The signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 brought a new era and good riddance to the tone-deaf aristocracy under King George III.
With the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788, America’s new experiment in self-rule was formally initiated. This document established the framework for the U.S. government, both its institutional structure and the rights of its citizens.
Today, the United Kingdom’s Prince Harry doesn’t understand this, apparently. We’ll get to that shortly.
The Framers of the Constitution were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideals, including the power of human agency, importance of individual rights, necessity of religious freedom, fundamentality of a just society, and primacy of seeking the truth. They created a system of government that, first and foremost, would not interfere in the development of these virtues.
Thus, “American” values include individual liberty in the pursuit of happiness, respect for the equal rights of others, limited government shaped by the consent of the governed, a merit-based system of rewards, and the pursuit of truth as a societal virtue.
Today, each and every one of these values—along with the system that upholds them—is under vigorous attack by powerful subversives for whom they are anathema.
These subversives seem driven by one of two primary impulses.
The first is as old as humankind: the satisfaction of the base human passions. This includes, especially, the accumulation of wealth, exercise of power, and the indulgence of sensory pleasures (and, typically, all three simultaneously). This group includes the so-called globalist elite who view a strong U.S. driven by American values as an obstacle to its insatiable appetite for wealth, power, and consequence-free physical indulgence.
The second group is driven by dogma. These are the disciples of Karl Marx and fellow travelers who believe that once some group attains social primacy, that group will use its power to tweak all the institutions in a way that ensures the continuation of the group’s dominant position.
This includes legal institutions, government structures, culture, language, and even rational thinking. This “systemic” lock-in is so resistant to change, so the story goes, that the only solution for the oppressed is to completely destroy the institutions.
Marxist values include limited liberty in the pursuit of equity, unequal rights in the pursuit of diversity, unlimited government shaped by the consent of the oppressed, a system of rewards via identity-based notions of inclusion, and a rejection of the very notion of truth.
Note that, while these two types may be united in their animus toward the U.S., it is axiomatic that a single individual cannot truly be both. That is, one cannot be a wealth- and power-maximizing hedonist while, at the same time, fully embracing Marxist values. Or so it seems.
Yet, here we face the perplexing case of Prince Harry, a descendent of King George III himself. Following the prince’s attacks on the British Commonwealth, he has turned his attention to bulldozing American values.
This is perplexing because, on the one hand, Harry, Duke of Sussex, enjoys all the privileges of the globalist elite. Yet, on the other hand, he enthusiastically embraces the anti-American values of Marxist dogmatists.
It is difficult to imagine how Harry deals with the implied internal contradictions without blowing a gasket—much like the “supercomputer” in Season 2 Episode 24 of TV’s original “Star Trek,” which self-destructed when Kirk presented it with a logical dilemma. Perhaps a dogged fixation on the object of animus common to both groups, the U.S., is enough for Harry to keep it together.
Alternatively, the answer may lie in really believing that there is no such thing as objective truth. After all, Kirk’s AI antagonist was hard-wired to adhere to logic. The logical demands of Marxist dogma are much more elastic.
Exhibit 1 is the prince’s bestselling autobiography “Spare,” a canonical instance of the postmodern genre in which knowledge is “positional” and one’s “lived experience” takes precedence over logical, fact-based arguments.
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“Spare” is riddled with historical inaccuracies and objectively untrue claims, such as identifying Harry as Henry VI’s great x7 grandson.
Harry also writes about his general disdain of history, recalling a visit to the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore with his father, now King Charles III:
A lifelong student of history, [Pa] had loads of information to share, and part of me thought we might be there for hours, and there might be a test at the end. Mercifully, he stopped, and we carried on.
Harry had no interest in more formal lessons from his history teacher, identified as a Mr. Hughes-Games:
So it came as a roaring shock when I realized that Mr. Hughes-Games believed me to be the odd one. What could be odder, he said to me one day, than a British prince not knowing British history? … It wasn’t just that I didn’t know anything about my family’s history. I didn’t want to know anything.
Once the problem of being a self-hating elitist is solved, all the other anti-American values can follow.
For example, Harry’s flagrant disregard for the rule of law, as evidenced by his illegal drug use in passages such as this:
I had been doing cocaine around this time. At someone’s country house, during a shooting weekend, I’d been offered a line, and I’d done a few more since.
Or his disregard for the truth, as evidenced by his unwillingness to release his U.S. visa paperwork.
Or his indifference to human dignity, as evidenced by his macabre discussion of kill counts in Afghanistan, including:
I could always say precisely how many enemy combatants I’d killed. And I felt it vital never to shy away from that number. … So, my number: Twenty-five.
Or his inability to understand democracy, about which U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, tweeted: “Love being lectured on democracy by an actual prince.”
Still, one marvels at Harry’s ability to forge ahead as the embodiment of two mutually inconsistent dispositions.
Is it a maniacal focus on the common object of animus? Is it the dogmatic rejection of logic itself?
British author Alexander Larman suggests that the answer is simply that Prince Harry, at 38, “is even more stupid than we thought.”
We’d like to think that he can learn better.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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