Not necessarily. Capitalist oligarchies can certainly exist within the structure of compromised liberal democracies but it’s by no means a guaranteed outcome. Even neoreactionaries like Thiel admit an incompatibility between their ideal of capitalism (really neofeudalism) and the purest forms of liberal democracy, resulting in a preference for monarchy by some of them.
The kinds of non-constitutional monarchies you would choose over liberal democracies explicitly enshrine privilege for a select few, inevitably resulting in the oligarchies and concentration of wealth you’re claiming you want to avoid.
It’s the 21st century here in the industrialised West. That people are still talking about the supposed benefits an unelected monarch can bring to the table instead of dismissing that outmoded institution as a barbarous relic is mindboggling.
7. What’s the Khashoggi family’s relationship with Turkey?
In Turkey, they’re known as the Kasikci family. Their most famous member until now was Adnan Khashoggi, the billionaire arms dealer whose biography is called “The Richest Man in the World,” and who in the 1980s sold his yacht, the Nabila, to Donald Trump. Adnan Khashoggi’s father was Turkish, a doctor who married a Saudi woman and became court physician to King Abdulaziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia. That marked the family’s rise to prominence in Saudi Arabia. However, they’ve kept their ties to Turkey. Another member of the family, Hasan Khashoggi, made the news in Turkey in 2017 when he survived a terrorist attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul, in which a gunman massacred 39 people.
Doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a broadbased coalition against the Shah. It absolutely was. The Shah was a brutal dictator. Sure, there might have been more brutal ones, but his was brutal enough to set off an uprising against him.
Maybe. The Hashemites had been the governors of Mecca and Medina since the time of the prophet (and claim descent from him), even under the Ottomans. Having that taken away was no small thing and was entirely engineered by the West working in conjunction with the house of Saud. I think it’s important to remember that the power structures in place today go back to the period of the dismantling of the Ottoman empire and were not entirely of the making of people who live there.
In the end I doubt the Hashemites would have been any less corrupt or ignorant or prone to blackmail by Sunni religious fundies, especially once the oil money started rolling in. As destructive as the British and French and later U.S. meddling in the region was, in a way the West did the Hashemites a favour, saving them from the worst of the resource curse and forcing them to wise up, get educated, and start joining the modern world.
Maybe, but it’s a counterfactual and we can’t know either way for sure. We do know what the Saudis have done and continue to do. They get worse with every passing day. We do know that they are causing a major humanitarian disaster, are funding terrorism, ignoring the Palestinian issue, and blockading their neighbors who refuse to muzzle their media in their favor… and of course, assassinating journalist on top of all that.
If Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud by Said K. Aburish is to believed, the Hashemites were educated aristocrats while the House of Saud were a clan of desert bandits fond of livestock rustling.
They also were fond of a particular weird desert sect, the Wahhabists, who from a being a minor and largely disregarded group were now associated with arguably the most powerful Islamic power in the Middle East. Most of the Islamic terrorists are associated in some way or other with Wahhabism.
Jordan wasn’t cursed with the wealth from all that oil or by having to maintain the major holy sites that made the Sauds prime blackmail target by the fundies. That said I can definitely see @GagHalfrunt’s point that the Hashemites might have been more cultured hillbillies and thus perhaps better equipped to deal with the challenges that the Sauds were never up to.
As @mindysan33 says, it’s all counterfactuals anyhow.
This is true. That alliance goes back well before the end of the Ottoman Empire. Still, control of the Mecca and Medina meant that religious fundie thugs of some sort were going to want to wet their beaks and would blackmail the ruling family to do so.
That’s a pure assertion. As a counterexample, the seizing of power over what is now Nepal by Prithvinarayan Shah ended up in noticeable improvement of life for the ‘peasant class’ of these areas compared to their earlier state under a variety of essentially petty chieftains.
" inevitably resulting in the oligarchies and concentration of wealth you’re claiming you want to avoid." - but this the hallmark of ‘liberal democracy’
There are better ways with more popular legitimacy to establish life-improving universal standards of governance than an unelected monarchy (AKA one petty unelected chieftain overcoming the others). Prithvi Narayan Shah (not exactly a poor man compared to most of his countrymen) died just one year before one of those better ways was declared.
He also didn’t set a very good example to his kid, the next king, concerning spreading around the wealth. According to Teh Wiki, Junior:
was more involved in the Royal luxuries rather than the unification campaign.
As a result his brother was more admired, but thanks to the genetic lottery of monarchy this dud was the king. And of course that lottery can have really unfortunate results:
You can keep your unelected monarchies, thank you very much.
Now that’s a pure assertion. Not every liberal democracy is the U.S., and not every one has to settle on neoliberal capitalism as its preferred economic system (illiberal democracies, in contrast, will always end up with an oligarchy and concentration of wealth because their leaders secretly or not so secretly aspire to be kings).
In the modern world, an unelected monarch is less likely to bring about economic and social equality than is an unelected Leninist vanguard party (which historically fails at doing that, too). You want to improve quality of life for the people, try expanding their educational horizons* and then asking them to decide what they want. If things go pear-shaped they’ll have only themselves to blame.
[* this is really the failure point in the U.S., one deliberately exacerbated by conservatives]
