Tea at Trianon: The Law That Ate the Constitution

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 17, 2022

The Law That Ate the Constitution

From The Claremont Review of Books:

If the consequences of civil rights law have been as totalitarian as Caldwell says, why has the harassed majority not revolted? The short answer is that they tried. Caldwell identifies the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as the moment when adherents of the old Constitution fought back, and the next eight years as the period when their hopes were conclusively defeated. “Reagan changed the country’s political mood for a while,” he laments, “but left its structures untouched.”

Reagan promised to shrink government, roll back the Great Society, and end affirmative action “with the stroke of a pen.” Instead, the national debt tripled. The federal civil rights bureaucracy proved as impossible to abolish as the Department of Education. Voters favored lowering immigration and getting control of the border, and Reagan promised to do it, but the compromise bill passed in 1986 traded immediate amnesty for enforcement measures that never came. “Reagan flung open the gates to immigration while stirringly proclaiming a determination to slam them shut,” Caldwell observes. “Almost all of Reaganism was like that.”

The voters who might have revolted against this betrayal were, Caldwell argues, essentially bought off. Public and private debt rose dramatically in the 1980s, and much of that borrowed money ended up in the pockets of white Baby Boomers in the form of tax cuts and consumer credit. These were the same people whose status in the political order had been altered for the worse by the civil rights revolution, and this borrowed prosperity allowed them to think that the old and the new constitutions could coexist. “[F]or one deluded generation,” suburban whites were able to recreate “a Potemkin version of the old order.” Their “easy and indulgent lifestyle”—the Age of Entitlement of the book’s title—was all funded by debt, but it was “convincing enough to draw vast numbers of people to construct it, like the pyramids or the medieval cathedrals or the railroads.”

That Boomer lifestyle was also made possible by immigration, which Caldwell argues is another kind of debt. In exchange for cheap labor now, citizens must eventually pay in government services and burdened infrastructure, as well as cultural friction. These debts are conveniently “off-balance-sheet” and can easily be ignored by those whose position in the social order makes immigration seem to them like an unmitigated boon. Demographics complicated the debate by making immigration “what the spread of slavery in the western territories had been before the Civil War—an issue that could be used by one side or the other to connive at a position of permanent political dominance.” It was therefore inevitable that immigration would play a starring role in the 2016 election when partisans of the old Constitution staged their last-ditch effort to elect a president who might succeed where Reagan failed. (Read more.)