DBWI: Republicanism Survives?

Dorozhand

Banned
Republicanism was an ideology based on the concept of government chosen by the people, and centred loosely on the state of the eponymous Roman Republic. It was inflamed by the rhetoric of humanist philosophers and dominated the late 18th and early 19th century. However, the concept of the "social contract" and "popular sovereignty" so eloquently phrased by those men seems to have worked much less well in practice than on paper. The abuses committed by republican experiments and the consistently bloody results of its implementation led eventually to the fall of all states that espoused it, and it was posthumously regarded as unnatural, flying in the face of all established reason. Many have also pointed out that the Roman Republic which the Republicans so admired was really just an oligarchy, and that it naturally became more autocratic as the empire grew.

Some today, however, regard the "young god that failed" as having been judged too harshly. They believe that its implementation led to disaster only by the lack of strong checks on the power of magistrates and restrictions on the natural tendency towards mob rule.

In this day and age of increased freedom of expression, the ideas of those old philosophers have seen new traction. But can the greatest and most ambitious of the enlightenment's children have ever come to succeed or replace monarchy entirely as a mode of governance?

Note that this is only a hypothetical question. It does not reflect a treasonous viewpoint that His Most Catholic Majesty does not possess a right to the state, nor does it attempt to defame, sully, or otherwise injure the dignity of his most virtuous and high blooded majesty.
 
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Republicanism was an ideology based on the concept of government chosen by the people, and centred loosely on the state of the eponymous Roman Republic. It was inflamed by the rhetoric of humanist philosophers and dominated the late 18th and early 19th century. However, the concept of the "social contract" and "popular sovereignty" so eloquently phrased by those men seems to have worked much less well in practice than on paper. The abuses committed by republican experiments and the consistently bloody results of its implementation led eventually to the fall of all states that espoused it, and it was posthumously regarded as unnatural, flying in the face of all established reason. Many have also pointed out that the Roman Republic which the Republicans so admired was really just an oligarchy, and that it naturally became more autocratic as the empire grew.

Some today, however, regard the "young god that failed" as having been judged too harshly. They believe that its implementation led to disaster only by the lack of strong checks on the power of magistrates and restrictions on the natural tendency towards mob rule.

In this day and age of increased freedom of expression, the ideas of those old philosophers have seen new traction. But can the greatest and most ambitious of the enlightenment's children have ever come to succeed or replace monarchy entirely as a mode of governance?

Note that this is only a hypothetical question. It does not reflect a treasonous viewpoint that His Most Catholic Majesty does not possess a right to the state, nor does it attempt to defame, sully, or otherwise injure the dignity of his most virtuous and high blooded majesty.

Well, I'd think that the successes of more countries like the Commonwealth of Columbia might help; Columbia may have been poor up until the 1860s(with the end of slavery, and the birth of the Industrial Revolution and all that), but it is now a reasonably respectable Great Power, along with Pacifica(everybody's favorite Spoonerist state).....though not exactly a Superpower, unlike Russia, the Japanese Empire, and the British Commonwealth.

Unfortunately, it is true that so many other experiments failed; Napoleon's France, for example, may have been genuinely egalitarian for the era, but it was too heavily decentralized, and didn't do enough to bridge the wealth gap. Peru's Republic failed in the 1880s thanks to governmental incompetence(and 120+ years of Communism hasn't done them much good), as did that of Mexico and Paraguay earlier on. At least Britain learned from their mistakes, truth be told; some of the Dominions(Rhodesia, Nigritia, Uruguay, Guyana, Jamaica, etc.) and Associated Commonwealths(Assiniboia, Laurentia, the Maritime Union, Ireland, Alaska, Cuba, etc.), are pretty free these days.

Columbia, Pacifica, South Brazil, Greece, Germany, post-Wloclawski Poland, and the South American Confederation might be the only successful Democratic(and not ruled by dictators and/or an oligarchy, as Rio Bravo, the Yucatan, Korea, Sicily, the Greater Congo, etc.) and non-Communist republics in our world, but it didn't have to be that way.

