Tea at Trianon: Our New Civil War

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

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Our New Civil War

From The Epoch Times:

Never before has a governance system done so much good for so many people. It’s not perfect, but that’s the beauty of our system, we have processes and methods to address injustices and our warts. This system has never existed before, and never will again if we allow the street chaos to intellectually shut us down, intimidate us, and force us to sit idly by while our incredible Constitution is placed by radical elements in the dustbin of history.

The modern information age American Civil War is in progress. It is fundamentally a struggle between a Constitutionalist view of America and Globalist Elites who despise individual countries, desire to control societies and populations on a world-wide scale, and desire to dismiss our Constitution as an asterisk in history to be expediently used or dismissed as needed. The domestic branch of the Globalist Elites have no problem aligning themselves with the CCP if it means they can take the American White House. Very disturbing indeed. (Read more.)

Meanwhile, we have witch hunts, excommunication and iconoclasm that make those of the past ages seem tame. From Spiked:

What are No Platforming and cancel culture if not a modern form of excommunication? Qualified, competent professionals are hounded out of their jobs and publicly shamed just for uttering the wrong opinion, often simply for a misjudged choice of words. Even just the wrong pronouns.

As often as not, their employer wants a quiet life, so he bows to activist pressure and sacks the target of the witch hunt. Cancel culture is excommunication. Today’s religions, however, are not the many sects of Christianity that once perforated Europe, but climate change, education, the NHS, gay rights, trans rights, the European Union and multiculturalism. Even coronavirus and the lockdown have become sacrosanct.

Intellectuals of the right and left, from Polly Toynbee to Nigel Lawson, have described the NHS as Britain’s religion. It has replaced the Virgin Mary as the divine matriarch. Why this worship? I suggest it goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the state began to replace the church as the main provider of education, welfare and healthcare. After 1945, it was just a matter of time before the welfare state achieved altar status. (Read more.)

Not even Frederick Douglass is safe. From The Washington Times:

Frederick Douglass was not a slave owner, not a Confederate general, nor even a “white savior” abolitionist. His statue still was vandalized over the weekend. A Douglass statue in Rochester, New York — the site of his famous July 4 address — was damaged and removed over the Independence Day weekend, according to news reports backed by social-media pictures from the site. The statue of the famed 19th-century former slave and antebellum abolitionist had stood at Maplewood Park, Fox-2 news in St. Louis reported. According to pictures, the statue’s base was gone and bits of it were scattered around the area. (Read more.)

We must remember that courage is a virtue. From The National Review:

It is a mistake to compare Roberts to past disappointing Republican appointees to the Court. Unlike William Brennan or John Paul Stevens, Roberts was not appointed as an obvious sop to the opposing party. Unlike David Souter, he is not a liberal who snuck on the Court without adequate vetting. Unlike Earl Warren, Warren Burger, or Sandra Day O’Connor, he is a serious legal technician, not a politician. Unlike Harry Blackmun, he is not a simpleton seduced by stronger personalities within the Court. The chief is the opposite of Anthony Kennedy, whose sin was the hubris to maximize the power of the federal courts and his own votes in nearly every case. Roberts remains what he was before his appointment, a conventional conservative legal theorist who believes in many of the doctrines and judicial philosophies one would hear at any Federalist Society gathering.

But courage is lacking. Over and over again, Roberts has failed to follow through on the rule of law. His defenders point to his big-picture vision of judicial modesty and incrementalism: that conservatives should avoid big, wrenching moves, and build small victories in doctrine today that will accumulate to larger ones tomorrow. But in law, as in politics, tomorrow never comes without courage today. Worse, Roberts has on occasion written or joined opinions in big cases that forced large changes (as in the Bostock decision on Title VII) or did violence to doctrine (as in the King v. Burwell decision on Obamacare exchanges) in order to reach results that momentarily appeased the Left. It is all too apparent that Roberts can be cowed by the Democrats’ frequent and noisy threats to pack the courts or otherwise poison their credibility and legitimacy with the public. By caving to such threats, he only invites more of them.

Worse, a movement is beginning to grow among social conservatives to give up on the entire project of stocking the courts with Federalist Society–style originalists and textualists, on the theory that they will simply fold in a tight spot. Roberts is Exhibit A. Senator Josh Hawley issued a shot across the bow a few days ago on this theme regarding Bostock. These voices on the right are arguing openly for a more results-driven jurisprudence — a project that would do violence to the things Roberts cherishes, and would also inevitably be a fight the Right could only lose. Failures of judicial courage can also dispirit conservative voters, as happened in 1992 after Casey. Why labor in the vineyards of politics to appoint judges who know the right thing to do but lack the strength of character to do it? (Read more.)