American Monarchists

A surprising number of Americans seem to romanticize Britain's upper classes, and its associated trappings, the ultimate symbol, idol, fetish of which is the monarchy. The tendency clearly extends far, far beyond the well-known Anglophilia of blue-blooded Eastern Establishment types who feel the more blue-blooded and Established for a trans-Atlantic connection to the even older Establishment in Britain. Even some who should know much better seem awed by the upper strata of British society, feel inferior to them. I remember, for instance, C.M. Kornbluth's rather gratuitous remark regarding George Orwell's literary craftsmanship in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The prose is the prose of a man with an English public school education, and I have noticed that these old Eton and Cambridge boys can write rings around anybody unfortunate enough not to have attended a public school and an ancient university.

The lecture in which Kornbluth made this remark was, on the whole, deeply disappointing in its intellectual shallowness and sheer enervation (the title was "The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism"), but this line was disgusting in its bowing and scraping before a pretension and snobbery that the individual object of his praise happily did not share (the more fortunately as the man who gave the world Oceania and The Road to Wigan Pier could not have produced his sterling work had he shared it). And it says a great deal that a writer as intelligent and talented and accomplished as Kornbluth (six decades on The Space Merchants and Gladiator-at-Law remain as relevant as ever, in their ways even cleverer and more relevant than Orwell's book) could have spoken it publicly in such a context.

One reflection of this is that many Americans hear Received Pronunciation, and immediately assume great education and intelligence on the part of the speaker, necessarily superior to their own--just as the only school whose name can beat "Harvard" in the snob stakes among adherents of the Cult of the Big School that may be sending Aunt Becky to a very different kind of Full House than the one some of us grew up watching her in is "Oxford."

Another more significant reflection is that they think the feudal trappings of a British social system that, as H.G. Wells remarked in Tono-Bungay, was, and a century later remains, frozen circa 1688, are quaint and picturesque and essentially harmless, essentially not at odds with their cherished notion of Britain's as the Mother of Parliaments, which brought the light of democracy back into the world--and that, indeed, it is in poor taste, gauche, to criticize such things. However, the reality, as Adam Ramsay recently put it in his book, is a

House of Lords where a combination of the only hereditary legislators in the world, the only automatic seats for clerics outside Iran, and hundreds of appointed cronies get a say on all the UK's laws. This valve in the British state allows the interests of the powerful to flow freely, while holding back progressive change.

All this is combined with, as his colleague Laurie MacFarlane explains, "a head of state that is appointed not on the basis of merit, but by bloodline," with the whole operating under "an 'uncodified' constitution, which is to say that we don’t really have one." And it all gets crazier from there--the seven-eighths of British territory outside the British isles, "asymmetric devolution," and the rest, complemented and reinforced by the culture of the civil service, the culture of "empire-kitsch nationalism" sustained by the tabloids, which leads people to speak such stupidities as "We need a monarchy because we don't have a Hollywood!"

Altogether it is a spectacle of backwardness, unearned and unjustifiable privilege, reaction, which the same people, seeing them in a nation of Africa or Asia (especially one which had suffered the kind of industrial hollowing out Britain did, living off of accommodating foreign financiers and the kind of balance of payments Britain has), would be an object of racist scorn, proof that "those savages" are unfitted for industry, democracy, modernity and the rest of modern life. And all of it has real-world consequences, with the Queen's Stuart-ish, pre-1688-ish suspension of Parliament to permit Boris Johnson's shoving a No-Deal Brexit down the throats of the British people only the latest and most recent example. (Ask the Australians what happened in 1975 for another.)

Online, at least, one seems to encounter a little more alertness to the fact from British observers.

One wonders if this will give American observers, or at least those who pretend to be at least a little bit progressive, similar pause where fawning over "the Queen" is concerned.

Alas, to go by the fawning over Prince Diana I see today, I do not think it likely.

James Bond and Britain's Small Wars
7/22/19
The New 007 Is . . .
7/22/19
Announcing . . . The Long Drawdown: British Military Retrenchment, 1945-1979
7/17/19
George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and Obesity
5/28/19
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Note
10/27/18
Just Out . . . (The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond, 2nd edition)
11/12/15
Just Out. . . (James Bond's Evolution)
10/10/15
Just Out . . . (The Forgotten James Bond)
9/24/15
Just Out: After the New Wave: Science Fiction Today
7/27/15
Reading H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay
7/14/15
Preview Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry
7/9/15