The self-imposed exile of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is one of the
many casualties of the “culture war” that has been taking place in Britain for
most of the last ten years. It has intensified in the last five years to the
point of infecting the image of the royal family itself. The whiff of racism is
implicit in the way that the popular press (the “Daily Mail” being the most
vivid example) has reacted to Meghan Markle’s behavior, criticizing her for the
same actions that Kate Middleton has been otherwise fawned over for. It is
incredible that two women can be treated so differently for doing the same
things (one – of mixed-race heritage – scorned, the other – of white British
descent – praised). The only identifiable difference between them is their racial heritage, and to not see that at the reason for how differently they have been treated by the popular press is to be delusional to what is going onin people’s brains.
Why do the popular press (and its very vocal readership) fawn over Kate
on the one hand, and scorn Meghan on the other? Apart from the racial
undertones, what else it going on?
“Embodying British values”
The “culture war” that has encompassed Brexit also overlaps into broader
cultural issues of national identity, and both these issues affect each other.
To “traditionalists”, the royal family represents a link to the values of the
past: of deference to authority, ultra-orthodox family life, and maintaining “dignity” through an aversion to displays of emotion. These values are, to those
traditionalists, embodied in the Queen Elizabeth II, who grew up at a time when
these values were shared not only by traditionalists, but by most of the
general public.
This behavior had been instilled in her father, George VI, and her
uncle, Edward VIII, by George V, the queen’s grandfather. Those values,
however, were noticeably absent from Edward VIII, and his very public persona
and charisma made him immensely popular to the public, but hated by the
traditionalists. His relationship with Wallis Simpson was only the most obvious
example of how he wished to rule as a king in his own singular (and modern)
style, against the values that the traditionalists held dear. This was a very
public “culture war” that the traditionalists won, at Edward VIII’s expense; it
was a “culture war” that cost the king his crown.
Edward VIII’s sympathies towards Fascism were, by comparison, a
distraction; his views were shared by many others in the elite at the time, and what made it inconvenient was that Edward was sharing publicly views that many held in the elite held privately. Edward VIII “embarrassed” the image of the
royal family by being indiscreet, and it was this that the traditionalists were
determined to stamp out. Once he was “exiled” he could be conveniently
dismissed as a “crank”.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are victims to similar sort of “culture
war” today: by being open in their views, by engaging with public causes (in
much the same way that Edward VIII did), being openly liberal, somehow, they
are bringing the image of the royal family into disrepute. Nearly a hundred years
on, Meghan Markle receives the same levels of scorn from traditionalists that
Wallis Simpson did, with the added dimension of Markle’s mixed-race background.
So Harry and Meghan, to escape further scorn from the popular press,
have exiled themselves to Canada; jumping before they were pushed, to save the
embarrassment of being “shipped off to the Bahamas” like Edward and Wallis
Simpson were.
The dimension of race in today’s situation is emblematic of how the idea
of “liberal” Britain became a myth. The popular press wants a monarchy that
lives in their minds as an unchanging symbol of the past, rather than a
representation of the present. It wants a monarchy with the cosmetic appearance
of modernity, but with its “modus operandi” unchanged for eternity.
The Japanese once revered their emperor as a god; the traditionalists
revere the Queen and her family as a living representation of British values;
or more exactly, of the values they want to mythologize. While the 1990s were a
time when the royal family’s veneer of respectability lost much of its sheen,
as the Queen has grew older, she has still represented a continuity of values
that traditionalists in modern Britain hanker for once more. Like Emperor Franz
Joseph of Austria, who ruled that empire for more than fifty years through the
industrial revolution to the First World War, Queen Elizabeth II has ruled
Britain (and its dying empire) through many social and cultural changes.
Traditionalists’ “culture war” against modernity and liberal values is
summed up in the values that spawned “Brexit” as much as the values that forced
Harry and Meghan into self-imposed exile. In some ways, they are victims of the
same “culture war” that has forced many Europeans to leave the UK; in the battle of values and culture, the values of tradition, the reverence of authority and mythologizing the past have beaten the values of liberalism and globalism.
