chat

Pretty much every European monarchy except Vatican City is portrayed as a quaint "tourist novelty" that's more profitable to maintain than to abolish,^[The Norwegian state and royal family have always had a keen interest in pushing an image of the monarchy as an inexpensive, folksy institution, but this is just propaganda largely built on secrecy, clever labeling of assets, and simply not drawing attention to the royal family's actual cost and wealth.] but frankly this is just "our quaint constitutional monarchies" versus "their barbarous absolute monarchies": not to say that there are no differences between constitutional vs absolute monarchies — as I understand it it's basically the difference between liberalism and fascism — I just want to emphasize that the monarch is in any modern monarchy the head of a bourgeois dictatorship, beholden to the interests of the ruling class as a whole, and able to act as a member of that same ruling class, regardless of whether they have a hypothetical legal right to act on their whims as head of state. I think it's especially important to keep in mind how every liberal democracy is designed to be able to turn fascist when necessary and vice versa.