Bunyip Aristocracy

Knights, Dames, Beheadings

A few weeks ago Elon Musk really dropped the ball on whatever back end algorithm controls X’s For You feed and for a solid couple of days I was exposed to a cascade of leftoid content during my afternoon bar stool doom scrolls. I saw this meme, by some guy with a Palestine/Rainbow flag profile pic, it was a picture of a guillotine with the word “Soon” under it.

And I thought, man that’s pretty funny. Because in real life, it’s less than two decades from when the French declare the Republic to when they crown an emperor.

“Well comrades, we did et, ze aristocrats are dead! Ze Dauphin’s blood runs in ze Place de la Révolution! What shall we do? Oo will lead us?” Robespierre takes a bite of the giant ball of cheese he was gesticulating with, a murmur goes through the crowd. “I ave an idea - what if… instead of a Dauphin, we ave… a different guy… not an aristocrat, just… any guy. And instead of a crown…. well, actually what if he also had a crown… But we call him… something different…” The tiny hand of some Hugo-esque street urchin goes up “What about a Consul?” Robespierre throws his ball of cheese to the hungry street urchin who scurries away like a mouse. “Genius enfant! A consul! There’s no way a Republic with a consul could ever fall to tyranny! Zat as never appened! This will work perfectly! Glory to ze people! Glory to ze Révolution!”

I do actually sympathize with the leftist urge to periodically purge aristocrats but you have to go into it open eyed. The beauty of aristocracy, the reason it’s been the preferred method of socio-political organization for two millennia, independent of geography, emerging concurrently on opposite sides of the world and functioning identically regardless of culture - is the system is nearly perfect.

An aristocrat’s life is worth nothing. This is why a millennia of European nobles enthusiastically strapped their heirs into suits of armor and had them run into walls of spears on horses. The system is designed so each component, each individual aristocrat, is interchangeable. If one dies, they’re replaced with a genetic copy, or a cousin, or a second cousin. If the bloodline runs out, you skip one bloodline over, and you’re all but guaranteed that replacement will be identical in character and outlook. They’ll have been educated to the same standard and possess the same skill set (swords, fucking, money). And they have the same investment in the success of the State they have to run. The system only has to run for a few decades and a sub-aristocracy emerges that does all the non-sword, non-fucking, non-money jobs, like, building churches, collecting taxes, books. But they actually function the same way, with a longer lead in time because the educational requirements are more stringent.

After a few centuries, you get a sub-sub aristocracy, and that’s when you’re really locked in. Because the sword and fucking aristocrats, the bricks and books aristocrats, they need someone to wipe their arses, someone to light their candles, someone to hold their spears, and an aristocracy emerges at that level which now means your society has built in redundancies. If the sword and fucking aristocrats make a mistake, the bricks and books aristocrats take over for a while, but if the sword and fucking aristocrats make a mistake, the bricks and books aristocrats don’t do their jobs, the toilet and toil aristocrats chop everyone’s heads off and start again.

And every single time this happens - the toilet people become the new aristocrats.

The reason why you can make jokes about chopping aristocrats heads off is at some primordial level everyone knows this is how society is meant to function. If there is no implicit threat of beheading, aristocrats get lazy and your society collapses.

Seen through this lens, you can strip the economic window dressing out of Marx and see it as actually a very complimentary template for accelerating the system when it gets bogged down with too many component parts, too many sub-sub-sub-sub aristocracies and regional fiefdoms, Marxism can come along and clean the slate in one go. At a state level, Marxism is a really benign affectation. The USSR and CCP prove that done correctly as a transitional model, you can just use it to elevate a new generation of toilet aristocrats to power and effectively fool the regular dirt people at the bottom of the heap that it’s something different. Marxism at a bureaucratic level is utter poison - which is probably why the CCP’s current aristocracy sends their children to the West to learn economics before they let them anywhere near a government organ.

China is a fascinating case study in aristocratic transition because they so utterly ruined their society in just a few short centuries before their revolution. It turns out, you can’t really sideline the sword and fucking aristocrats and control the bricks, books, toilet and toil aristocrats by just chopping their cocks off. It doesn’t take long for everyone to realize that the whole model is only invested with transient authority and the toilet people’s desire to keep their cocks far out weighs the real nobility’s ability to keep their heads.

It’s taken China a century, and some extremely chaotic revolutions to get over the cock removal period, but now they have a king, a court, a flourishing aristocracy, and all is right with the world.

This reveals the real secret to successful aristocratic transition, which is you need to change the names around. Change the trappings and furniture. Create new rituals and cast new crowns. Xi is Emperor in all but name. Stalin was Emperor in all but name. Hitler was a Kaiser. George Washington was a King. The people below the toilet aristocracy are dirty and stupid but they aren’t that stupid. The French certainly realized that just swapping out powdered wigs for tri-corner hats didn’t really cut the mustard.

Which brings us to the British, and discursively, to Australia.

