First, to set the parameters for this post: Prince Harry is a prat with some very nasty aristofascist friends. Nuff said.
Second, if one is going to use fighting words then make sure you use them accurately. The folks at Socialism In an Age of Waiting have endorsed some rather intemperate words from the Virtual Stoa which I think deserve no such endorsement. Let's have a shy.
"aristocrats and their apologists (both secular and ecclesiastical) opposed the ideology of human rights every step of the way from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries..."
A minute's thought and ten minutes Googling brought me a few links by way of commentary on that statement. In the eighteenth century, Lords Rockingham and Shelburne, brought recognised American independence, which might be said to have been a step in the right direction as far as human rights were concerned. OK, they don't deserve much credit for that, but they deserve some.
More substantial evidence required? In the nineteenth century it was partly through the efforts and with the leadership of Lord Shaftesbury, of the long-established Ashley Cooper family, that the Ten Hours Act was passed limiting children's work hours in the teeth of furious opposition by business interests. He followed through by spending most of his life trying to get children out of factories and mines and into schools. Not everyone agrees that education is a right (though the UN thinks so, for what it's worth - see article 26), but I doubt if even the most hardcore free market fundamentalist nowadays advocates making ten-year-olds work twelve-hour days in factories. Just saying, y'know.
And in the twentieth century? Check out this obituary for Lord Wilberforce. No, not that Lord Wilberforce. This one, the former head of Anti-Slavery International.
A bit more time and I could multiply examples. OK, these are individual cases, not a statistical survey of the aristocracy: but then Virtual Stoa left that goal wide open for me - they did after all say 'aristocrats and their apologists...'. Even if one did say 'the aristocracy' (i.e. the class rather than its constituent individuals) the case isn't so clear as all that, since the House of Lords, though often acting with mule-headed obstinacy to oppose necessary reforms (the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the crisis of 1910-12 being the strongest examples) has never been a monolith.
All of these men, you might say, acted out of paternalism, not out of a real belief in human rights. Perhaps (and if so, good for paternalism), though Wilberforce and Shaftesbury would certainly have said that they had a belief in equality - equality before God, perhaps a different sort of belief in equality to that of a modern liberal humanist, but perhaps not to be despised for that reason.
As for the apologists of aristocracy, the first and greatest of these was Edmund Burke. Of him one can say that he did indeed oppose the ideology of human rights, but he did a good deal for actual human rights, for instance with his long unrewarded efforts to punish Warren Hastings for abuses in India.
"there's also a political campaign to wage, and what that needs right now is the spread of an attitude of naked contempt for monarchy and its political, economic and social supports".
Speaking as one of those supports, I don't see what I've done to deserve it. Or do they mean 'supports' in some nice safe antiseptic way, akin to hating the support but loving the supporter? The difficulty is that contempt - their word - tends to spill over from a cause to the people who participate in it. It is difficult to say to anyone 'I have contempt for your cause' and then buy them a pint. It is possible, by contrast, to socialise with people you merely oppose. (As a side issue, this shows how hard it is to distinguish a cause from the people who support it, a fact relevant to the debate over the religious-hatred Bill.) Contempt is a strong drug, one of the strongest, like lust and greed, and it should be used only in extreme, urgent cases. The monarchy and aristocracy are not that: the question of what to do about them would come about 754th on my list of issues the country needs to tackle, some significant way behind persuading people on buses to turn the volume down on their personal stereos. There are, in fact, good reasons to oppose the existence of the monarchy and aristocracy, though I think they are outweighed by the benefits, as I explained in my debut post. But my advice is: reserve one's contempt (and SIAW do contempt marvellously well) for people who deserve it: that is, tyrants, terrorists, murderers, rapists, in short anyone who uses violence against the innocent, and their apologists.
I hope SIAW have read Burke, as good Marxists should (just like good reactionaries should make sure to read The Communist Manifesto at the very least). If so they might find a pertinent comment on the issue of why going after the ancien regime is a distraction even from the perspective of a radical:
"...the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain... Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive... The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with a fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad, it continues its ravages, whilst you are gibbeting the carcase, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourselves with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under colour of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse."