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Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, made an official personal statement that they have chosen to quit their frontline roles as ‘senior’ royals and start being financially independent.
The semi-demi abdication of Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle raises more issues than they probably intended. In seeking to live as part-time commoners, probably in Canada, they are clearly hoping to shuck the downside of royalty, which has come to include 24/7 coverage by the tabloid press. (Much of that press, of course, is Murdoch-owned, and is as bent on publicizing every royal folly, real or imagined, as it is on ignoring the empirically verifiable misdeeds of its favored American monarch, Donald Trump. To say this demonstrates a double standard is to understate. But I digress.)
But what about the upside of royalty? What about royalty itself? If ever an institution bore out Faulkner’s observation that the past is neither dead nor past, it’s the persistence of monarchy past the point where it has ceased to exercise monarchial rule—which, in Britain, happened around 1688. I get the feeling from reading the stories on Harry and Meghan’s flight that their discontent may go a bit deeper than being subject to the tabloidization of their lives, to, at minimum, a desire for normality that, whether they acknowledge it or not, undercuts the whole idea of kings and queens and dukes and earls.
No current royal actually came up with the idea of monarchy; they simply inherited their role because their nations have preserved this anachronistic institution. But before we look down on those of our British contemporaries who, for one reason or another, want to keep the monarchy intact, we should recognize that we still preserve anachronistic institutions that have a far more destructive effect on our lives than monarchy does on the Brits’. I refer here to the United States Senate and the Electoral College, rooted in views of the states, and the opposition of 1787 slaveholders to anything approaching popular sovereignty and majority rule, for which no argument, under any theory of democracy, can be made today. Mitch McConnell is as much, if not more, the personification of the persistence of pre-democratic norms as is, say, Prince Philip. A civilized nation would lose them both.
