Tea at Trianon: The Constitution, Citizenship, and the New Right

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, July 20, 2023

The Constitution, Citizenship, and the New Right

From Kevin Slack at The American Mind:

COVID-19 and the BLM riots revealed the breakdown of the rule of law, and leftists openly call organized violence an effective strategy. Professor Daniel Gillion has argued that “violent protest has a positive impact on political and policy change.” It brings urgency, while nonviolent protest only brings awareness. NPR featured Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting, which presents the “strategy of looting” as a way to attack “whiteness and white supremacy.” The riots, funded by corporations and abetted by Republican silence, defunded, demoralized, and overwhelmed local police. The Left seeks to monopolize the state’s agents of force, purging the military and creating a national police force while passing emergency decrees to create spaces for its use.

Many conservatives have now become convinced that, unless they are willing to allow their churches to be desecrated, their sacred services cancelled, their property and liberty taken away, and their children indoctrinated or chemically castrated, they must be willing to engage in violence of their own. One now hears the question asked, albeit still quietly: “Where’s the New Right’s Antifa or BLM?”; “Who is threatening corporations that have sided against us in the culture war?”; “Should their windows and properties be safe from our bats and bullets?”; “If conservatives are harassed in the cities, why are Democrats not harassed in our towns and fired from their jobs?”; “Would not our natural rights to life, liberty, and property—for all races—be better protected by a strongman than a kleptocracy?” (Read more.)