its also important to note that the King isn't necessarily supposed to be the most capable. He's supposed to embody the State in his person. History is full of Kings who left most of the running of the country to advisors and senior ministers. This is why I'm not a fan of absolute monarchies either. I rather like the idea of hybrid systems and constitutional monarchies where the King is bound to certain higher order principles that even he cannot change, with suitable checks on his power.
When you reduce to the monarch to a figurehead instead of his role as a leader of the people (which is why kings existed to begin with in every society), then you get the beginnings of subjects acquiring privileges that undermine the state. For every good minister, there's a lazy minister who got his power because his family background was good and he managed to slander the right people.
Absolute monarchy was the only form of monarchy that ever worked. That's why the most successful monarchies, wherever they were from, believed in the idea of the monarch's absolute power rather than the medieval European conception of the nobility and church having certain inherent rights (which itself goes back to Germanic tribal law). The end result of the latter was nothing but endless feudal wars, states incapable of anything, and yes, the beginning of liberalism thanks to the most extreme application of these rights like in England (Magna Carta), Italy (all the communes), and Poland (all the privileges the Jagiellonians granted). Once you mate the idea of these rights with the philosophy of nominalism, you get liberalism. Yes, England came to conquer the world and started the Industrial Revolution, but England was favored by geography and luck and was playing on easymodo.
I think you're adopting liberal ideas without knowing it when you imagine "suitable checks" on the power of the king, because that's something innately tied to the development of liberalism. Unless you imagine it from an extreme clericalist standpoint (of the sort that was politically dead by the 1300s thanks to the Avignon Papacy and permanently killed by the Western Schism), where the Pope takes an active role in the politics of all Christian nations.
The President is still elected by the people. Originally indirectly, and then later directly. The big difference between a King and a President is that a King ascends to power through mechanism that do not even consider popular consent. His authority is derived from heaven, not from the people. So an example of a "Hybrid" system would be a Hereditary Monarchy with a coequal branch of elected representatives. Though there could also be a step removed from Hereditary Monarchy as well. Perhaps an upper house made up of Landed Nobles who elect among themselves the King, much like how the Holy Roman Empire functioned at least in principle if not function. Good example of this today would be the Vatican City.
Elective monarchy is literally the worst political system in all of existance. It has failed every single time at producing a coherent state, for the exact same reasons why democracy fails. Why would you, the high noble permitted to be an elector, vote for a ruler who seems capable? You want to make that ruler promise you all sorts of things and win your vote. Ergo the end result was always feudal anarchy and a non-functional government because the central government had to give all sorts of shit away and engage in nepotism to get elected (sound familiar?). Anglo-Saxon England was a shitfest. Medieval Hungary was a shitfest. The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth was a shitfest. Medieval Scandinavia was a shitfest (and never united because of electoral monarchy) that when it finally unfucked itself in the 1600s by mass executions of nobles and clergy unsurprisingly became a powerhouse (both Denmark and especially Sweden). The Holy Roman Empire was a shitfest until the Emperor decided to not bother trying to make a coherent country anymore because he already had a kingdom for himself.
No, I think its going to give way to unenlightened corporate syndicalism like what @Save the Loli is arguing for. This is because everyone is stuck in this Liberal paradigm of thinking where they assume that the solution to todays problems is more of the stuff that is poisoning the well.
Liberalism didn't poison the well so much as the well was already poisoned. The rise of cities and wealthy peasants absolutely confounded traditionalism as early as the 1300s (the aforementioned Count of Flanders fleeing like a bitch to his masters in France), and that would inevitably lead to the gradual disintegration of this traditionalism which can only work under feudalism. Land ownership is not the basis for wealth in the present, not because of Jewish conspiracies but because there's businesses beside being a landlord. Thus you need to implement a meritocratic system so successful men can advance and aid the state and thus enlightened absolutism, as the monarchs of Europe did (and to a degree the Tokugawa Shogunate which also dealt with this problem as land ownership became less important).
There's also the fact that nations exist, which medieval Europe hardly recognized, and thus a national character exists. So you really only have three options--feudalism, liberalism, or post-liberalism, because those are the systems that have been part of European culture since the late Roman Empire, and European culture is ultimately defined by its inheritance of Greco-Roman culture as mediated by the influence of Germanic law. You can't wholesale impose some sort of Asian despotism on European cultures no more than liberalism works in Asia. You can borrow influences, sure, but not a whole ideology (as recognized by people like Sun Yat-sen and Lee Kuan Yew and the modern CCP after the utter disaster of Maoism). So that's why you need to
rebuild tradition instead of simply copy it, and that's where national syndicalism excels at it, particularly if we add successful elements from other cultures like a Confucian view on governance and morality much as modern Asian traditionalists believe in borrowing elements from post-liberalism.
I dislike communists and hate fascists, but I absolutely loath traditionalists.
I am a goddam red-blooded American, and I refuse to bow down before any kind of inbred gilded niggerfaggot whose claim to rule is 'God said so'. All of OP's criticisms of liberalism are invalidated by him being a cock-hungry faggot who wants to kneel before some foreign fop and his band of warlord cronies. That's Africa politics shit.
The commies didn't kill enough of these fuckers.
One of the best takes on traditionalism I've ever read, and among the big redpills for me regarding democracy and liberalism was an old text by a Tsarist reactionary minister named K.P. Pobedonostsev. He writes a very impassioned defense of Tsarist monarchism in Russia. The gist of it is that it's within the Russian national character, and he's more or less correct even if it was proven that the absolute figure need not be a Tsar. Pobedonostsev mentions the US a lot, and says that American national character (derived from English and Scottish character) is different so doesn't recommend absolutism.
I gotta thank my college professor for assigning me that book--imagine taking a class from an obviously leftist professor, coming in as a leftist, and leaving as not a leftist!
Here's the link since it's free.
