I genuinely hadn’t thought about this until just now after reading this article, but it’s kind of darkly funny that Chinese monarchies (via the Mandate of Heaven legitimizing rebellion when conditions for the masses deteriorated) can be argued as more progressive in some senses than modern Western liberal democracy. A literal monarchy having a more materially grounded notion of legitimacy than today’s ‘democracies’ is wild. And at the same time it must be immensely sad, if you live in the West and aren’t fully on board the propaganda delusion (if you see things as they actually are rather than the ideal they insist exists) you’re basically trapped inside a system that can’t even acknowledge its own failure.