mercenary backbone - to "liberate" Portugal.

The more it changes, the more it's the same.

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