U.S. media overkill on Queen Elizabeth II should make us mourn, fear rising autocracy | Will Bunch

It took more than 28 years, but now we finally know the ultimate destination of the TV news trucks that followed O.J.’s white Bronco when it veered onto the 405 that unforgettable June night. Their route stopped on Donald Trump’s tarmac for interminable live shots in 2016 before somehow crossing the pond and transforming into 2022′s Griefmobile.

Endless, slow-moving images of Queen Elizabeth II’s Class E Mercedes-Benz hearse — its big windows displaying her coffin flag-draped in imagery of an orb, sceptre, and the bejeweled Imperial State Crown depicting opulence ... and domination — briefly reformulated the British Empire on global TV sets, even here in the nation that claims to celebrate the bloody 1775 revolution intended to cast off the curse of dynastic monarchy.

Every morning this week, viewers of the major U.S. cable networks — CNN, MSNBC, Fox — who might be curious about what Donald Trump did with those purloined top-secret documents, anxious about the future of women’s reproductive rights, or terrified about America’s would-be kings like Doug Mastriano or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the November ballot — instead got the white Bronco of benign autocracy, rolling slowly down crowded streets in the Scottish gloaming. When King Charles III addressed his new subjects for the first time, ABC, NBC, and CBS cut into normal programing to carry it live for Americans — just days after those networks refused to do the same for President Biden’s speech warning about the threats to our democracy which, it must be noted again, was created to undo the intolerable nature of absolutism.

For a lot of us, this royal takeover of American airways has been just too much. “It’s weird traditions and everything and I’m like, ‘Jesus, enough with the Queen!’” said radio’s Howard Stern, finding his Everyman voice. Folks like Louisiana retiree Julian Guidry agreed, as he told the New York Times: “It’s like a dog with a bone. The news outlets won’t let go!” But the truth is, this is happening because millions of Americans are somehow mesmerized by royalty.

CNN, desperate for a ratings spark under a controversial new boss, won the coveted 18-49 ratings demographic with its first day coverage — so no wonder its still gnawing on remnants of that bone days later. And so endless interviews mining the depths of Brits mourning the only queen most had ever known, “breaking news” coverage of boring church services, and all the sidebars about Charles’ arrogant fits of royal pique or informing the Queen’s bees of her passing or the clouds shaped like QEII’s head will keep coming through Monday’s funeral.

We humans — even those of us of the American variety — are somehow hard-wired for this fascination with royalty, the absolute top of the celebrity food pyramid. Our prurient fascination with the fantasy that TV’s The Crown was taking us inside Elizabeth’s surely more-complicated inner life has captivated many viewers in the same way. There’s a reason it went viral when a Twitter wag called the BBC’s even-more-over-the-top around-the-clock coverage this week “Mourn Hub.”

Very few of us are completely immune. For nearly 50 years, I’ve amused friends with my own story of the night when a 17-year-old high school friend and I — on a low-budget whirl through the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal — unknowingly missed the last bus of the night and found ourselves aggressively grilled on a street corner by security guards, only to look up and see Elizabeth and Prince Philip smile and wave at us from the back of their massive limo.

I’ve held onto that memory even though my personal view of monarchy was summed up by my favorite movie of that same era — Monty Python and the Holy Grail — and its famous scene where a peasant woman tells King Arthur, “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” Or maybe in the words of the Sex Pistols, also in 1976, that “our figurehead ... is not what she seems.” And yet it’s telling that America’s conflicted feelings about royalty are even reflected in a different summer of ‘76′s Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson laid out the case for government by the people without a single critical word about King George III.

The irony in 2022 is that — amid the trivial focus on coffins and corgis — the conversation that ought to be inspired by the passing of Elizabeth and the ascension of Charles is the one that, with a few exceptions, we aren’t really having, which is the one about the complicated ways that we humans govern our societies, and the ways those systems continue to fail us. The one constant in the around-the-clock praise for Elizabeth’s 70-year reign has been “stability,” and that shouldn’t be surprising. Globally, and not just in the UK, that quest — for continuity and a feeling of order — has only intensified during a queen’s long rule that overlapped with the chaos, cultural upheavals, and gross inequality of our real regime: late-stage capitalism.

The death of the 96-year-old queen did not occur in a vacuum, but in a moment when everyday people around the world — the folks on their couches driving this week’s TV ratings — are increasingly turning not to cosplay autocrats like Charles but real ones like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and a Former Guy here in Britain’s former colony, who promise order and to undo cultural progress that makes some uncomfortable, with a mantra that “I alone can fix it.”

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In the case of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth’s reign stood out as an attempt to have this both ways — by giving the common folk the embodiment of English tradition and continuity in a figurehead whose regal bearing could paper over the ongoing unraveling of the British Empire. At the same time, Britain also offered a largely democratic system of governance, even if it ultimately produced bad policy like Brexit and bad leaders like the clownish Boris Johnson.

Here in the U.S., the similar yearning for law and order, a backlash against rapid cultural changes, and “making America great again” doesn’t have a less harmless outlet like the pageantry of Buckingham Palace and the Changing of the Guard. Instead, that outlet has become a Republican Party that has rejected the basic 1776 principles of the American Experiment that cast off the United Kingdom, where the authoritarianism isn’t the polite dress-up kind. The spirit of colonialism that faded — though not disappeared or properly apologized for — under Elizabeth lives on in the cruelty-is-the-point policies of Donald Trump, Greg Abbott, and Ron DeSantis.

Indeed, as I write this on Thursday morning, the fog of royal grief drifting over from across the pond is finally lifting somewhat, with some news coverage of a horrific twist in America’s new embrace of autocracy. That would be the horrible game of demagogic one-upmanship taking place between Florida’s DeSantis — whose team tricked 50 Venezuelan migrants onto a plane to dump them in wealthy and mostly liberal Martha’s Vineyard — and Texas’ Abbott, who the next day sent two busloads of migrants to the front door of Vice President Kamala Harris’s home.

The rise of this cruelty-is-the-point fascism here in America is playing out in so many ways — in Sen. Lindsey Graham sounding more monarchical than Charles III in arbitrarily picking 15 weeks as the limit for when women can terminate a pregnancy, in the homophobia targeting our transgender youth, in book bans and in election denial cloaked in Christian nationalism. This is the brutal yin to the more soothing yang of the “feel-good” brand of authoritarianism as branded by Elizabeth and now Charles and as seen on TV.

This is why I find America’s media overkill on Queen Elizabeth so troubling, that this celebration of soft autocracy is offering cover for the steady rise of the more dangerous kind, here in America and around the globe. Great Britain is about to coronate a new king right as America is losing sight of the values that caused us to fight so valiantly to reject monarchical tyranny all those years ago. We really need to be talking about this, and not hypnotizing democracy to death by watching a royal hearse roll for hours on end. Like the Sex Pistols’ worthy American heirs Green Day sang about fascism on our own soil, everything isn’t meant to be OK.

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