Our political columnist pitches a dynastic new television show
“GAME of Thrones”, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, returned for its eighth and final season this week, has already had a profound impact on the television industry . Let’s hope it has an equally profound impact on the history industry.
“Game of Thrones” gets a remarkable number of big things right about the nature of dynastic societies. One is that the dynastic principle eliminates the difference between the public and private realms, a difference that is fundamental to democratic and meritocratic societies. Public life in a dynasty is shaped by the personal foibles of the monarch. Power is wielded by people who can get physically close to the king.
The most powerful is the nation-state. The heart of Brexit is not racism or a desire to be truly global as opposed to narrowly European-focused . It is the desire to restore the sovereignty of the nation-state. Brexiteers don’t just dislike the demands that the European Union poses in terms of agreeing to its rules and regulations. They dislike the idea, beloved of some if not all in Brussels, that the nation-state is an anachronism that we need to get beyond.
A third answer is the capitalist system. The Conservative Party has traditionally been the party of business and the City—indeed there was a time, between the wars, when the party was actually dominated by businessmen such as Stanley Baldwin, whose family owned an ironworks, and Neville Chamberlain, whose family once produced a third of the world’s nails.
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