I'd rather be ruled by a system, not a person. We are a nation of laws, remember? I would rather not be ruled by any one person no matter how great they were.

Laws must be enacted, interpreted, and enforced by people. All governments are governments by people.

* Come now, these issues were prevalent and were widely discussed during the United States' founding. It's not like any of them are new.*

Indeed. Of course, the so called "patriots" who agitated for the revolution ended up infrining on rights far more than the British ever did. If you ever want to read a real history of the American Revolution instead of the school book mythologies, check Sydney Fishers history. Chapter 8 is a great read if you are short on time: http://books.google.com/books?id=SZccAAAAMAAJ&printsec=t...

As for your Gibbon quote, let's not start playing who's got the best authority. Plato said that philosophers should rule, and that art should mostly be eliminated. Lots of people working with the best information they had at the time made lots of statements.

I didn't mean to make an argument from authority. But Gibbon was a smart man who read a lot of history. He came up with conclusions about monarchy that were counter-intuitive to a lot of people, including you. Rather than arguing against monarchy with glib remarks you should ground your arguments in historical evidence.

Sure, early democracies without proper checks and balances did all sorts of heinous things.

You mean, democracies that had not been diluted by something other than democracy ( Civil service, independent judicary). You are agreeing with my point.

But Germany became productive, Iraq will become productive. These things are simply a matter of time.

That's the largest understatement I've heard in a while. It did not take time. It took military force. The allies bombed the crap out of Germany, occupied it, purged all Nazis from public life, and set up an education system that reeducated the public along pacifist lines. Germany is still military occupied. It is still illegal to publicly speak in favor of Nazism or jingoism. It's modern elections resemble student council elections, not actual democracy ( and for very good reason).

As for Iraq, if the U.S. ever wakes up and starts acting more like Lord Cromer ( http://books.google.com/books?id=SZccAAAAMAAJ&printsec=t... ) then maybe Iraq will turn out alright. But 50 proof democracy will continue to be a disaster. Democracy puts the entire resources of the country up for grabs every four years. While elections are supposed to be peaceful, the stakes are so high, that voting easily turns into violence. This rarely happens in the U.S. anymore because the committee system and the civil service results in a very stable allocation of resources. But again, this is tantamount to diluting democracy with not democracy.

Aristocracies stagnate. Democracies evolve.

Also totally not true. Read Mancur Olson or Jonathan Rauchs. Rauch was a writer for the National Journal, which is the in house magazine of the Hill staff in DC. His writings match my experiences on the Hill exactly. The title of his book was "Government's End". The end result of democracy is either a) tyranny or b) Brezhnevianism (stagnant socialism or quasi socialism)

As to WWI, you're surly not telling me that Tsarist Russia was democratic, are you?

Tsarist Russia was probably about as democratic as the modern U.S. It was less democratic than the U.S. of 1914.

Or that the rise of populist feelings and movements didn't drastically affect the outcome and aftermath?

Populist feelings in Britain almost certainly prolonged the war. In Russia, the mob was more fickle. At first they were for the war: "It was war. 'A popular war this time' said the people in the cathedral of Yalta ... I found the Czar hard at work and doing his utmost to justify the popular acclaim given to him the day of the declaration of the war. Never in all Nicky's twenty years of luckless reign had he heard so many spontaneous hurrahs. National solidarity, coming at this late day, pleased him enormously." (from Once a Grand Duke by Alexander Grand Duke of Russia )

Later, of course, the newspapers and the mob turned against the Czar and the war. I certainly do not defend the actions of the Czar. I just note that what followed ended up even worse. Within a year they were back at war ( the 1919 war against Poland). And later the Bolsheviks got in a war far worse than even World War I.

And as for the effect of democracy on the aftermath, see Churchill: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:OOaesHZ14PAJ:themonarchi...

Or that the Germany-France war in 1870 didn't set the stage for the larger conflict to follow, right?

Old disputes over territory are never the cause of war, only excuses for war. Lots of territorial exchanges occur without causing future wars.

It just seems amazingly blind to assert that the evolution of what works and what doesn't be predicated on some Utopian view of inherited rule.

I'm not going by some utopian view. I'm simply arguing that monarchy as it was actually practiced tended to produce superior results to democracy as it is actually practiced (and by superior, see my definition in a previous comment). I'm arguing that actual transitions that went from aristocracy or monarchy to democracy tended to make the quality of government worse. Again, I recommend Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday.

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Thanks to the constant accumulation of profits, in an era of increasing prosperity in which the State never thought of nibbling off more thant a few per cent of the income of even the richest, in which, on the other hand, State and industrial bonds bore high rates of interest, to grow richer was nothing more than a passive activity for the wealthy. Not yet, as later at the time of the inflation, were the thrifty robbed, and the solid business men swindled; and the patient and the non-speculating made the best profit.

...

Because of their liberal belief in the unfailing progresss of the world through tolerance and reason, these middle-class democrats honestly thought that with small concessions and gradual improvements they were furthering the welfare of all subjects in the best way possible. But they had completely forgotten that they represented only fifty or a hundred thousand well-situated opeople in the large cities, and not the hundreds of thousands and millions of the entire country. In the meantime the machine had done its work and had gathered the fomerly scattered workers around industry. Under the leadership of an eminent man, Dr. Viktor Alder, a Socialist Pary was created in Austria to further the demands of the proletariat, which sought a truly universal suffrage. hardly had this been granted, or rather obtained by force, before it became apparent how thin though highly valuable a layer of liberalism had been. With it concilliation disappeared from public political life, interests hit hard against interests, and the struggle began.

...

An able and popular leader was Dr. Karl Lueger, who mastered this unrest and worry and, with the slogan, "the little man must be helped" carried with him the entire small bourgeoiseie and the disgrunteled middle class, whose envy of the wealthy was markedly less than the fear of sinking from its bourgeois status into the proletariat. It was exactly the same worried group wwhich Adolf Hitler later coallected around him as his first substantial following. Karl Leuger was alo his prototype in another sense, in that he taught himself the usefulness of the anti-semititc catchword, which put an opponent before the eyes of the broad classes of the bourgeoisei, and the same time pimperceptibly diverted their harded from the great landed gentry and the feudal wealth y class.

...

But soon a third flower appeared, the blue cornflower, Bismarck's favorite flower, and the emblem of the German National Party, which -- although not then recognized as such -- was counsciously a revolutionary party, and worked with burtal forcefulness for the destruction of the Austrian monarchy in favour of a Greater Germany under Prussian and Protestant leadership, such as Hitlers dreams of. Weak in numbers, it made up for its unimportance by wild aggression and unbridled brutality. Its few representatives became the terror and ( in the old sense ) the shame of the Austrian parliament. Hiter also took over from them the anti-semitic racial theory - "In that race lies swinishness" his illustrious prototype had said. But above all else, he took from the German Nationals the beginning of a ruthless storm troop that blindly hit out in all directions, and with it the principle of terroristic intimidation by a small group over a numerically superior but humanely more passive majority.

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Stefan Zweig lived through the transition from monarchy/aristocracy to democracy. Have you ever actually read first hand accounts like his? Or is your entire knowledge based on second hand caricatures from AP history text books and PBS specials?

I used to think the same way you did. I could have written your response a few years ago. I'm not some snooty William Snodgrass Brunswick the 7th who's bitter over the fall of the aristocracy. I came across a bunch of history that never gets taught, and I changed my mind about a lot of things I used to think were true.