More anti-democratic thoughts from 2018 the NYT allowed this writer to exclude from his current piece. Delivered with an air of detached irony, as if he miiight be joking or exaggerating. But is he?
Not only is this guy an asshole, he’s also wrong: many, many pre-modern regimes were very unstable and changed frequently. The difference is this change would come from civil wars between rival elite factions, wars that reliably immiserated the population
The Roman Empire sometimes went decades without an uncontested sovereign. Norman/Plantagenet England had a civil war more or less every other generation. The Holy Roman Empire had occasional generation-long interregnums. The Cordoba caliphate collapsed after a succession crisis
Some scholars think all of Shakespeare's history plays are about the anxiety over the wars of religion restarting or alternate forms of government if Elizabeth 1 died without an heir.
France having a series of single heirs long enough to consolidate into an early modern kingdom is sometimes referred to as a "miracle". (but in the secular sense, not the Catholic sense, I assume)
Yeah the Capets are the exception that proves the rule I think. Also stable as that dynasty was the French throne was contested multiple times by the Plantagenets and every time it led to misery and disaster for the French peasantry
Without Diocletian and Constantine, the 3rd century crises might well have ended the Empire two centuries early -- and without a stable Eastern Empire to survive.
