Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II died yesterday, September 8, at Balmoral. Her funeral will be a celebration of a great lady, the very embodiment of mettle.
The queen of England might be a member of the much-maligned landed aristocracy, but she has acquitted herself as a natural aristocrat would. Elizabeth II had lived a life of dedication and duty, and done so with impeccable class.
The queen had been working quietly (and often thanklessly) for the English people for over seven decades. Elizabeth Windsor was but 13 when World War II broke out, which is when she gave her first official radio broadcast to console the children who had been evacuated “from Britain to America, Canada and elsewhere.” Still in her teens, Elizabeth joined the military, “where,” according to Wikipedia, “she … trained as a driver, and drove a military truck while she served.”
This is precisely what the George Bush girls ought to have done in Iraq or Afghanistan, but didn’t. Both the queen’s grandsons have shown more mettle than most members of America’s pampered political dynasties. I may not share these young men’s version of duty and patriotism, but I can, nevertheless, appreciate what it takes. William worked as an RAF search and rescue helicopter pilot. Before marrying that dolt from Tinseltown — Meghan Markle, who imagined she was a match for the queen of England — young Prince Harry had served in Afghanistan, and wore his Afghanistan Campaign medals on his brother’s wedding day. By contrast, in 2010, young Barbara Bush graduated as a royal pain in the behind: She assumed her official duties as spokesperson for Obama’s healthcare plan.
If forced to choose between the mob (democracy) and the monarchy, the latter is far preferable and benevolent. This thesis is anatomized in Democracy: The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order, by libertarian political philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In his seminal work, Hoppe provides ample support — historical and analytical — for democracy’s inferiority as compared to monarchy:
Democracy has succeeded where monarchy only made a modest beginning: in the ultimate destruction of the natural elites. The fortunes of great families have dissipated, and their tradition of a culture of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership has been lost and forgotten. Rich men still exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortune now directly or indirectly to the state.
In light of elementary economic theory, the conduct of government and the effects of government policy on civil society can be expected to be systematically different, depending on whether the government apparatus is owned privately or publicly…. From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above shortsightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline.
The democratically elected ruler has no real stake in the territory he trashes during his tenure in office. It was no mere act of symbolism for the Clintons’ staff to have vandalized the White House on the eve of their departure. Besides, the democratic political transient has learned that he can trust court historians and assorted hagiographers to re-write history favorably for him.
Pat Buchanan captured the rival perspectives — the despot’s vs. the king’s — in the following anecdote: “Louis XVI let the mob lead him away from Versailles, which he never saw again. When artillery captain Bonaparte asked one of the late king’s ministers why Louis had not used his cannons, the minister is said to have replied, ‘The king of France does not use artillery on his own people.’”
From pundits on our side of the pond, however, the monarchy regularly draws nasty barbs. Trashing the British monarchy appears to be their way of asserting American exceptionalism. I wager that were the conservative, periwigged Englishmen who founded America to pounce back on to the Tucker Carlson Tonight TV set — the only place they’d be welcomed, given their “Ultra MAGA” bent — the Founders, too, would favor the monarchy over the current American mobocracy.
Whereas the British queen’s role had become purely ceremonial — life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Lastly, consider the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the tawdry, quintessentially American saga they had inflicted on the queen. That the British monarchy stands for the last vestiges of ancient English tradition is not in dispute. But what do the Americanized Harry Windsor, formerly known as Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle represent? The Economist magazine, whose sources crown Meghan Markle as the “principal agent of the current debacle,” tethers “Harry and Meghan to … Marx.”
Markle, the Economist ventures, is a “product of an entertainment business that has done more than any other industry to fulfill Marx’s prediction that ‘all that is sacred’ would be ‘profaned’ and ‘all that is solid’ would ‘melt into air.’”
The Communist Manifesto predicted and celebrated that crass commercialism would subject national institutions “to the revolutionary logic of the global market.” “The Sussexes,” mused the Economist’s “Bagehot” column, “are … embracing capitalism in its rawest, most modern form: global rather than national, virtual rather than solid, driven, by its ineluctable logic, to constantly produce new fads and fashions.” [Emphasis added.]
Bar Marxist celebrity Meghan Markle from the funeral of the consummate public servant, HM the Queen, a true-blue “Sussex Royal.”
