this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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I heard a very interesting argument that if the Royal family can remove Andrew from the line of succession, then the line itself can be manipulated, and anyone else could be added. In that case, what is the point of having a royal family?
I’m not sure what the point is in any case. Whatever about how the monarch is chosen…having a monarch is bad! And this monarchy is particularly bad!
A lot of people have a tendency to want to show loyalty to their country by showing subservience to some rich arrogant asshole that surrounds themselves with gold. See the how a significant percentage of the US population think of Trump for example.
If there is no King the subservient portion of the population will create one. It's better to have a King that doesn't have any actual power so that won't happen. The subservient part of the population don't really care that their King has no political power, they just want to bow to someone to prove their loyalty to the country and see some pomp and pageantry. For a lot of people the concept of a country is too abstract to understand so they need some person to do all kinds the ceremonial stuff so they can express their loyalty to the country by showing loyalty to that person.
Similar to how having a separation between government and religion, it's a separation between government and all the ceremonial pomp and pageantry stuff.
Sure, I wouldn't directly care if there was monarchy was eliminated, but a lot of other people would. And those people would start voting in some wealthy asshole to rule over us like a king. And that's something I definitely don't want. So just give the subservient types someone they can bow to so it doesn't impact the rest of us.
The line has been manipulated several times by Parliament, including the selection and elimination of kings.
The point of the royal family now isn't to be a defined lineage, but an agreed upon vessel to hold power when Parliament temporarily breaks. Even then, Queen Elizabeth II was kind of shit at it.
I kind of feel like the Royal line has been nothing but manipulated. Usurpations, rule changes, and exceptions to primogeniture have been there since the beginning.
It'd be nice if this led to just getting rid of the concept of royal families in general
A monarchy is a family business. Anyone in the family can run it. Monarchies are inherently unstable when the monarchs die because of this.
Authoritarian forms of government will be unstable when there's no clear line of succession. It's the reason why monarchies come about. It's not like people don't understand that it's extremely arbitrary, it's just that it's better than the alternative: civil wars whenever whoever is in power dies. It's an agreement among various lords that it's better they just accept that person over there that's the son of the King will someday be King rather than having a civil war when the King dies.
And sure civil wars would still happen, but most of the time the succession would happen without bloodshed. When there's no line of succession, it's just constant power struggles when the leader dies.
Of course democracy is a far better way to determine who will run things, but that requires a literate population to work. Which didn't exist throughout much of human history. Sure, there were republics throughout history, but they'd usually become monarchies when the illiterate masses would decide they liked that Julius guy (he threw the best parties!) and hated that Brutus guy who killed him, even if the Julius guy was becoming a tyrant.
So monarchies suck, but they're better than civil wars. So when the population becomes too dumb, it sucks, but it's better than the alternatives.
Seems a little threadbare as a theory.
People have been adding other people to royal families for the entirety of recorded history.
Sometimes its through marriage, but sometimes its adoption, sometimes they just make up a lineage.
Now, theres arguments against royalty, for sure, but if the royal family wasn't allowed to prune itself, find the best people and merge them into the royal family, etc, there never would've been royals in the first place. Royal families begin with individuals but they remain by caring about "good breeding" (and other ways of consolidating power).
Consolidating is the real purpose. It can be obscured with religious lines of divinity, or what have you, but royal families are always shopping for people to incorporate.