<\/p>\n
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!<\/p>\n
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay<\/p>\n
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare<\/p>\n
The lone and level sands stretch far away.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u2014 Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley<\/p>\n
It begins, as it often does, with scandal. It will likely end that way, too. This time, not only in Britain, long the global stage for the great royal soap opera, but in Norway, where once squeaky-clean palace fa\u00e7ades are cracking under the weight of very modern, and very very lurid embarrassments.<\/p>\n
The latest allegations against Marius Borg Hoiby, son of crown princess Mette-Marit, have shaken the Nordic kingdom to its pragmatic soul. The princess herself is now embroiled in fresh controversy over hundreds of emails that tie her to Jeffrey Epstein<\/a>. Across the North Sea, Britain\u2019s crumbling institution finds itself once again defending the indefensible, in the form of the now exiled former prince Andrew<\/a> \u2014 whose vile entanglements have become an open wound in the crumbling House of Windsor.<\/p>\n Each time, the reaction feels more weary, more hollow. There are fewer defenders, fewer royalists ready to rally to the banner. Something broader is happening: Monarchy itself as an idea, as pageantry, as moral fiction, is tilting irrevocably towards irrelevance.<\/p>\n According to the National Centre for Social Research in Britain, support for the British monarchy has fallen to its lowest level since records began in the 1980s, with barely half (51%) of Britons now believing it is \u201cimportant\u201d to maintain the institution. Just 40 years ago, as Princess Diana was privately miserable in her very public pomp, that figure was 86%. Meanwhile, almost four in ten now say they would prefer to see an elected head of state.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not only the British crown under strain. In the Netherlands, support for the monarchy dropped from 75% in 2020 to 58% in 2021. In Spain, the shadow of Juan Carlos I\u2019s financial scandals lingers, and a growing republican movement calls for a referendum.\u00a0<\/p>\n The world now counts 43 monarchies, down from more than 100 a century ago. The trend is unmistakable: Monarchies have been in retreat since the dawn of the 20th century.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, kings and queens compete with celebrities and billionaires who perform the same symbolic role but live under democratic scrutiny. When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle fled Britain for California, they didn\u2019t overthrow the old order, they simply franchised it into the influencer economy. Monarchs compete not with presidents but with Kardashians.<\/p>\n As philosopher Massimo Pigliucci argued in Think for Cambridge University Press, monarchy survives only as \u201ca relic of our feudal past.\u201d Even in constitutional form, it \u201caffronts human dignity,\u201d resting on the premise that some are born to rule and others to serve. The moral argument for abolition, Pigliucci says, outweighs any sentimental attachment or pragmatic stability such institutions might claim.<\/p>\n Constitutional theorist Craig Prescott, writing after King Charles III\u2019s coronation, suggested the monarchy once had value as a \u201cpressure valve\u201d \u2014 a neutral arbiter in political crises. But that function has long disappeared. Modern conventions forbid the monarch from acting independently; by law and precedent, the king effectively must obey the prime minister\u2019s advice. In moments of real crisis \u2014 Brexit, prorogation, aiding and abetting a genocide \u2014 the Crown cannot act, and cannot speak.<\/p>\n