Targaryen restorationism, like most restorationism (Jacobite, Bourbon, &c) tends to be more sentimental than ideological. It offers no substantive critique of the existing social order, only a moral complaint expressed as political nostalgia. #GoT

"The Baratheon-Lannisters are venial usurpers and things were better under the good old kings."

The idea of using abolitionism to establish Daenerys' radicalism never made any sense. After all, slavery is already illegal in Westeros. (Slave trading is why Jorah Mormont was exiled in disgrace.) So what does she offer the Seven Kingdoms? Her goodness.

Her heel turn becomes so load-bearing only because her spotless character was really the entirety of the case for her restoration. Once that was compromised, everyone began looking for a "better" claimant, rather than imagining a different system.

And this makes the supposedly shrewd and far-sighted Varys's politics look so capricious and one-dimensional in the end. He too only believed in Daenerys's personal goodness, until he found someone better and began plotting accordingly.

As in Black Panther, we are supposed to be shocked when a "good" monarch gives way to a "bad" monarch, when the natural response is to question the legitimacy of hereditary power altogether.

In the books, remember, the movement represented by the High Sparrow was much closer to Savonarola or Luther, a religious protest with genuinely transformative social implications. In the show, it was played like the Investiture Controversy as a clash of church vs. state.

In the absence of a Reformation or a classical republican 'Machiavellian moment,' Westeros remains trapped in the antechamber of political modernity.

Everyone knows kings are really made not born, but the artificiality of *all* political arrangements eludes them.

You can follow @BrentSirota.

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