NoxMiasma said:
While Blue Rose's default romantic fantasy setting appears to have a fairly standard Good Guy Monarchy, the actual lore behind it is pretty funny. The ruler and their heir are selected by the approval of a Special Magic Deer, which may also withdraw it's favour from an unrighteous monarch. ... How the Magic Deer actually works is that a really long time ago, a wizard cast a spell to summon an avatar of the collective will of the people of the nation, which resulted in the deer. ... This means that the ruler of the nation is actually chosen by popular election, but nobody knows about it.
An elected monarchy is still a monarchy, and in fact elective monarchy was the norm in a number of states that were not therefore democratic. What's more relevant in the case of Blue Rose is that, while the monarch is functionally the chief executive as well as the figurehead, the ruling council includes representatives of various groups, and while the monarch has a lot of influence, they can't constitute a majority vote by themself. So there are some institutional ways in which the limited monarchy resembles a republic whose chief executive has no fixed term limit and is appointed through magical means that sort of resemble election in that they accomplish what elections are ideally meant to accomplish, but avoid some of the big problems with actual electoral systems in the real world.
Mondo said:
As recently as the French Revolution, the commoners overthrew a King, only to replace him with a Emperor (and after a quarter-century of war, end up with a King again.).
The commoners weren't behind the Thermidorean Reaction, which resulted in the Directorate, nor were they instrumental in Napoleon's coup that overthrew the Directorate and ultimately resulted in a new monarchy under himself. Those were all reactionary counterrevolutions by elites who feared a more egalitarian republic in which their class identity would be threatened, so you could say the commoners were on the receiving end of those events, rather than their agents. The same thing happened again after 1848, for similar reasons, as the more democratic spirit of the Revolution hadn't gone away among the classes that stood to benefit from it, nor had the fear of them diminsed among the classes who feared it. All revolutions have different progressive and conservative elements trying to steer things toward their own class interests, and that's before you factor in counterrevolution by the people who just want to undo the whole thing. Those are not all the same people.
Mondo said:
Even more recently, the Russians overthrew a Czar, only to get a Party Chairman with even more centralized power than the Czar.
At no point did the party general secretary have anything resembling the autocratic power of the Tsar. Despite the US State Dept.'s policy even today of referring to any non-US-aligned countary as a dictatorship, the USSR, like similar states still extant today, was actually ruled by a complex set of parallel and concentric committees, with no independent executive branch as such. Executive offices were created by and entirely answerable to the relevant committees, not unlike what we saw in the original French Republic. And since it was based on a delegate rather than trustee model, there were no set terms and delegates could be recalled at any time, just as officers could be removed at any time if they were not felt to represent the will of the relevant councils, which did happen.
Those who managed to play this game well and stay in the top ranks of power long-term still had to spend a lot of time and effort appealing to the people and their representatives, crafting detailed policy proposals, asking for votes of approval, accounting for failures and engaging in public self-criticism, etc. We can read Stalin doing all of the above throughout his entire tenure, and he was the GS with the firmest base of support by far. No Tsar ever had to do any of that; Nicholas notoriously abdicated rather than suffer the indignity of being answerable to anyone other than God.
The autocratic presidency we associate with Russia today was Yeltsin's creation, though the US supported him in it, even as he was shelling his own legislature into submission. And that new order is both the result of the circumstances following the reintroduction of class antagonisms between the new oligarchs and the newly impoverished masses, and also a catalyst meant to facilitate and maintain that new status quo. In other words, it's the product of specific material conditions and events in recent history and shouldn't be taken a revolutions are pointless and people prefer autocracy (or that Russians do, which is an ugly orientalist assumption one still encounters all too often).
Mondo said:
Monarchs, by various names, appear to be Mankind's default setting.
Monarchy is probably the default setting for certain specific types of states with specific economic bases, for which a monarchy provides sufficient balance of forces among the competing class interests involved, so as to keep the status quo functioning with potentially the lowest instability. For example, there are certain ways in which historical monarchies could leverage the interests of the peasantry against those of the aristocracy and vice versa. That presented a relatively more populist option than an oligarchy, which would serve the interest of elites at the expense of everyone else, while also helping to prevent civil war between aristocratic factions (at least until the nexts succession crisis). But those material conditions are not themselves the default setting for humanity at all stages of development (good luck finding any solid evidence for monarchy prior to the bronze age), and even then it's not the only option, or the one preferable to all parties.
Oligarchy is the next most common, as when there isn't a single monarch to monopolize power, those with the most wealth (i.e. those who control the economy) will inevitably capture political power unless specific steps are taken to expropriate and/or disenfranchise them. So even going back to Mystara or Forgotten Realms, we see fantasy places ruled by magocracies or councils of merchant princes or noble families, with or without a figurehead. Theocracies are also not uncommon in fantasy, but they're functionally oligarchies or monarchies of a particular character, by and for a ruling clerical class. It's only really different in a fantasy context if the gods are clearly real and somehow involved in the running of the state. Or, as in Exalted, sometimes just the rulers themselves.
What we don't see often is truly democratic/egalitarian societies whose authors have bothered to think through how they formed and, more importantly, how they could stay that way, rather than devolving into rule by one or more people who control most of the money and/or magic and/or religion. Practically speaking, it would involve some institutional way to prevent private control of those things by a specific subset of the population. Even Blue Rose isn't really trying to do that, so much as present a medieval fantasy society whose inhabitants have gone ahead and invented magical liberalism. So the extent of their political sophistication is the view that different classes of people don't have fundamentally incompatible interests and can live together harmoniously as long as the right people are in charge, requiring only that good people stand up and put a stope to the occasional problems that creep in at the edges, especially from one of the less rosy neighboring states.
