Apparently, the newly minted right wing populists have also decided that they are monarchists. Yeah. They don’t have to make sense. If it feels good to them, they just do it. And it’s not just because they hate the Black duchess, Meghan Markle, or revere the gold plated Donald Trump who went on TV this week and made this pathetic comment when asked about Meghan possibly running for president in 2024 (which may be the dumbest rumor of the century)
“I hope that happens. If that happened, I think I’d have an even stronger feeling toward running. I happen to think, I know the Queen, as you know. I have met with the Queen and I think the Queen is a tremendous person, and I am not a fan of Meghan.”
As I said: pathetic. But there’s more to this than Meghan Markle and that fool. Josh Marshall put together an interesting twitter thread explaining the deeper origins of all this:
The British monarchy is quaint, good for streaming costume dramas and something I really don’t care about in any way. But the new pro-monarchism on the US right, which seems to flow downstream from hostility to Meghan Markle, is a fascinating development. It goes without saying that rejection of the British monarchy is literally about as foundationally American as you can get. But it’s worth stepping back and appreciating the radicalism of this stance for Americans in the final decades of the 18th century.
Read the correspondence of a Jefferson or a Washington and they bristle with hostility not only to *the* King but the concept of kings. This seems obvious to us. After all America doesn’t have kings and they rebelled against a king. But you cannot understate the degree to which the whole political world in which these men were reared was centered around loyalty to the King and the commonsense reality that countries were governed by kings.
The overthrow of the particular and the very idea is deeply radical. And the element of the rejection drives deep into the political culture and indeed the culture itself. During Washington’s first term Jefferson (state) and Hamilton (treasury) are the two ideological poles of the cabinet. As tension around the French Revolution escalates, Jefferson and his supporters are quite sure that Hamilton and his supporters want to bring back monarchy. Jefferson in his correspondence calls them “monocrats”. That’s not really true, though people around Hamilton (who has a deep influence on Washington) do want to bring back some of its trappings. But it illustrates the depth of the hostility to an institution and a foundation of political existence that all of these guys had been born into and long sworn allegiance to. It’s not just a governmental revolution but one of manners and morals as well.
No ones talking about bringing back Kings to the US. So it can all seem a bit theoretical and distant. But we should remember that the hostility to Kings is the taproot of hostility to inequality, something that was altogether incomplete at the time and remains so today. Indeed, it’s hard to find anyone in whom this contradiction remains more present than in Jefferson. In any case, I focus on him only because he’s well-known and his extant correspondence is voluminous. What I’m describing is widespread across American in these years.
Rejection of monarchy was and is deeply radical and its umbilically connected to political equality which remains deeply relevant today and not at all hypothetical. There’s no harm in some fascination with the modern day British monarchy which is little more than a generously funded dress-up show. But monarchy, adoration of monarchy, giving it some pride of place in a ‘heritage’ that is anything Americans should want to honor is deeply unamerican.
The final point here is that nostalgia for monarchy and sometimes more than nostalgia is a recurrent theme in the US, almost always among conservatives of some sort. That is almost always because playing out the rejection of monarchism and the interlaced rejection of inequality brings a certain kind of conservative to a place they don’t like. So they end up running the chain back in the opposite direction. If equality is this uncomfortable maybe we need to give monarchy another think? And here we are.
Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on March 20, 2021.
Yes. And when they’re not extolling the virtues of the British monarchy, they’re fluffing Vladimir Putin and pushing QAnon. Their minds are in chaos.