Monarchies and republics: An obvious difference I only just noticed
2024-11-10 10:47:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Another no doubt totally incorrect observation about the US political / govermental system that I only just noticed...
As a brit, I find it kind of strange how in the US, the majority leader of the house, who I guess maybe is somewhat similar to the prime minister in the UK (?), is totally unknown generally and over-shadowed in terms of popularity by the president.
In the UK, the prime minister is elected, and then that’s the bloke or gal that you see literally leading the government in parliament every week. They are the one answering questions, they are the one on the tele and in the newspapers. They have quite a lot of power. They are running the entire show so to speak. They get a lot of attention from the general population, but it’s kind of like they are a tech CEO of a subsidury company. They do this both internally and internationally.
The monarch on the other hand has basically no power, and though they have lots of attention from the public, it’s a very different sort of attention, more similar to the attention an actor gets. You follow them your entire life, growing up with them mostly in the background, though occasionally they are front and center. They operate both internally and internationally, but they aren’t really ever involved in actually running the government. They aren’t officially part of a political party.
In the US, it feels like a totally different dynamic. The president is sort of outside of government, a bit like a monarch type figure, but they have quite a lot of power, signing all sorts of executive orders and what not. They operate internally as a sort of monarch, but internationally they are more like a prime minister. Also, I don’t know how much this has any practical significance, but since they are part of a political party, there’s a sense that one party is totally in control of everything, from top to bottom. A bit of cognitive disonence perhaps for a republic, which is supposed to protect minorities from the rule of the majority?
All this probably seems very obvious to many, but I just never noticed it before. I had in my head made a vague equivalence between the US president and the UK prime minister, because in international diplomatics stuff, which is what you see in various media, that’s what it looks like.
Really the equivalency is that the president is more like an elected monarch.
Is that a good thing? I don’t know, I’m still trying to get my head around this observation. I wonder if it affects how much the general population pays attention to politics. And I suppose it creates a totally different balance of power to the entire governance apparatus.
With all this in mind, it really must have been rather a big moment when Reagan became president. Much bigger of a moment than I had previously realised. It was sort of saying, in not so many words, hey look, our president is a monarch now too. And likely it was saying a lot more than just this. Perhaps we are still trying to figure out exactly what.
Just wanted to mention, sorry if it’s all clumsily said. Based on how much I had to edit this piece as I wrote it, some of these are very new concepts to me.