OOC: Spoonerism is basically like OTL's Social Democracy in some ways. Columbia is best described as something akin to the C.N.A. from "For Want of a Nail", and Pacifica is basically everything to the west of the Rockies and the Rio Grande.
 
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Republicanism is a failed ideal. Despite its promises of egalitarianism and liberties and the right of the people, it consistently encroached on all of those in a way traditional democracy did not. You cannot change human nature, which is what Republicans tried to do. Humans seeking utopia is worthy, but only in a way that fits with what humans can do. And you cannot, as the Republicans did, overthrow the established order and expect things to work. The sad fact is, even if the states that preceded them were horrible, it would take a gradual change of society and government to get what they wanted. The problem is the revanchist attitude inherent in the revolutions, and that stained what followed. All that happened was instability followed by repression. And that's another problem; it always fell into dictatorship.

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OOC:
I basically wrote Communism and replaced it post-facto with Republicanism. I have always thought that had Republican movements gone the way they did in France, and there had been no example of the United States, that Republicanism would have been interpreted exactly the way that Communism is now. For every nation like the United States, how many countless dictatorships that say they're a republic are there?
 
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Republicanism is a failed ideal. Despite its promises of egalitarianism and liberties and the right of the people, it consistently encroached on all of those in a way traditional democracy did not. You cannot change human nature, which is what Republicans tried to do. Humans seeking utopia is worthy, but only in a way that fits with what humans can do. And you cannot, as the Republicans did, overthrow the established order and expect things to work. The sad fact is, even if the states that preceded them were horrible, it would take a gradual change of society and government to get what they wanted. The problem is the revanchist attitude inherent in the revolutions, and that stained what followed. All that happened was instability followed by repression. And that's another problem; it always fell into dictatorship.

EDIT:

I basically wrote Communism and replaced it post-facto with Republicanism. I have always thought that had Republican movements gone the way they did in France, and there had been no example of the United States, that Republicanism would have been interpreted exactly the way that Communism is now. For every nation like the United States, how many countless dictatorships that say they're a republic are there?

Well, the early United States, for one was indeed a good example, I think; after all, they did provide much of the framework for the creation of Columbia in 1789.

However, though, one must wonder; what if Monarchism hadn't had the good example set by the British in the 20th Century, but instead had more bad examples, such as Prussia under Frederick Wilhelm in the 1880s, or China during the Global War in the 1940s?
 
Not all Republics are bad. the German Federation is a relatively prosperous power within Europe. So is the Polish Republic.
 
Not all Republics are bad. the German Federation is a relatively prosperous power within Europe. So is the Polish Republic.

You mean the German Empire right? Just because its a federal state doesn't make it a republic. And as to the so-called Polish Crowned Republic, don't get me started. Its a corrupt cesspool of a nation dominated by cliques of nobles and corporations, which are themselves controlled by Austria, Germany and Russia. If that's a functional republic I'd hate to see a dysfunctional one.
 
You mean the German Empire right? Just because its a federal state doesn't make it a republic. And as to the so-called Polish Crowned Republic, don't get me started. Its a corrupt cesspool of a nation dominated by cliques of nobles and corporations, which are themselves controlled by Austria, Germany and Russia. If that's a functional republic I'd hate to see a dysfunctional one.


German Empire? that collapsed in 1940. I'm referring to the German Federation of course.
 
OoC: It was stated in the OP that ALL republics failed. Please donot contradict the OP in DBs
 

Sabot Cat

Banned
I'm an ardent supporter of democracy, or Republicanism so-called. I really wish people would see the benefit of the democratic principle: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. When leaders are checked by majority assent, they're less likely to be able to get away with abusing their power. However, I think the industrialized nations of the world have autocratic or inherited means of distributing power ingrained in their social fabric. This is largely because you may all think of democracy as mob rule, or what killed Socrates, or just a doorway for worse dictators. But I still think of it as the only way to truly liberate people from their oppression.
 
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