Indeed, but for counter culture, I think the artifacts are kind of important, as it communicates your involvement inside that culture. It is kind of hard to imagine punk without the music, the cloths, the hairstyles, the graffiti, etc. Sure it is also hard to imagine punk without the Anarchy, but if you think of early punks, with their heavy drinking and male dominant behavior, and compare it to modern punk which thoroughly reject these early cultural behaviors, you’ll find that they still share the aesthetics even though their attitude has changed.
Sure, monarchists literally have the monarchy, prison abolitionists have a wide variety of songs/books/icons, etc. I don't understand what you're trying to differentiate.
First of all, I’d like to make a distinction between monarchists and royalists. Monarchists is a political group with certain believes around the structure of the government. Royalists on the other hand is a cultural group that enjoys certain events.
If you look at the cultural artifacts of royalists you’ll find they enjoy and attend events around, for example royal weddings, they gather in forums where they share gossip around, e.g. the Romanovs. It doesn’t matter if they like to keep Putin as president, or if they would like to re-inaugurate the Romanovs as tsars, as political believes are orthogonal to the culture (although I do admit it would be kind of weird to find an anarchist royalist). To that extent I think of royalists more like Eurovision fans.
Likewise if you look at the quintessential prison abolitionist Angela Davis. Now describe her speech, her hairstyle, her public events, etc. You’ll find many prison abolitionists that don’t share any of it, however if you’ll look for people that share these cultural artifacts, you’ll find a bunch of radicals. Radicals is exactly the cultural group which I would ascribe Angela Davis as belonging to.
