Long live the king?

[Avocado]

Some of the novels in your local bookstore feature re-imagined medieval settings. Knights ride forth, armies besiege castles. Maybe magic works this time around, or maybe it doesn't. Most of these novels aren't trying to recreate the European Middle Ages -- they're trying to use the parts of it that resonate with readers. As such, sympathetic characters in these novels are often free of prejudices appropriate to the time period, only to be given the prejudices appropriate to ours, because the writer is blind to them, or because the writer is afraid of the reader's response.

So, if these writers and audiences are free to keep or discard parts of medieval history and culture as they see fit, why do almost all of them keep a monarchy or an aristocracy as the form of government? Most of us live in representative democratic republics, and we like it that way. What does this say about our relationship to medieval history, and also to our misconceptions or ignorance of it?

(I hope I've asked this as a sufficiently historical question, rather than a question about what's useful or not useful to the fiction writer.)