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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16085 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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It's part of the ontology of what makes you British, like fish and chips or poor dental health. Rejecting monarchism causes an existential crisis in the British psyche - which would be bad enough on its own, but when one starts to think "OK, I'm No True Scotsman because I don't like the monarchy" then as a Western European this puts you dangerously close to being French, which the British (or post-British) psyche also recoils from.

If you don't yell God Save The King, are you really British? Or are you just some guy with a lame piece of paper signed by (chortle) Rishi Sunak that confers upon you legal citizenship on a rainy island?

But surely there is some giant set of seething academics who hate that their society idolizes literal colonizers? Or to look at it from the other way, where did all the people who transparently hate America and everything it stands for come from in the States and why doesn't this same process happen elsewhere? Where is the equivalent of the person who every thanks giving delights in shitting on the settlers? Isn't the UK one of the countries that sneers at the US for being backwards and unenlightened?

Sure. There has long been a minority of republicans in the UK. The problem is that they mostly come off as seething radicals, and though there are a good number of republican politicians, they mostly choose to downplay it or hide it, because they know how poorly it goes down with voters. And of course there are plenty of radicals on the left in papers like the Guardian who don't hide their contempt for the Royal Family (or for anything they judge as too white and too old).

This is good background but doesn't answer my question of why the 'republicans' of the UK as dismissed but the 'America is an irredeemable country' people in the states are not.

Aren't they dismissed in the US? Yeah there are people in academia or what have you that openly hate the country. But by and large, politicians (even Democrats) have to act patriotic if they want to have political success. That seems rather analogous to what @Mewis was saying about the UK.

The USA doesn’t stand for anything. Certainly parts of the USA have unifying myths or culture based nationalism(and politicians in these places are quick to praise those myths or nationalism even when it’s aligning with the other team nationally), but a New Yorker, a Californian, a Texan, and a Floridian probably will not be able to agree amongst themselves which of them apply to the whole country.

What does the UK stand for then? They're certainly not without their regional troubles.

The monarchy. It’s in the name. The most politically successful secession movement(Northern Ireland) is explicitly Republican.

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