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economy, do business with
the central bank instead.
OPINION
Meghan and Harry: Aristocratic Victims for Our Times
W
hen some future historian,
or perhaps some honest par-
odist of our modern mores,
seeks an event that captures the in-
version at the core of our continuing
cultural revolution, he should exam-
ine closely the television spectacle
that aired on CBS Sunday evening.
There they were, assembled
dreamily in the verdant grounds of a
California mansion, poster victims of
our irredeemably unjust system: the
sixth in line to the throne of the
United Kingdom, his wife, a so-so ac-
tress who nonetheless enjoyed con-
siderable fortune before she married
into the highest levels of the English
aristocracy, alongside one of the
most successful television celebrities
on the planet, bemoaning the injus-
tices that have befallen them in a sys-
temically cruel society.
You’d struggle to find a better
metaphor for one of the dominant
narratives of our age: our elites pa-
rading their grievances and preoccu-
pations for the masses, demanding
sympathy, issuing a call for the ordi-
nary people to do better to acknowl-
edge their own sinfulness.
Economic inequality is greater
than it has been in decades, and wid-
ening still further after a great reces-
sion and a global pandemic. The
poorest neighborhoods in this coun-
try, many of them dominated by eth-
nic minorities, are beset by levels of
violent crime and disorder not seen
in a generation. Educational opportu-
nities for those most blighted are
drowning in a sea of neglect, ideolog-
ical rectitude and acquiescence to the
demands of teachers unions. All the
while, we are forced to listen as chief
executives, tenured academics, Holly-
wood celebrities and now a prince
and his wife lecture us about what
are supposed to be the real systemic
flaws in our society: the terrible leg-
acy of American history; sexism, rac-
ism and “transphobia”; the endless
stream of microaggressions caused
by an errant word, a contentious
writer or the illustrations in the Dr.
Seuss books.
None of this is to deny that our
three figures, up there on their little
Californian Calvary on Sunday, have,
like all of us, had to bear their crosses.
Oprah Winfrey was there as the fa-
cilitator. She is a woman of excep-
tional talent and character who over-
came crushing hardship in early life
to achieve deserved success. When
she speaks—or in this case facilitates
a discussion—about hardship, we are
well-advised to listen.
The duke of Sussex—the name
provides a clue—had no such misfor-
tune of birth, though he did suffer
the unspeakable grief of losing his
mother at a young age in violent and
public circumstances, an event that
surely left the deepest of psychic
scars.
Even the duchess, the squeakiest
of the wheels, commands some sym-
pathy. The costs of marrying a royal
are sometimes overlooked. Whatever
their virtues, the Windsors will never
be known for an openness of manner
or spirit. They seem to have com-
bined in their personalities in fact the
relaxed informality of their German
heritage and the sunny warmth of
their adopted English homeland, so,
we can assume Meghan’s distinctly
New World style probably went over
like supermarket kibble in the corgis’
breakfast bowl. And while claims
about a yearning for privacy can be
taken with a pinch of salt coming
from an actress with a penchant for
self-publicity that was notable even
by the standards of her profession,
it’s also true that the British press
can be aggressively intrusive in ways
anyone would find painful.
But the personal struggles, real as
they are, aren’t the subject matter of
the lesson we are enjoined to learn
from them. The ex-royal couple have
enough wit to understand that their
own hardships don’t occasion many
tears outside their lachrymose celeb-
rity friends.
Instead they frame themselves as
victims of much larger societal evils.
Harry and Meghan have seized the
moment to sign on fully to the woke
creed, ascribing their trials to that
original sin of racism, not just from
the royal family itself, but from the
British press, feeding the ugly preju-
dices of the masses. They conve-
niently forget that the arrival of
Meghan was greeted by the same
press—and the same masses—with
joyous acclaim, that she was por-
trayed as somewhere between Grace
Kelly and Diana Ross.
But that’s the beauty of the new
dispensation: You can always blame
systemic injustice. Meghan may be
pointing the finger at unnamed roy-
als for her victim status, but we
know that’s just a proxy for the
wider evil that, improbable as it
seems, makes her the victim. Even as
you sit there in your alabaster pal-
aces, your Silicon Valley boardrooms
or your elegantly appointed dressing
rooms, you can point to the real
cause of society’s inequity: the
Trump- and Brexit-voting hordes
with their unenlightened views on
immigration, crime, the climate,
Western history.
And it’s one of the ironies of our
leading social-justice revolutionaries,
fighting to overturn the social order.
When you have on your side the peo-
ple who control most of the nation’s
corporations, newsrooms, universi-
ties, celebrities, the federal govern-
ment—along with a duke and a duch-
ess—can
you
really
be
that
oppressed?
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