I have consistently promoted our British monarchy but at the same time I say to people that I subscribe towards an anarchist view when I look at state systems. They don’t understand how these two can be reconciled so I have to explain this. With Monarchy they think of autocratic rulers and with Anarchy they immediately think of flying bottles and burning cars.
Yes there are monarchs that are despots and there are anarchists who are vandals. But that isn’t British.
I view anarchy like I view a fuse or circuit breaker in a power supply. It isn’t the voltage regulator, it doesn’t provide the current, but you would be a fool to not have this in a design. When something goes drastically wrong then you need something to cut the juice, quickly. That’s anarchy. It can be a spectacular flare of molten metal and exploding air or the delicate trip of a relay. That is your design decision but it is intrinsic to the design, not extrinsic.
In a well regulated environment with supply matching loads then the capability to stop the power should exist as part of the system but never needed to be used.
Anarchy is non-violent and without coercion. There is a lot of confusion with the term in that it is associated with lawlessness, disorder and violence but if you have that association then you are a victim of some presumptions. It is the same class of presumptions that associate atheism with immorality. In much the way that atheism isn’t a belief then anarchy isn’t a means to rule. What is positively claimed will vary for the atheist and could be diametrically opposed philosophy though western atheists generally positively claim to be secular humanist and societies with a high level of organic atheism are predominantly stable and societally healthy. At the core of secular humanism though will be a explicit naturalistic worldview and so an implicit atheism. In this way atheism is not a nihilism but quite the reverse in that theism is the nihilism because a created universe is pointless from a human point of view. Presumptions are just points of view and easily reversed.
In a similar way, someone can positively express a reduction or elimination of the state by promoting another system rather than promoting anarchy. If a rule is necessary to achieve a common good then anarchy isn’t such a process but it should be in the design criteria for such a process.
When used in the design of a system then this is an intrinsic anarchism and the anarchist in all of us must always look for where this fuse is and who is controlling this. When a monarch dissolves a parliament because the elected leaders couldn’t agree on a finance budget then that is the fuse – that is the anarchy in that the state is non-violently dissolved. It is that there is now no elected state but there will be a transition to a new government. That’s my kind of anarchy. There was no violent storming of parliament, no military junta, but a simple process that removed the state. The monarch as a titular head of state with the power to dissolve parliament is such a fuse in our British system. They don’t have power in themselves to rule the people but they can remove the state’s ability to rule. For this reason I support such a titular head of state. So there you have it, an anarchist who supports democratically elected states with a monarch as the titular head of state because the monarch is the ultimate anarchist who can remove the state with a flick of a pen if it should so be necessary to do.
I would love it if we could work out some other system for Britain like an elected titular head of state but I do not know of any republicans that promote their point of view in the way that I do in that the president would remain the ultimate anarchist of the society. Presidents traditionally have a tendency to rule rather than to be the anti-ruler. Maybe a British President could break that mould ? I don’t know. I do know that what we have for the past few hundred years does work so I don’t see a need to change this on a whim.