Tea at Trianon: Trump and Conservatives

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

Thursday, February 8, 2018

Trump and Conservatives

From The Federalist:

As most conservatives outside the beltway understand, and as President Trump’s voters surely understood in the 2016 election, progressives have successfully captured the vast majority of our nation’s institutions, distorting them to serve their own ends. Although many of these institutions — academia, the media, entertainment, legal and judicial — once stood above politics in serving all Americans, most have now surrendered to progressives’ relentless push to turn every area of civil society into a propaganda arm for their politics.

Prior to Trump, elite conservative leaders generally accommodated to this progressive framework. Because of their reverence for our nation’s institutions and the traditional sense of the appropriateness of the constitutional system, conservatives largely limited their attacks against institutions to the rhetorical and the ideological. The idea of calling the entire legitimacy of specific institutions into question, however, was beyond the pale. (Read more.)