https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/11/monarchy-republic-britain-democracy-us-india-colonialism/

"For Americans who rebelled against Britain’s King George III in 1775, monarchy was another name for tyranny—by definition, incompatible with democracy. This view of Britain softened over the next centuries, as many Americans drew inspiration from the British empire’s “civilizing mission” in regions suffering under “oriental” and other despotisms. During the Cold War especially, they saw Britain as a vital partner in a contest against Soviet tyranny, tolerating its monarchy as a quaint vestige in a country otherwise committed to liberal democracy. The bond sustained the U.S.-U.K. partnership in the subsequent war on terror, including the invasion of Iraq in the name of spreading democracy.

But if Britain’s royals were perceived as benign ornaments, the death of Queen Elizabeth II last year launched a new global conversation about their role. In former colonies, such as Jamaica, where the British monarch remains the head of state, republican sentiment has gained strength. Historians have highlighted the monarchy’s role in slavery and imperialism and the origins of its hereditary wealth and jewels. And revelations about the monarchy’s racist treatment of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, have fortified the old equation of monarchy with despotism. In a New York Times column about a Netflix documentary on the Sussexes, American writer Roxane Gay affirmed: “Monarchies are almost never benevolent, even if they have no political power. They are often upheld with one form of violence or another.” For Americans, monarchy is either ornamental or autocratic, never democratic.

Yet Americans are also concerned about the reality of democracy in their own republic. They ask: Does the power to elect one’s rulers guarantee democracy? And can democratic republics holding regular elections become deeply coercive even as they fly the flag of liberty? As it turns out, Americans’ narrow focus on voting has blinded them to other, more robust, forms of democratic expression practiced even in some monarchies in the past. Behind myths about foreign despotisms are lost kingdoms where monarchs were often actively accountable to the ruled.
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Questioning our assumptions about monarchy as the “other” of democracy helps us reflect on what real democracy entails. Democracy is not the endpoint of a process of political evolution from an original state of anarchy or tyranny; it is the continual collective struggle for liberation in every kind of polity. “Democracy is not a settled state, but a shifting expression of collective will,” one British journalist reflected in the Guardian after the massive 2019 march against Brexit. This is the culture that drove and was nurtured among the Indian farmers who joined what was likely the largest protest in history in 2020-21. It is a culture of empowered political agency, a sense of the sovereignty of every human being.

This is what anti-colonialism was fundamentally about: rediscovering personal sovereignty. For thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi, swaraj (self-rule) was about unlearning capitalism and colonialism’s denial of mutual obligation to become, once again, an ethical being: “It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves,” Gandhi wrote, echoing thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy. “It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands.” Anti-colonialism’s objective was an “enlightened anarchy in which each person will become his own ruler.”

The goal of human life is self-rule—each of us monarchs unto ourselves. This is a cultural ideal that resonates even with Americans who, despite their allegiance to a republic, embrace stories about fairy-tale queens and princes as vehicles for working out ethical ideals. It is the radical libertarianism that animated the 18th-century English working classes and the mutually committed members of the Khalsa Army. As we continue to wrestle with the legacies of colonialism, it remains a democratic vision to which we might aspire, together."