Honestly, seeing highly educated people on Instagram mourning her death with the underlines of "well, it's not technically democratic but it's a lot more democratic than our country" is so so so weird.
I mean, some of the third world countries are really shit in terms of democracy and quality of life. But seeing the argument of "they still follow Magna Carta and our leaders don't care about the constitution" especially pisses me off. Whenever that old old document is discussed, I feel the "educated" people are having a non-american West Wing moment with saying how important it is.
It literally was an agreement between a king and lords, nothing more and nothing less. I think it's insulting to the actual labour unionists and suffragists who bled for constitutional freedoms when people keep talking about Magna Carta like it was the original sliced bread.
I feel it was a cop-out, for creating a cool and monarchy-enabling version of justifying the constitutional reforms implemented during the 19th century in order to keep the facade of Britishness.
This is my first effort post, please be gentle.
This reads like "And then the king and the lords made a friendly decision together".
It wasn't that. It was the nobles cornering the king and using a collective threat of force to coerce the king, who'd previously had near-absolute authority over them, to make a law that would devolve some of his power to them.
It's a straightforward example of how collective and direct action gets the goods, no matter what class you are.
Our response should be "You know what they did to make the Magna Carta happen? We should do that too."