As a much-younger Will Swaim – even then a hothouse flower but cultivated by solidly American and generous Californians just after the middle of last century – I was infatuated with all things British and particularly what I thought was “English.”
It was stored in the DNA: my mom’s dad (for whom I was named) had come direct from Bolton, a soggy North England mill town where, at age eight, he went to work in a textile factory surrounded by rough men and dangerous machines. He lost a finger there and much of his hearing. One night in his sixteenth year, following a grueling 12 hours at the banging/clanging/bellowing factory, he returned to his family’s home, a rented one-room hovel where water crept down the interior walls as if the building were heartbreakingly and chronically sad. He’d had a sinus infection for so long he thought it was part of the human condition along with hunger and the Seven Deadly Sins.
He went to dry his sodden socks on the pot-bellied stove in the corner, but it was dark and cold that night. So, as he told the story, he reached for an old newspaper to bring the coal fire grudgingly to anemic life. But as he struck the match to light the newspaper, he saw a photograph on the front page, and he paused: It depicted a woman reaching as if to pluck an orange from a tree in her yard in Pasadena, California. The caption said she was citrus-picking on New Year’s Day, and that the temperature was 72 degrees. That woman might have been a short-sleeved Lady Liberty holding her lamp over New York Harbor.
Within a year, my grandfather, was aboard the RMS Carmania and steaming beneath the actual Statue of Liberty. Rough Irishmen in uniforms herded him with others through Ellis Island. He paid for passage on a train to Southern California. It was 1921 – 100 years ago. He arrived in San Pedro, a nine-fingered 17-year-old with no real education and almost no money. Within two decades, he launched a tool-and-die factory of his own in Los Angeles. Over time, he employed hundreds of people who, in exchange for producing things, received wages they used to build their own homes and the communities that rose atop the foundation of those homes. My grandparents made a family of their own, moved to Rolling Hills, and developed a network of friends who loved scotch and exotic vinyl records featuring music of the South Pacific and Mexico. He became wealthy and played golf – memories of childhood days at their home are working alongside my grandfather in his garden, with a rough-cut soundtrack of radio men whispering about obscure problems on this or that green, USC football, or Vin Sculley calling Dodgers games with breaks in the action to read out enthusiastic product endorsements for Farmer John’s wieners.
My grandfather loved America in place of everything but family. He supported Republicans because he regarded the free-market philosophy they represented as the most powerful anti-poverty program in the history of mankind. Leap forward to his grandson, yours truly, whose weird, youthful affection for England (Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Manchester United) metastasized into a dogmatic admiration of British revolutionary parties, E.P. Thompson’s “History of the English Working Class,” hirsute Karl Marx working in the British Museum, and for Marx’s friend and patron Friedrich Engels, a guy who, as an owner of factories in the very place my grandfather fled, was a kind of model of the Silicon Valley elites who live as royalty while waving semaphores to indicate their connection to the oppressed.
I grew up – abandoned leftist politics simply because I grew up and saw the world beyond graduate school. This was no miracle of personal transformation; I am a cliché, Churchill’s liberal at 20 and conservative or libertarian (or conservatarian) by about 40. And I tell you all of this to say how little I would care about Oprah Winfrey’s interview this week with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry in Montecito, California – except that it signals an acceleration in our cultural decline.
The royal couple’s conceit – that they are victims not merely of capitalism and white supremacy – is so breathtakingly arrogant that even my younger self would have seen the interview for what it was: A very British coup.
This is my conspiracy theory – a rumor I spreading, beginning with you: Harry and Meghan’s interview is novelist Mark Helprin’s novel “Freddy and Fredericka” come to life. In the novel, British intelligence dumps the eponymous characters (stand-ins for Charles and Diana) in the U.S. with the aim of forcing them to grow up by starting out with absolutely nothing. Bereft of titles, money, connections and character, they survive on the streets by mixing with criminals, taking limited advantage of a non-government homeless shelter, and slowly discovering in America precisely what my short-handed grandfather found. Freddy (i.e., Prince Charles) sums it up this way:
“All you need do is refrain from smoking, drinking and the use of drugs. Eat only wholesome, low-fat foods, with the emphasis on vegetables, grains and fish. Seek work. Work hard. Show up on time. Do more than is expected. Think of ways to make the job efficient. Don’t complain. Shave, bathe and wear clean clothes. Be cheerful. Don’t gamble. Live within your means. Save. And then, when you have all this in balance, study things of substance. Read to satisfy your curiosity. Don’t father children out of wedlock or bear them as a single mother. Exercise. You will find that you will be promoted – perhaps not knighted, but promoted. Is that doesn’t happen, look quietly for a better position. Find a husband or a wife whom you love and who has the same good habits. Invest. Assume a mortgage if you must. Teach your children the virtues. And then, having become the means of production, you will own your share of the means of production, and if you do those things, all of which are within your power, you will live your own lives.”
Compare that with Meghan and Harry. Leveraging their own global celebrity, contempt/fascination for the British Crown, the terror of actual self-harm, and America’s newfound hatred of itself – for “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” and that greatest of evils, “capitalism” – it’s now apparent this is no attempt to bring down the British monarchy. In a weird way it’s that monarchy’s revenge on the American democratic experiment: California has a new social order, and a Prince and Princess of Woke.
It is fitting that they (the PPW) chose to live in California, in this engine room of the progressive movement. They could have lived anywhere in the world, but chose instead a $14 million Santa Barbara County mansion by the sea. And from that castle they will deploy their vast resources – the estimated $50 million in assets they regard as something like subsistence farming – to tell us they feel our pain because they’re victims too, and that they embody every American’s desire to be led, and specifically to be led by beautiful, wealthy people backward into an aristocratic caste system of racial and sexual identity. We see in them the unfolding of a new class structure, in which each of us is incentivized to establish that we’re the greatest victim and therefore have a powerful claim on the property and civil liberties of others. This way lies the perdition of a thousand similar experiments. Led by the likes of the Prince and Princess of Woke, we have boarded leaking little boats that, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “beat on, against the current” and are “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
If they do not lead this movement – if Meghan does not, as the rumors suggest, get into American politics – the PPW will at least aid in the ongoing destruction of the very things that made California a place of dynamism and opportunity, the very reasons that people from benighted parts of the world want to come here, not just from North English mill towns, but from Latin America, Africa, Asia, the former Soviet Union, and until recently the segregated U.S. South.
California is certainly imperfect – and yet people all over the world still surrender their families, communities and traditions to brave rape and murder, death by drowning, dehydration and illness to get here. Like my grandfather, these immigrants see something in California, in America, something that our comfortable, progressive neighbors cannot.
Will Swaim is president of California Policy Center, and cohost with David Bahnsen of National Review’s Radio Free California podcast.
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