At least racist royals don’t undermine Democracy
The British monarchy came in for well-deserved criticism in the throne-shaking interview Oprah Winfrey conducted with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle. I believe every allegation the couple made, including the bombshell accusation that one family member expressed concerns about the skin color of the couple’s progeny. (Among other things, that suggests a gross misunderstanding of genetics. Given the fact that Meghan is a light-skinned biracial woman and Harry is a pale white man, Archie, their firstborn, was quite likely to turn out just as he did: white.)
Still, it is worth remembering that there is only so much damage the British royals can inflict. They don’t run the government. Queen Elizabeth is the titular head of state, but she doesn’t tell the prime minister or the British Parliament what to do. British citizens have the right to vote. Great Britain is one of the world’s oldest and most stable democracies.
Why the elementary civics lesson? Well, across the pond in the United States, many citizens seem to have forgotten the value of a stable democracy. Resentful of a browning America, upset by cultural change and misled by the Trump presidency, a significant minority of U.S. citizens yearns for a dictator — a king, if you will — as long as he is white and views the country through the same nostalgic lens that they do.
Our myths tell a different story, of course. Starting with elementary school, the textbooks tell a story of a freedom-loving people who threw off the yoke of an oppressive king to chart a course that changed the history of the world. Only in recent decades have those textbooks dared to address the fact that those “freedom-loving” former colonists wanted to grant liberty only to white men. But as the nation matured, its founding document, the U.S. Constitution, matured as well, granting full citizenship to all its people, whether male or female, Black, white or brown.
Black and brown citizens still had to fight for the rights guaranteed by the Constitution — protesting, suing, marching, dying — to secure the franchise, to eat in restaurants and attend decent schools, to buy a house in any neighborhood they could afford. Those valiant Americans helped their nation to become the democracy that is held up as a model to other countries.
But it seems that the more democratic the nation becomes, the more some of its citizens resent the expansion of rights to those who don’t look like them, sound like them or worship as they do.
President Donald J. Trump’s tenure was marked by a series of brazenly authoritarian moves. Most gallingly, he attacked a fundamental pillar of democracy — the peaceful transition of power. He claims that he did not lose the election and tried to pressure other Republican officials into denying Biden his rightful victory. Scores of elected Republican officials went along with the lie and continue to do so.
In state legislatures across the country, Republicans are erecting barriers to the franchise, hoping they can stay in power by eroding one of the fundamental tenets of any healthy democracy — the right to vote.
American democracy was given a reprieve with the Biden presidency, but the threats aren’t over. Too many citizens are willing to jettison the promises of the Constitution for the privilege of sitting at the top of the cultural heap.
Trump’s acolytes in high office don’t seem to have a problem with that.