“I say chaps, bloody worrying things happening on the continent. If we don’t get our act together some Fenian blaggard is going to come to the manor and chop our heads off. Have you ever seen an Irishman? Me neither, but I hear they’re disgusting. So here’s the plan: we let the bricks and books chaps run this thing called a “corporation”. And we send them to India. Or maybe Sudan. Or Burma? There’s also this whole island we just found, seems vaguely interesting. Doesn’t matter so long as they aren’t here. We send the toilet people with them. We’ll have to wipe our own bottoms but it’s a small price to pay. Then we let the dirt people run things. I know, I know, it sounds positively bonkers, but think about it. They can draw lots, they can take it in turns, but we’ll have no responsibility if things go wrong. They can’t chop their own heads off because it makes them uncomfortable. They’ll have a round robin system to pick a temporary governor of the homeland and it won’t matter if they get it wrong or right because we can just trot off to Majorca in an emergency. We’ll keep the manor, we’ll still do fucking but we only have to do swords if it’s really important. It’s agreed? Smashing. Sherry?”

Since the end of their Civil War the history of the British Empire is really just a series of japes by a sclerotic aristocracy to stave off their natural retirement due to head loss. Cromwell is largely to blame. For all the hagiography about his stern, puritanical character, when the time came for serious skull collecting he got the wobbles. As a result, the British aristocracy were able to shuffle their entire society around so they could have an easy going few centuries of irrelevance, tea parties, and only occasional sword play and only when they got really bored.

It didn’t help that the only serious ideological threat to the regime of doing nothing were Irish rebels, insurgents of such profound incompetence they couldn’t secure more than a peninsula for themselves even with, by the 20th century, the support of the Soviet Union, the Arab League, and much of the American east coast industrial base. A fucking spaceship could have landed in Dublin and aliens given the IRA laser guns and they would have proceeded to trip on a banana peel and disintegrated themselves.

The British had a geographic advantage in that it’s just very hard for anyone to get to them, and a cultural advantage in that the Protestant work ethic kept the bricks and toilet aristocrats so busy with paperwork, boat building, law making, there really wasn’t any time for them to size up the curtains in the mansions down the road.

But as it turned out, it only takes a few decades of sitting around the fen chasing foxes and reviewing tweed swatches that you loose interest in swords and fucking completely. All it would have taken is one young buck in the line of succession to sow his wild oats in the manufactured sub aristocracies of Rangoon and Calcutta and we’d be living in a much, much different world. But the British aristocracy couldn’t keep their mitts off blobby school teachers, American actresses and their own cousins. Sexual racism might be fine for nativist dirt farmers and social media influencers but with the privilege of sovereignty should have come the occasional obligation to marry a Jaipur or Konbaung princess. The American aristocracy gets it, look at JD Vance.

By the 20th century, the British aristocracy had kept their heads but lost any shred of relevance to anyone other than tabloid journalists and the parasocial housewives who keep them in business. The entire United Kingdom is now little more than a democratic petri dish the rest of us can observe for research purposes, so we know exactly what entropy and decay in the latest stage of liberal decline looks like. When the last functionary turns out the lights at Number 10 Downing Street, they’ll hand the keys to a local toilet aristocrat answerable to a bricks and books aristocrat in Brussels who in turn is answerable to an actual swords and fucking aristocrat from one of the modern dynastic banking families or maybe even the House of Saud depending on just how badly things work out over the next few years.

The greatest sin the British ruling class ever committed during the age of colonization wasn’t all the sad face emoji “colonialisms”, the teaching stone age people how to use cutlery, the building rail lines, the programmatic control (atrocities in the modern parlance), it was their complete failure to establish any aristocratic infrastructure in the states where they were the ethnic majority (Australia, South Africa) and the undermining of the aristocratic infrastructure they co opted (India, Burma, Egypt, Oman, Sudan).

Since the round robin, or effectively random transference of governorship in their homeland seemed to be working reasonably well they just assumed this would work everywhere if they left behind the template. We now know, it doesn’t even work very well for them, let alone in India, let alone in Burma, or Myanmar, or Burma again depending on which regional warlord is running it today or tomorrow. And we are increasingly aware - it’s not working well in Australia either.

“Here, we all know the common water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a bunyip aristocracy.” Dan Deniehy said. I was talking to a fellow traveler recently who misattributed that quote to Henry Parkes, and he’s not the only one. I think it’s embedded in the Australian political psyche that the person who coined the term “Bunyip Aristocracy” to deride the establishment of Australian peerages and thus permanently poison our country with the cancer of toxic egalitarianism was someone of genuine note. But he was not a person of note.

The first thing you need to know about Dan Deniehy is he was 150cm tall and sickly, a point often reflected on in biographies. The second thing you need to know, is he was poor. The third thing - is he was a journalist.

Australia had one shot at establishing a properly ordered aristocracy that could have seen us endure and thrive in peace and stability, eventually surpassing the Empire that spawned us, and it was destroyed by a diminutive pauper from the most effeminate profession there is.

