maybe- maybe i am just a walking cringe

As the son of a nation that had just left a brutal dictatorship before I was born, I was raised with school teachers who in fact ran from cops in protests, fought secret police, ran counter-propaganda campaigns and defended their rights in the middle of the street, shouting and bleeding. And the pitch I got for democracy was always, well, military dictatorship is unacceptable, and the vote is the most important weapon in a population's arsenal.

LOGH mostly agrees with the sentiment, but it doesn't put republican democracy as the end-all be-all of good government as a matter of fact, which was a fascinating decision to me. The democrats as a faction are mostly corrupt or ineffective politicians who balance their self-interest by either flat-out lying to the population or throwing lives into blenders so they can push a ufanist agenda for an election.

They applaud each other as they figure out ways to remain in power while doing nothing themselves, and even though one or two of them are ultimately trying to Do The Right Thing, the system's checks and balances make it so they're being, well, checked and balanced by people who do not have the population's best interests in mind. We even have one of those same politicians say it out loud: we are parasites, we get paid to suckle on society and offer nothing, we are glorified bank attendants who should only be concerned with how to spend tax money but here we are, deciding who lives and who dies simply because we can.

Meanwhile you have the imperials-- descended from literal space nazis, genocidal maniacs who slaughtered billions or even hundreds of billions depending on how you interpret one of the history episodes -- and they're not much better before Reinhard shows up. A lousy, dumb class of aristocrats grown fat and complacent on the food and effort of the lower classes, with no desire to treat others who don't dress in their fancy suits as fellow human beings.

99.9% of the population will never affect public policy or even be targeted as the main beneficiary of policy, unless one of their young daughters is attractive enough for a 70 year old pervert to kidnap her and maybe listen to her requests every once in a while. The show is not subtle about who you're watching-- they scream Sieg Heil and are all German. It explicitly expects you to balance whatever you feel about the Lohengramm Dynasty with the historical context, both in the show and in real life.

So the question is thrown at the audience, at first by inferring it and then explicitly in season 2: assume for the sake of argument there's change coming for both systems, would you rather live in an aloof, corrupt democracy or a benevolent, yet inevitably complacent autocracy?

And I strongly feel that in most other stories, Reinhard would be depicted as a wide-eyed idealist that would slowly but surely succumb to his own vices, only to become a bad emperor killing all his incumbents and repeating the same problems of the original empire that destroyed billions of lives. It would be a cautionary tale about how absolute power corrupts absolutely or whatever, and about how only through freedom fighting with wanton abandon can we create a world worth living in. There would be nothing no one could tell Yang or Julian or whoever that would convince the audience that they didn't only have good points.

But no, LOGH is genuine about the question: it's a benevolent autocracy, at its heart, you can trust the emperor's words at face value. The values have shifted in such a way that the vices of yesteryear will not be around at least for a little while, and democracy itself may be on its way out due to the sheer lack of consistency it let fester at its breast.

The question is not whether or not having a decent-looking approach to government is a trick by the space nazis, the question is whether it's okay for you to give up your personal freedoms if you can be sure you will have your interests still considered, and that some level of oppression will happen on both sides either way. The show asks you whether, once removed from morality or ideology, you will go with the tax fraudists or with the pompous fucks, if you can be sure your life will objectively be easier on the latter and will always be unstable due to the former's natural changes.

The democratic systems in place in the galaxy by the time Reinhard takes over the Empire are shattered not just because of external actions, but because they were rotten to begin with. There was simply no way for them to survive in their form at the time. You have democrats constantly talking about the wonders of democracy while making sure most of the population will never experience those in the first place.

Parallel to that, in Iserlohn Fortress, the literal last bastion of democracy, you have Yang Wenli being pressured to become a military dictator to "put things in their place" and "make sure things work", showing you how little faith people have in the actual system and how much faith people have on him. But Yang has none of it-- taking over would make the entire exercise pointless.

