Tea at Trianon: Liberalism’s Good and Faithful Servants

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

Saturday, March 11, 2023

Liberalism’s Good and Faithful Servants

From Compact:

What passes for the American intellectual right is a sorry thing. Indeed, it lacks even the virtues of unity and coherence; in reality, it is fractured, an ever-changing hodgepodge of views and conflicting mini-movements. To the extent there exists any institutional structure at all, it is only to be found on the right wing of liberalism, Conservatism Inc., which coheres in a brittle way only at the price of stasis, recycling nostrums for Reagan’s birthday, policing intellectual challenges, and establishing yet another Center for Madison and Mammon at some nominally Catholic university or other, funded to the tune of $10 million by some calculating donor who suspects Leo XIII was a dangerous socialist.
So what is organized isn’t opposed to liberalism in any real sense, and what is genuinely opposed to liberalism—genuinely critical of the endless revolution of liberalism, genuinely interested not merely in slowing its progress, but in defeating it, undoing it, curing its ills, and then transcending it to rebuild a civilization—isn’t organized.
What’s even worse—and this is my thesis—is that most of the sub-movements on the American right that imagine themselves to be critical of liberalism are, objectively, its servants. They serve the liberal order by practicing and, indeed, advocating, in one form or another, political quietism: the fundamental refusal to mount a political and public challenge to liberalism itself.
(No, such a challenge doesn’t mean “overthrowing the government,” because the government was here before liberalism and will be here after it; nor does it mean “betraying the Constitution” or some such, because the Constitution can be interpreted on nonliberal premises and, indeed, was for a long time interpreted on such premises, as I have argued; nor does it mean “theocracy,” for liberalism has no monopoly on recognizing a legitimate sphere of independence for the temporal power, and a legitimate sphere for the individual conscience as well. If these or similar slogans leapt into your thoughts, you already suffer from the very infection of the mind I mean to diagnose here.) (Read more.)