Royalist mania transcends traditional political divisions in the United States. Liberals, who decry entrenched privilege at home, seem strangely OK with a British aristocracy that conveys titles and estates through bloodlines. Fox News talking heads, who denounce coastal “elites” and the Ivy League, nonetheless carried breathless live coverage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding in May. A 2015 YouGov poll found that Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, held more favorable opinions of the British queen, Prince William, Prince Harry, and the Duchess of Cambridge than of their own politicians. Even the most popular American politician, Barack Obama, had a favorability that fell below their net rating by a considerable 34 points.

Donald Trump, with his penchant for Versailles-style gilded furniture and his predilection for stamping the family crest on his properties, seems to have a particularly bad case of this national affliction. In April 2017, The Times of London reported that White House staffers had demanded the full Cinderella treatment for his planned state visit: a gold-plated carriage ride to meet the queen at Buckingham Palace. (In order to avoid protests, as well as a giant balloon depicting him as a diapered child, the president will mostly avoid London and instead meet with the prime minister in the countryside, before heading to Windsor Castle for tea with the queen.)

Very little seems to unite Americans these days—except, apparently, their enjoyment in fawning over the rulers the Founding Fathers waged war to overthrow. Once, the United States claimed egalitarianism as a central ideal. What happened?

Americans may believe in meritocracy, but if their obsession with the royal family is any guide, they yearn for a time when fulfillment wasn’t quite so much work.

It’s not difficult to see how nostalgia for a system that finds dignity in stasis could take hold. American social mobility, depending on which economist you favor, has either been in steady decline for decades or has at the very least failed to keep up with widening inequality. Today, those born without privilege face daunting barriers to wealth and advancement. And even in the privileged upper class, the scale of competition—plummeting acceptance rates at elite universities, for example—makes it hard to live up to the assumption, hammered into American children from an early age, that they are “special.” Sleep deprivation, which affected 11 percent of Americans in the 1940s, is now a “public health epidemic,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The percentage of people who “worry a lot,” Pew Research analysis shows, has been rising for all income levels since 2003. And prescriptions for both stimulant medications, to keep up in an increasingly chaotic and distracting world, and sedatives, to unwind when it overwhelms, have jumped accordingly.

“This permanent struggle—between the instincts inspired by equality and the means it supplies to satisfy them—harasses and wearies men’s minds,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the United States in the early 1800s. Americans may believe in equality and meritocracy, but if their obsession with the royal family is any guide, they yearn for a time when fulfillment wasn’t quite so much work.