Trust me America: you don’t want the circus of an imported monarchy
As a Brit, I can tell you it’s a lot darker than you think
Have you ever been to the circus? I have, as a child. I remember the giddy hedonism of nostalgic stripes striping their way across the sky, as clowns beamed cheerfully at impressed toddlers. The air was acrid with gunpowder and the brilliant illusion of a fading past burnt its way into my eight year old brain, burying itself there for seventeen years.
Of course, it’s all a façade. The tent comes down, the clowns drink bitter lager in their trailers and the dancing elephants and lemurs are shut away in the gloomy hollows of iron cages. I’m sure you know where this is going: in much the same way, the monarchy is a dark institution hidden behind a hefty amount of glitter and mysticism. Here’s why, in three easy steps:
1. It offends the very notion of equality and freedom.
To believe in royalty, you have to believe in one very nasty notion: that people can be innately better than you just because of the family they are born into. And they always will be. It’s an old notion, one stemmed in a long current of imperialism, eugenics, colonialism, classism and slavery, but there we have it. It doesn’t matter if Sir Louis Fitzwilliam can’t string a sentence together and resembles an alarmingly shaped potato, he’s much, much better than you because his great grandmother had sex with the right aristocrat. Imagine if you had to take your hat off and bow every time you saw a Kennedy or Vanderbilt, no matter how vacuous, vain, or stupid that individual was. And you had to pay for his mansion in your federal tax bill. Great. You’re now up to speed with the very British ideal of ‘knowing your place.’
I’m very, very bad at knowing my place, to the point I’m called ‘americanized’ by many Brits. I don’t bow, I don’t curtsey, I’m not impressed by the word ‘Lord’ or ‘Lady’ before someone’s name and I definitely won’t be humbled by the fact your Daddy owns half of Scotland. I don’t believe anyone is inherently better than me because of their wealth or parentage, which is in itself an essential part of American exceptionalism.
My father, a vigorous republican from a long and noble line of angry peasants, was so incensed that I should be brought up without the trappings of classism that I was sent to a Quaker school, where we didn’t even have to call teachers ‘Mr’ or ‘Miss’ out of respect. Having a monarchy is a big ‘fuck you’ sign to any child in the gutter looking up at the stars, hoping to achieve respect off their own merit.
2. You’d have to pay for their extravagance on your tax bill.
The monarchy is, as I’m sure you’re aware, heavily funded by the UK taxpayer. That means that money that we could spend on nurses, doctors, hospitals, starving children, and abuse victims is spent on making sure that a random family lives in massive palaces and has whatever they want at hand for the great and noble reason that- it’s nostalgic.
It’s tapping into a pride of Britain in 1850, when the British Empire wasn’t seen as something that now terrifies alt-right anti-immigration campaigners, but a massive source of pride and nostaglia. The glorious Empress, Queen Victoria, ruling over a third of the world at a simpler time, right? It helps if you ignore the bit about the starving children on her streets, the virulent poverty and rampant racism, antisemitism and xenophobia. You know, just cheerful cockney characters singing about oranges and delighting in their happy inferiority, not a care in the world that the rich believed it was the ‘natural order’ for them to live in comfort while others starved.
If you want to pay for Meghan’s latest pair of earrings or a special American crown for Harry, fine, but that’s food you’re taking straight out of a hungry American child’s mouth.
3. We have celebrities now: the monarchy is irrelevant.
Bottom line is that we don’t need to pay for a monarchy to have a national identity anymore. The USA, Germany, France and Italy have enormous cultural identities without the shackles of a weird aristocracy and monarchy based on who was the mistress of a king in 1440.
We now live in a world where activists, actors, politicians, academics and artists can do more to influence the world positively than a monarch ever could. And why shouldn’t they? They have talent. They have insight. They have ability. The Beatles or Jane Fonda have done more to shape global politics and culture than the Queen, Prince Charles or Prince Harry have ever done. That’s to be expected, if you think about it: 1000 years of consanguine inbreeding and selection on the basis of lineage doesn’t play much into the genepool for genius or exceptionalism.
If Lady Gaga or Angelina Jolie wants to tackle child bullying or HIV, they’ll do it without demanding taxpayer funding and they’ll be able to do it with just as much press attention, if not more from their millions of fans. Hell, I’d say Kim Kardashian has more political power and intelligence at her finger tips than the British Royal Family. More people would pay attention to her choice of dress than any of the female royals. What’s the last royal campaign you can even remember on a current issue? Let me guess: Diana, AIDS. That was 30 years ago.
So you don’t need a monarchy. However much Harry tries to hard sell you the idea that it’s a cutesy British import and you should all be curtseying and dreaming about being his princess, it’s just another empty institution that has thrived off privilege and hierarchy behind a gauze of pretty dresses and jewels. We’re over it and we’re ready to get over it after Queen Elizabeth II: I fully anticipate a referendum on it in the next ten years.
You’re better than this, America. You don’t need our archaic traditions and empty-headed aristos.
