Guest post: Compelling arguments for monarchy

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on One’s estates.

The third* most common argument I hear from pro-monarchy Norwegians is something along the lines of “Would you rather have something like the American model and get someone like Trump as the Head of State?”. This seems to presuppose that the monarchy does indeed serve a real function that must be served somehow, so if the monarchy is abolished we need to put something else in its place. My answer is the same as the one I give when religious apologists ask what atheists want to put in religion’s place: Neither the monarchy nor religion serves any function that needs to be served at at all, so we can just abolish both and have nothing in their place.

The fourth most common argument is that the monarchy supposedly plays some unspecified yet vitally important role in luring foreign investors to Norwegian companies. At this point I always imagine someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk sitting there and thinking to himself “I was going to invest my money where one would expect the highest returns, but then I learned that Norway has a monarchy, so now I’ve decided to invest everything in Norwegian salted and dried cod instead and watch my financial empire crumble”.

*The first two are (1) “I still get warm fuzzies about the King’s admirable refusal to concede to the Nazi occupiers in 1940, therefore monarchy good” and (2) “but the Norwegian royal family is so much nicer and more in tune with ordinary people than those pompous snobs they have in Britain!”

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