I've spent some time recently renewing my acquaintance with The Godfather and its sequels. The reason I did so was that a recurring theme came to mind, that of loyalty to the family (and Family), with the attendant duty to refrain from behavior that outsiders are not to witness. This behavior serves to undermine the Godfather--the patriarch--as he executes his supreme duty to safeguard and pursue the family's interests, making him seem other than capable and powerful- and thus not to be preyed upon (i.e. disrespected). It is also what drives Michael's sister, Connie, to push his son to supersede him in the third film.
These dynamics are not purely fictional. Change the context, and it becomes the story of a political dynasty navigating the treachery seas of dynastic politics. Change it again, and you get House of Cards. The reason that context merely changes the trappings without changing the behaviors is because of this: the family is the natural unit of Mankind, and all else that is lawful in Mankind's existence is an outgrowth of it.
We are now, globally, observing that this is true. We call this "identity politics", but it is really the reality of Mankind's existence in all of recorded history and most of the current world. The West's deviation is an aberration, and renewed exposure is going to put an end to this heresy--and it is a heresy--soon enough, because if it does not then the West shall cease to exist. The nations currently exploiting the West (with the help of traitors in the states of the West) have no qualms about putting the West to the sword for no other reason than that they are not Westerners and shall not preserve it.
Nations arise as outgrowths of families, through the mechanisms of extended kinship in clans and tribes, and kingdoms emerge when a single father-figure must emerge for the smooth execution of the duty to preserve the nation-family from predators without as well as fools within. (There is such a thing as too much talk at the wrong time.) The issue thereafter is the formalization and ossification of an emergent lawful hierarchy into artifice that does not reflect the shifting circumstances that life imposes; who is king must change when the circumstances shift too severely for the current crown to meet them, something ordinarily done with the simple passage of time and encounters with hostiles taking their toll.
The limit of an authority to respond effectively to predatory threats is the actual boundary condition for any authority, be it the lawful authority of a family (at any scale) or the artifice of a state (similarly, or subset thereof, such as a military). The question of legitimacy turns on this capacity, and people will accept many hardships and restrictions on individual agency so long as their father-figure is seen to effectively execute the duties put to him. It is no accident that political thought equates the people to children, for without the wisdom of the father too many too often are little more than children- and this very well-known phenomenon is proof of a fundamental quality of Mankind's nature, one that cannot be changed.
The answer to the matter of Empire is to acknowledge this as Natural Law, and to abandon everything that denies it in favor of reforming one's communities and societies into lawful reflections of this fact. Patriarchy is Natural Law.
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