Tea at Trianon: The Post-Reagan Era Of Conservatism Has Collapsed

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

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

The Post-Reagan Era Of Conservatism Has Collapsed

From Andrew Klavan at the Daily Wire:

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the fallen era of conservatism, and what it would take for him to turn against President Trump. Video and partial transcript below:

I’ll tell you, one of the things I like least about the current political moment is watching conservatives who disagree with one another attack each other’s integrity. This is a legitimately difficult moment for thinking conservatives.

Conservatism, as we knew it in the post-Reagan era, has collapsed. It collapsed for good reasons: It collapsed because it failed to stem the slow growth of the undemocratic administrative state, it collapsed because it supported the overly ambitious Bush freedom agenda, which led us into unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and it collapsed because it answered the anguish of unemployment and despair in the heartland with pompous bromides about the wonders of the global free markets that had destroyed their communities and lives. Donald Trump is an effect of that collapse. [He’s] not its cause. He’s a huge American original with huge American flaws.

He’s accomplished a great deal for our country. Taken the brakes off our economy, restored integrity to our judiciary, begun a necessary reordering of international relations in a post-Cold War world, and taken on a corrupt anti-American culture led by a corrupt anti-American news media. He’s also a bullying loudmouth of questionable principles who doesn’t always think before he speaks — all of which hurts both him and the country.

But I don’t pick on every mistake Donald Trump makes. I don’t call balls and strikes from a neutral umpire-like position because I don’t believe the two teams are fighting for the same goals. I believe the Democrat team has become socialistic and anti-American. They say that out loud themselves, they tout socialism, they say America was never great, they oppose the First Amendment when they seek to ban, intimidate, and deep platform speech they disagree with. They also oppose the Second Amendment, which is the only real guarantee of the First. They are, as I’ve said before, enemies of our Founding.

The other party, the Republicans, led by Trump, seemed to me a bunch of fractious clowns straggling in the generally right direction. In other words, they seem like a typical American political party. I don’t question the integrity of Never Trumpers and Trump skeptics — I really don’t — but I do think they’re making a moral miscalculation, a mistake, not a sin. I think their mistake is that they’ve lifted their own discomfort and uncertainty amidst the collapse of the conservative movement, above the true purposes of our politics, which are the preservation of American freedoms and the happiness of the American people. To allow the occasional unforced errors of our blowhard president to endanger those purposes is, in my humble opinion, to be played for a fool by our opponents. (Read more.)