I wish I could tell you that I had come up with the outstanding aphorism of “the working Windsors vs. the working-it Windsors” to describe the rivalry—scratch that—the open warfare going on in the U.S. between the “American” side of the House of Windsor (the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, otherwise known as Harry and Meghan), who are currently residing in California, and the Prince and Princess of Wales (aka Catherine “Kate” and William), who are now visiting Boston. Instead, it was coined by my brilliant friend, the historian and philanthropist Amanda Foreman, who, like me, is American (she was born in the U.S.) but spent most her childhood in Britain before moving here in her twenties.
Foreman explained in the funniest, most on-point article I have read on the topicthat Brits who hoped that the Waleses’ visit to Boston this week might clearly illustrate their superiority in what Foreman lists as “duty, probity, discipline, decency, discretion, loyalty and commitment”—versus the Sussex’s currency of “self-actualisation, self-healing, self-identity, self-care, self-expression, self-confidence and self-love”—hoped in vain.
This, Foreman says—in an article for the UK Sunday Times so spikily excellent that I wish it had been published in the U.S.—has to do with a generational divide. According to Foreman, Americans under 40 (i.e., the demographic who don’t read New York Magazine and therefore didn’t appreciate its “Meghan of Montecito” expose in August) don’t want duty, probity, etc. No, they want something called “me-spiration” which, says Foreman, is “not a philosophy so much as an ego massage and…a pure money maker.”