“Natural selection”
As the monarchy represents traditional values, it also implicitly
represents the ideology of elitism and inherited superiority. For
traditionalists, that innate “superiority” (and implicit “purity”) is
threatened by globalism and multiculturalism. This is the real stem of the
racism that Meghan Markle has faced: traditionalists, at their heart, cannot
abide the idea of a black woman marrying into the white Anglo-Saxon “elite”
that the royal family represents. For the royal family to maintain its “royal”
lineage and its elitist power, in traditionalists’ eyes it must remain “pure”.
This is the ugly prejudice and elitism that lies under the surface of
Britain’s cultural traditionalists: for Britain to remain special, its royal
family must remain pure. This is not so far removed from the thinking of racial
eugenicists that was prevalent a hundred years ago, and the fact that such
thinking has refused to die (and even seen a resurgence) tells us that
Britain’s form of hierarchical racism has been long-hidden under a façade of
respectability and a pretense of egalitarianism.
Britain’s traditionalist elite has maintained its hold by adapting to
change; but allowing a mixed-race American woman into the royal family was
always a step too far for them; thus she had to be discreetly encouraged to
live as a “royal” in name only, if not meek and subserbient then better to have her exiled outside Britain. That she has done
what they always wanted has then allowed them to blame it on her own “egoistic”
personality. The conservative tendency has won.
These are the same kind of traditionalists that blame “Europe” for holding Britain back, blaming the egos of EU bureaucrats for not giving Britain what it wants; and when Britain gets what it wants – “Brexit” – they still blame the EU bureaucrats for sabotaging Britain’s destiny regardless.
Traditionalists blame immigrants (and Britain’s modern multiethnic
society) for a litany of problems: from crime, to unemployment to welfare
scams. If you read the “Daily Mail” this is certainly the impression you will
get. The same tropes used in the 1930s are being repeated in the age of the
internet; only this time, technology is doing the job much more efficiently,
reinforcing prejudices and solidifying the cultural divides.
The traditionalists can’t turn back the clock on multicultural Britain,
but they can make it uncomfortable for those who don’t fit in to their
prejudices: people from “foreign descent” who are “uppity” for instance, and
should learn to respect what Britain “has done for them”. In their eyes, Meghan
Markle should be “grateful” for being in the royal family (and therefore keep
her mouth shut, one assumes).
Traditionalists can accept multiculturalism as long as it is on their
terms; if people start using their own languages on public transport then “it
no longer feels like Britain any more”, and so on. Immigrants are only
acceptable if they are “useful”, doing the jobs that Brits don’t want.
Immigrants are meant to feel grateful that they are the underclass; they are meant to feel grateful for the dehumanizing articles written about them in the popular press. Non-whites, traditionalists assume, are all meant to be thought of as “foreigners” who can never be allowed to feel truly at home in Britain; they are there “on sufferance”, at the whim and pleasure of its “natives”.
Britain, as traditionalists see it, is an implicit “white power”.
Britain’s historical power as an empire, it is assumed, came about from
Britain’s inherent superiority. Its ability to dominate the world, given its
relative puniness in geographical terms, can only be explained by the innate
superiority of its natives. Britain’s historical dominance can only be seen as
due to Darwinian “natural selection” that enabled its people to make its fortune beyond its shores. In this thinking, inequality is part of the natural
order, and those Britons that have thrived abroad did so due to their own
innate superiority.
The irony of this form of "eugenic mythology" is that many outside Britain implicitly admire the country for that
very reason, seeing Britain as a country that has produced a multitude of
intelligent scientists, academics, traders and adventurers. It is this mythology of Britain always able to "punch above its weight" and "thrive on adversity" that has led to Brexit’s most ardent supporters
thinking that the nation is more than capable of thriving outside the EU in the
21st century (as some kind of fantastical super-human innovation and
trade hub that operates outside of the laws of reality).
Britain, in traditionalists’ eyes, is a nation that lost its empire due
to ungrateful “colonials” and the conspiracies of foreign powers, rather than
due to changes in global commerce and inefficient techniques at home. The mythology
of Britain as a “global power” reliant on only itself, with a royal family
acting as both an instrument and symbol of that innate power, is the myth the
traditionalists maintain in spite of the uncomfortable (and embarrassing)
reality staring them in the face.
The traditionalists will find out who wins when mythology trades comes face to face with reality next year.
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