But the greater point is that limited monarchy seems to be working where it still exists, and popular democracy does not seem to be working where it has been introduced.

Funny to see this in the NYT.

Anyone else ever feel like they just don’t get with the times?

The proper reason to support an existing monarchy is loyalty to the identity, traditions and institutions of one’s ancestors and people.

In the event anyone seriously starts new ones, the proper motive is loyalty to the lineage and legacy of some great founder, insofar as it is, again, bound up with the identity of one’s people. This sort of thinking comes easier to people who actually think of heredity as both real and a good thing, to be honored even when it produces flaws. There’s always room for flexibility.

Alas, the trust was broken many times in both directions. At least in the west.

Fukuyama implied that liberal democracy was the final form of human government. I’m somewhat of the view that it is already being supplanted, even if the progressives call their thing “democracy”. But SF writers have long reasonably written on the assumption that different planetary, interplanetary, biological and technological conditions would continue to both reintroduce old forms of government and develop speculative new ones.

Dynastic politics are a favourite. Sure, it makes an easy, reader-friendly society that contemporary Earth humans can relate to, and allows a certain romance or soapy quality if that’s what one wants. In the “Battletech” game universe and its many novels, dynastic rule [with some checks and balances] is the norm for the empires of a human dominated galaxy. Many other SF properties use the dynastic model.

Margaret Weis once wrote a middling-grade series called Star of the Guardians, in which the largely exterminated human caste of monarchs and princes [the "Blood Royal"] had in the distant past been genetically engineered to rule.

I suppose a monarchy like that being created in the future would strike someone like me as tendentious but that’s mainly because I’m considering it from the point of view of a time before our elites manage to create it… If I joined the story in medias res, perhaps I’d have another view.

Of course, I’m loyal to my own monarch for the earlier-stated reasons, despite her occasionally revealed less-than-satisfying sentiments and the increasing futility of the whole thing.

“We assemble a unique dataset on leaders between 1874 and 2004 in which we classify them as hereditary leaders based on their family history. The core empirical finding is that economic growth is higher in polities with hereditary leaders but only if executive constraints are weak.”

- link 1
- link 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye

Pardon my skepticism over a shocking “scientific” study reported not in a peer-reviewed journal but rather in a press release. ;-)