Yet he never says Reinhard is an inherently bad leader, and never stops acknowledging the immense progress that he forced upon the galaxy. Both Yang and Julian constantly mention how, since Reinhard is a beloved monarch, he is technically more democratically-supported than any politician in Heinessen ever was. And that's not nothing-- it is imperative to actually engage with this conversation for those characters, because they are essentially fighting for a system that literally nobody in the universe has faith in, because they just saw it eat itself alive.

What the ideals of democracy eventually shape up to be is the belief that one man should not be the end-all-be-all of government policy, regardless of the kind of system they have. A king, a president, a prime minister, whatever-- other people's livelihoods should never come down to a single person's whim without any sort of recourse for criticism. Democracy, when stripped from its bells and whistles, becomes the ability to make yourself heard for good or ill. Autocracy, likewise, becomes the incapacity to reach anyone other than through personal, non-official means. Neither is future-proof, but one of them gives future generations the resources to fight the scourge of corruption, while the other does not.

And this conclusion takes one hundred and ten fucking episodes. It takes multiple revolutions, the rise and fall of entire governments, conspiracies, probably an entire planet's worth of alcohol. But it gets there! It sits you down and expects you to talk back as it talks about checks and balances, taxes, education, the measure of a man, the place of honor in politics, the whole damn thing!

Yet it never feels like the show is putting imperialism on a pedestal either, because you see, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how illuminated despotism always falls: the complete and utter lack of systems that aren't nepotistic as a rule means snakes will slither into nests, no matter what. Yes, the king might not be corrupt-- what about the second in command? The third? The fourth? If the fifth person in the chain is corrupt, then literally everyone under them also is. Because it's a system based on personality and connections, and not necessarily in what's best for each role.

Even though Reinhard tries his hardest to avoid this, and explicitly chooses people whom he trusts and knows can do a phenomenal job, he cannot change the nature of politics. The complete lack of systems designed to counter corruption in autocracies aside from someone coming in and saying "Eh, fuck it, just kill them" means smart enough disruptors will find a crack in the armor, and they will scheme and lie and conspire against the trust that glues the entire system together.

And cracks they find, and it works. You can bring down an entire system in one day by simply undermining the right person. There is no chain of command strong enough in an autocracy to survive the death of a king. Whoever the next king ends up being, things will drastically change, far more than they would if a president were to be assassinated. And, again, the show asks and expects you to form an opinion-- but is that worth it? Is the thought of building an entire castle on top of an exposed central rock inherently a thing of hubris? Is there no middle ground that can make the best of both worlds function perfectly? Is the most democratic-leaning autocrat still not democratic enough? Is the most benevolent military governor still unacceptable?

Ultimately, the conclusion LOGH seems to reach is that a parliament is a good buffer to a king so that the puck does not begin its movement in the same place it stops at, but also so that the people have a more direct way to speak their minds to a centralized ruler other than literally becoming friends with the right people. While much less directly discussed than the grander conversation, it seems that LOGH ascertains that the speed of decisions an autocracy can achieve is not a bug, but a feature, and should be utilized for the greater good, but that aristocrats and the king's friends should not be the only thing stopping a genocide if the king so wishes, and they should definitely not simply be capable of being ignored.

It's not really showed as a victory for either side. Reinhard doesn't live to interact with the new system, and Julian doesn't believe he'll ever stop undermining the Empire, even though he got them to compromise. People will keep dying for what they believe in, but now for far less romantic reasons and for far less charismatic leaders. The legend isn't just over, the legend is dead.

But that's history, that's how it works-- you don't fight until you're the only one standing, you fight until, somehow, both people lose, and then you keep going. The conversation about politics will literally never end, because there is no right answer. There is no holy book explaining how to perfectly govern a population. There's only the messy attempts imperfect men and women put forth, and the shape they take after being grounded through the gears of progress and war. And at the end of the day, this is all just different people trying to figure out a way to better put tax money where it should go, otherwise we all starve next winter.