How the Republican Party became royalists

This Thursday, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in Washington brought together Tories from the UK and conservatives in DC for a panel discussion called “The Crown Under Fire: Why the Left’s Campaign to Cancel the Monarchy and Undermine a Cornerstone of Western Democracy Will Fail.”

Usually, panel discussions present conflicting points of view, but that’s not really how the conservative movement in America works right now. 

The host, Heritage Foundation’s Joseph Loconte, introduced the event by shouting, “God save the Queen!” Five white conservatives then proceeded to praise the monarchy, while all agreeing that “there isn’t a scintilla of racist beliefs within the royal family,” as Sir Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of the UK’s Conservative Party, said to approving nods from the other panelists.

While most of the British members of the panel defended the monarchy as an almost apolitical institution, with the Queen as a benign, mostly symbolic head of state, Loconte and the conservative pundit Nile Gardiner talked about Buckingham Palace as if a war was unfolding, and they were Winston Churchill addressing a terrified country. Gardiner described Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s interview with Oprah as “a cruise missile strike against the British monarchy” and went on to say that American attacks on Buckingham Palace were “essentially anti-British”, and came from furious liberals who “hate the Crown, Brexit, tradition, history, western civilization, and no doubt tea and scones as well.” 

The Heritage event revealed that the utility of the British monarchy for American conservatives is not as an apolitical institution, but quite the opposite. They see it primarily as a weapon to be used in the American culture war; as a bulwark against “woke cancel culture,” as Gardiner suggested.

It is no coincidence that American conservatives are praising monarchies just as the Republican Party is waging a war on democracy at home. As the Heritage Foundation event happened, the Republican state government in Georgia was busy passing a controversial bill to limit voting rights in the state. The law is an obvious response to recent Democratic victories during the 2020 election, which were made possible by making it easier to vote and thereby expanding the electorate. The new Republican law reduces early voting hours, imposes strict ID requirements and, for no good reason at all, bans any distribution of food and drinks to people waiting in line to vote.  It is clearly an attempt to make it harder to vote, particularly for people who look like Meghan Markle and her mother.

When the Heritage Foundation is not busy hosting transatlantic Zoom conferences on the glories of the monarchy, it is leading a nationwide campaign to change voting laws. Earlier in March, Heritage Action for America — a conservative nonprofit tied to the foundation — launched a $10 million initiative to impose voter suppression laws in eight swing states, targeting Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. “Everybody shouldn’t be voting,” as Arizona Republican John Kavanaugh said recently. These voter suppression laws are some of the main reasons why the US has fallen further than any other country in the most recent rankings of Freedom House, a DC organization tracking the global health of democracy.

It is a well-established irony that the Republican Party, originally founded in opposition to slavery, has been the party of the neo-Confederate South and white resentment since the 1960s. Embracing the monarchy feels like another clear contradiction. Yet Harry and Meghan’s interview was not just met with outrage from American right-wing pundits, but with a passionate defense of constitutional monarchy as a superior form of government. In the days after the interview aired, dozens of American conservative pundits defended the British monarchy while attacking Meghan Markle as an “insult to the British people” for speaking out on what she perceived as discrimination and racism.

Many political analysts in the US were stunned by this new Republican royalism, but American conservatives have a long tradition of defending the monarchy, praising kings and autocrats, and the general idea of the unitary executive, or unconstrained presidential power. It is not so much a surprising shift, but a return to form.

The main institutions that shaped the conservative movement in America were formed during the Cold War, when many on the US right saw a need to unite with monarchs and emperors in a common fight against communism. The National Review, once the most influential magazine for conservatism’s self-proclaimed intellectuals,  was founded by apologists for European monarchies, and many of their early writers and columnists fawned over kings and autocrats. The magazine’s founder and editor, William F Buckley, famously wrote that “General Franco is an authentic national hero.”

The most revealing quote at this week’s Heritage panel came from Tim Montgomerie, a British right-wing pundit, who said that the appeal of the monarchy is that kings and queens don’t really have to worry about the public and whatever they think, since they’re not elected anyway. “Imagine a presidential candidate who is being attacked for something, and then they say I’m not going to respond at all!” he added. This, apparently, was the real beauty of the monarchy: a complete lack of accountability.

It’s not hard to see why this would appeal to the party of Donald Trump.