The couple has been shacking up for months and one celebrity
gossip magazine claimed that the bride-to-be is pregnant, yet the
wedding next week between Prince William and Kate Middleton is
being ballyhooed with all the fairy-tale hype that marked the 1981
nuptials of Charles and Diana.
One might have thought the not-exactly-happily-ever-after
denouement of that union would have cured Americans of their ironic
obsession with British royalty. Contradicting the romantic
mythology of that “Wedding of the Century,” it turned out Charles
carried on an affair with his mistress, which led to a 1996
divorce, followed the next year by Diana’s death in a bizarre car
crash while fleeing paparazzi in Paris with her Egyptian-born
millionaire boyfriend, Dodi Fayed.
Romance is not logic, however, and a new century evidently
requires a new “Wedding of the Century” to inspire new storybook
dreams. And so we must brace ourselves for the transatlantic media
onslaught leading up to April 29, when Prince William
Arthur Philip Louis of Wales — to accord him his full title —
will wed Miss Middleton, the commoner who will be instantly
transformed into Princess Catherine by saying those magic words, “I
do.”
Conservatives, predisposed to defend all things
traditional and hierarchical, might naturally be expected to admire
the British monarchy. But the remarkable fact is that most of the
Americans obsessed by the royal wedding (and the media shamelessly
feeding that obsession) are not conservative. The Will and Kate
wedding is being hyped, and the hype is being consumed, by
Americans who see no contradiction between their commitment to
egalitarian ideals and their celebration of hereditary privilege.
Liberals who quiver in outrage that American millionaires pay only
a 35 percent marginal rate on their incomes — an injustice they
blame on the hated “Bush tax cuts” — nevertheless seem
unembarrassed by their adoration of British royalty. But then
again, liberals spent decades pining for the restoration of a
Kennedy dynasty, so perhaps we should not be surprised by their
fascination with the House of Windsor.
The New York Times, daily journal of American
liberalism, has offered its readers gossipy chatter
about the menu at the royal wedding reception and about the
relationship between “glamorous
and young” Miss Middleton and her soon-to-be stepmother-in-law,
Camilla. The former Mrs. Parker-Bowles, whose long-term affair with
Prince Charles was blamed for the disruption of his marriage with
Diana, has evidently become slightly more sympathetic since her
2005 marriage to the widowed prince elevated her to Duchess of
Cornwall. We are informed by Times correspondent John F.
Burns that public-opinion polls in Great Britain “show
sharply reduced levels of personal antipathy toward” Camilla, but
that at least half the Britons surveyed favor the crown skipping a
generation, so that the much more popular Will and Kate would take
over after Queen Elizabeth’s death.
Dynastic succession doesn’t work that way, of course, but
the fact that such polls are conducted and cited by reporters
indicates how far democratic presumption has infringed the royal
prerogative. Evidently, the Windsors nowadays must at least
seem to care about public opinion. And merely seeming to
care suffices to satisfy those whose passion for social justice
doesn’t prevent them from being dazzled by the blueblood glamour.
Among the rumored RSVPs to next week’s wedding is American rap
performer Kanye West, who cited the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster
as proof that “George
Bush doesn’t care about black people.” This kind of
contradiction — what, if anything, has the British royal family
done for New Orleans lately? — is happily ignored by American
liberals who fawn over the rich and famous, even while they respond
with populist fervor to the class-warfare appeals of
Democrats.
America’s enthusiasm for the pomp and pageantry of a royal
wedding is such that few dare criticize it, but at least one
inveterate iconoclast is having none of that deference.
British-born Christopher
Hitchens denounced the upcoming ceremony as “a
regular human sacrifice whereby unexceptional people are condemned
to lead wholly artificial and strained existences, and then
punished or humiliated when they crack up.” That sort of anti-royal
animus is rather a rarity stateside, where our Anglophile elite
nowadays love all things British, including the Crown.
Little noticed, however, is how the rags-to-royalty story
of Kate Middleton almost perfectly contradicts the dominant
narrative of liberalism, which portrays poverty as hopelessly
permanent. Kate’s mother was raised in what the British call a
“council flat,” but what Americans would call public housing. After
becoming an airline flight attendant, Carole Goldsmith married a
pilot, Michael Middleton. Carole then started her own small
business which grew so successful that her husband quit his job to
join the firm. Their entrepreneurial success enabled Kate to pursue
her education at St. Andrews University, which is where she met her
future husband. Despite her family’s millions, the
soon-to-be-princess is still a commoner (unlike William’s late
mother Diana, whose father was the 8th Earl of Spencer) and, were
it not for the wonders of capitalism, would probably never have
been anything more.
American liberals can’t be expected to notice that, any
more than they can be expected to comprehend the ancient traditions
of inherited custom that a royal wedding rightly ought to
symbolize. It was more than two centuries ago that Edmund Burke
denounced the “barbarous philosophy” of modern egalitarianism
in which “a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman;
a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.”
If nothing else, next week’s wedding will offer an opportunity to
point out the irony of America’s romantic fondness for a most
old-fashioned form of inequality.