As few people know who even said it, fewer know exactly what he said it in response to, which was a motion by the NSW Legislative Council to establish hereditary peerage, the Bunyip Aristocracy was not theoretical, 15 landed members of the Council really wanted to give themselves actual titles. There was talk of an Australian College of Heraldry. William Wentworth wrote the motion, not some crank who just wanted to wear a funny hat. At the time of the drafting of the Bill (the rest of which would end up becoming the first NSW Constitution, sans peerages), he had purchased 20 million acres of land in New Zealand from the Māori. He could have been the King of NSW and New Zealand with little effort, were it not for the tentacles of liberalism spreading through the nascent Australian soul. He had to content himself with merely crossing the Blue Mountains, establishing the University of Sydney, convening the first constitutional convention, becoming the first President of the Legislative Council. He established what we now know as land rights, despite his peerage plan being publicly eviscerated by Deniehy in his radical left newspaper, he would enshrine the Australian freedom of the press and the right to a jury trial. Wentworth was laid to rest after Australia’s first ever state funeral and he is buried at his former estate in Vaucluse overlooking Port Jackson - he was 82. He was the wealthiest man in the colony. Deniehy died penniless of alcoholism in Bathurst at 37.

He’s commemorated by a statue tucked behind the Department of Lands building commissioned years later by, predictably, Sydney’s community of journalists. I can’t remember the inscription but it’s something along the lines of “here lies a beta cuck journoid”. Or words to that effect. It’s worth noting that just as society let’s you get away with the occasional joke about beheading aristocrats, it also increasingly lets you get away with cutting the heads off statues dead white guys. It goes without saying I have my eye on that statue of Deniehy, for when the time comes.

More than a century later Tony Abbott had his own abortive attempt at peerages and it went predictably poorly. It’s really too late to salvage any sense of nobility out of the Australian body politic. The creation of an Australian aristocracy will be more like the Russian or Chinese model where it’s via stealth. The aristocrats will live in nicer houses, exert overt and covert control over the affairs of state, establish a system of hereditary transference of power but swear up and down they really aren’t aristocrats.

“Bloody hell Sheila I think we’ve got a bloody bunyip aristocracy rooting around in bloody Canberra!” “Can’t be Bruce, look at em, they don’t have the hats.” “Crikey you’re right Sheila. No wigs either. No bloody mole drawn on their cheek. Can’t be aristocrats at all.” “Nah they’re just like us Bruce.”

It is kind of funny that in the last hundred years they figured out you can just take the outfits off and no one realizes you have an aristocracy anymore. I have enormous respect for the Saudis for maintaining one, with the outfits, for more than a thousand years. They’ve even got different outfits for the different tiers of aristocrat. White robes for sword and fucking Saudis, black robes for bricks and books Saudis, and Ralph Lauren for toilet Saudis. And if you’ve ever been a woman on a Toilet Saudi’s yacht you know they take that part of their job very seriously.

The problem in Australia is instead of a Bunyip Aristocracy we got a Clayton’s Aristocracy. The aristocracy you have when you’re not having an aristocracy. Worse than even the British model of having them retire from responsibility. Because the modern Australian aristocrat tricks his, her or themselves into thinking they have more power than they really do.

This is why you can joke about chopping the heads off theoretical aristocrats but you absolutely can’t joke about killing the Prime Minister. An aristocrat isn’t a person, chop their head off another one takes their place. The Prime Minister is just a guy in the right place at the right time, who is temporarily convinced of his own aristocratic status but who has no dynastic investment in the state, his son is probably going to end up being a suburban solicitor or something, his legacy is just news print and transient policies.

“If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize” - has to be one of the funniest misattributed quotes of this or any other century. Used constantly by all sides of politics, often thought to be by Voltaire, but really by 1990s White Nationalist Kevin Alfred Strom. But it’s only correct in a post aristocratic world. If you really want to know who rules over you, just look for you are allowed to joke about beheading. Because therein lies the consensus about who the aristocrats really are. You’ll get a knock on the door if you say “I want to behead Evelyn De Rothschild specifically” but you can get away with “We should behead The Rothschilds”. Because the Rothschilds aren’t a specific person, it’s a canard for early 21st century crypto aristocracy in general. They’re not a real person, there are real Rothschilds, of varying degrees of power and influence, but as a class, you can go crazy. Not caring that dirt people go around saying they want to cut your head of is the defining feature of being an aristocrat. Because if you dropped every drooling degenerate who said that in an oubliette or something, it erodes the edifice of control. Power isn’t locking up people who say mean things about you, real power, is not caring if they do.

Every aristocrat knows that it doesn’t matter if the kine hate them, it only matters if they’re in a position to do something about it, and in their hearts of hearts they know, should the day come when the peasants revolt, as they’re being dragged from the manor and led to the Le Rasoir National - they probably deserve it for not being more circumspect, and that it’s only a matter of time before their replacements are coronated, one way or the other.

Until Australia has a governing class about whom we can all joke about needing to be separated from their craniums, nothing is going to get better. People who understand power, and understand their role in exercising it. There’s a chap who was arrested yesterday for saying he wanted to kill the Communications Minister Anika Wells. If Anika Wells were really in power, she would book another ten thousand dollar first class flight, fly to the trial, inform the court that the man is an insect who would doubtless trip over his own shoelaces or get distracted by some working class obsession like a football match or a poker machine before he could get even as far as her security functionaries, let alone pose a direct threat to her person.

That’s what a real aristocrat would do.