Tea at Trianon: Why Everything Is Being Politicized

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, September 22, 2017

Why Everything Is Being Politicized

From Return to Order:

The old phase of this war was defined by a set of rules inside the framework of the classical liberal order. It is based on an individualism centered on the pursuit of material happiness without restraint. In this arrangement, God and His moral law were relegated to the private sphere.

Both sides of the debate are represented by this order. Liberals on the left tend to favor a model of technological advancement that rejects a moral order since it restricts progress. Conservatives inside this liberal model desire to maintain some private remnants of Christian order as a framework for combating the chaos of misdirected progress.

Moral conservatives have long fought a stubborn and slow rearguard action inside the context of this liberal order. Unfortunately, some disregarded the sage advice of Jesuit Fr. Bernard Dempsey, who commented that “Only a very foolish general accepts battle on terrain of his adversary’s choice.”

However, inside this liberal framework, many Americans did manage to find some meaning and identity in their private lives. They did this by clinging to what little remains of family, church, and other social structures of Christian order. Meanwhile, the cultural left has lived off the social capital of Christian order, while slowly pushing a corrupting agenda ever further toward complete unrestraint. This symbiotic arrangement formed a precarious consensus that not even the disruptive sixties managed to destroy completely. (Read more.)