> lest their descendants be dragged into the street and hung by an unhappy mob with pitchforks.

The idea that a monarchy sees itself as accountable to the people is hilarious. They have a record of ruling with an iron fist and killing opposition.

It’s hard to grasp in a post-Westphalian world but killing opposition and governing with accountability to the people were not always considered opposing ideas. Loyalty to the king was a two-way street, noblesse oblige, etc

So if we are after accountability, in what way is a monarchy superior to a democracy?

I wasn’t making that argument. I’m rather inclined to Jefferson’s ideas (himself a severe anti-monarchist) of promoting individual human dignity and capability; the critical role of moral virtue and education; “small republics” and self-government:

“ When people witnessed our first struggles in the war of independence, they little calculated, more than we did, on the rapid growth and prosperity of this country; on the practical demonstration it was about to exhibit, of the happy truth that man is capable of self-government, and only rendered otherwise by the moral degradation designedly superinduced on him by the wicked acts of his tyrants.”

Thanks for that quote. It almost sounds Libertarian.

Well, your way means there's a succession unpredictably every ~20 years instead of predictably every 4.

Whether that's a point for or against depends on whether you think policy thrashing every 4 years is a good idea.

The generational succession is VASTLY more predictable than a random one, considering the successor comes from the same house and has literally spent his entire life being groomed and prepared to rule.

We, humanity, have literally ALREADY TRIED THIS.

This isn't some kind of super hypothetical what-if scenario. We have historical records.

It went poorly.

We tried the random thing?

It's not unheard of[1]. Ancient Athens used random selection for many offices and some Italian city-states like Venice and Florence incorporated elements of randomness. A lot of historians think that it did help a lot in reigning in corruption and making it harder for foreign powers to influence their politics.

I think randomly selecting a president is probably a bad idea but randomly selecting a parliament and then having them elect a prime minister from within that group would work well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

> The generational succession is VASTLY more predictable than a random one

Is it? Plenty of wars have been fought over succession.

Imagine a system whereby you could pole everyone and get a dud leader removed, rather than keep them until they die.

There have been a fair few elections with orderly transitions between governments.

What counterexamples do we have of the random method, to compare? I can’t think of when it’s been tried by a consenting people