I’ve been asking strangers random questions for 20 years in the name of journalism, but I’d never been vox-popped myself until last Friday, when I was approached on Oxford Street by someone from a Japanese television station. What did I think of Meghan Markle?

I said I thought she was great. Furthermore (warming to my theme), I thought the reaction against her in the British media was symptomatic of a deeply disturbing moment of racist hegemony that has crashed over us like sewage, following the dam burst of Brexit.

Her list of heroines was glitzy but political, and most of the rage centred on the fact that she hadn’t chosen the Queen

Yes, I admit there was quite a cock-eyed, irrigation-system riff going on in that metaphor, and I must have been talking for about 15 minutes, but they wanted more. What did I think of the cover stars Markle chose for her guest editorship of Vogue? The list had already had some hostile attention in the press, which is why they were asking. The princess’s heroines included Greta Thunberg, Jane Fonda, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and actor Jameela Jamil. It was glitzy but it was political, and most of the confected rage seemed to centre on the fact that she hadn’t chosen the Queen. I thought Meghan’s list was great; I think she’s great. Unnervingly, I think the royals are great.

If you dwell too hard on how things used to be, it becomes surreal: the royal family have typically been seen, by the forces of progress, as part of the apparatus of the status quo. With their unearned wealth, and protected by inscrutable silence, they shored up and symbolised the entitled establishment more trenchantly than anyone could by making a speech. It’s true that the staunch republicanism of your average leftie in the 1970s and 80s faded in the callow 90s, when it simply wasn’t cool to worry about privilege. But even as many anti-monarchists turned to other issues, none could have ever imagined standing on the same side of the barricades as the royals. Yet here we are. “The Queen won’t accept that,” people say sagely to one another, as another hard-right ideologue floats the possibility of proroguing parliament to crash Britain out of the European Union.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vogue’s September issue, guest-edited by Meghan Markle.

The thrust of the attacks on Markle’s Vogue editorship – condemning it as virtue-signalling of the worst kind, as Hollywood self-aggrandisement shoving its hypocritical values down our throats – was a variation on the theme: “Get back in your box, princess.”

It is typical of the age that anyone allying themselves with an optimistic vision – what if we could avert climate catastrophe? What if we stamped out prejudice? – is immediately greeted with this kind of ire. The mean-spirited arguments are constructed on a foundation of bad faith. Only the underprivileged can talk about privilege; only the excluded can talk about bigotry; only the monk can talk about consumption. The ploy is quite clear: virtually nobody counts as quite deprived enough to have ambitions for a better world, so everybody should just pipe down. It’s like some infuriating riddle, devised by Breitbart and recycled on the pages of once-respectable newspapers. Ultimately the targets are more interesting than the impoverished arguments themselves.

Why would it be Markle who riles them like this? Kate Middleton, when she first married into the royal family, chose as one of her charities a women’s addiction rehab centre called Hope House. Did anyone jump up and down about that? Could it be anything to do with Markle’s race, this constant provocation she seems to present to people who hate being called racist?

It is an uncomfortable thought experiment to imagine Prince Harry explaining the mainstream British media to his relatively new wife: “Look, the tabloids have never been great. They hounded my mother to an early grave with their insatiable scrutiny. But as bad as the treatment of my mother was, it would have been unimaginable that weird, misogynist rumours such as ‘she’s faking her pregnancy’ would circulate in the darkest recesses of the blogosphere. The mainstream British media has suffered some catastrophic bypass of decency that may or may not be related to your race.”

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Even with such a sober account of the facts, Harry would be placing himself considerably to the left of that mainstream. There’s no evidence to suggest that he is left wing at all. But he too has been pilloried by the self-appointed scourges of political correctness over his foregrounding of the climate emergency. The royals haven’t moved, but the political context in which they are now operating has shifted so far that merely through anti-racist advocacy, or trusting in science, they’ve fetched up on the same team as the socialists. References to the “Overton window” don’t really do justice to the changing political parameters that have turned our royal family into a stronghold of progressive thinking in modern Britain. The lexicon of political analysis needs a new gloss; the Overton hall of mirrors, the Overton trapdoor.

The royals have become potential allies in the rebellion against lunacy. Could the prime minister really refuse to resign following a vote of no confidence, and use the lack of precedent and fog of chaos to force through a no-deal Brexit? “Oh, the Queen would never have it.” We hope. “She’d be bound to intervene. She loves the constitution. It’s her favourite thing, after the Commonwealth.” We envisage the monarch intervening with sound sense, while Prince William goes on a Pride march and Prince Charles gives Davos a piece of his mind about carbon emissions.

Some of it is wishful thinking, but there’s a truth at its heart. English nativism, in all its petty media iterations, has turned the royal family into renegades. To explain that to a Japanese television channel would have been the work of a year.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist