Tea at Trianon: As American as a Stolen Election

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, August 3, 2023

As American as a Stolen Election

From Chronicles:

The historical record shows that election fraud is as American as apple pie. The divided America of today is in a situation similar to the one it found itself in during one of its most corrupt elections, the presidential election of 1876—except worse. The myth of American exceptionalism is the most powerful and lasting of all our national myths. It absorbs and assimilates all the others, including the counter-myths that have periodically challenged it. But there are facts that this national myth cannot assimilate, cannot reconcile, cannot acknowledge to be true—therefore, these facts cannot be spoken.
One of these facts is that cheating has been a recurring part of the American electoral process. “Election integrity” is rhetorical point of pride among politicians in our great shining city on a hill, a beacon radiating the principles of liberal democratic governance upon the world’s backward dictatorships. That elections may in fact be corrupt in the heart of the world’s greatest democracy touches what Thomas Merton called “the unspeakable.”

On a Sunday morning early in 2021 I heard my pastor say, “We have had contested elections before.” His were among the few words I ever heard spoken in my church about the 2020 presidential election. Given the calming, reassuring tone in which he delivered them, and the larger context of the sermon, I took his meaning to be something like this: we have been through bitter, angry post-election fights before, but have always emerged from them just as we were before, or maybe even better, with no real damage done to our body politic or constitutional order. We even had a post-election civil war. If we got through that, surely we will get through this—whatever this may be.

Recounting in narrative form what actually happened in the past, and how it happened, is the work of the historian. How difficult that can be is shown in the not only conflicting but absolutely contradictory contemporary versions about what happened before, during, and after the presidential election of 2020. If the people who lived through an event cannot agree about what happened, how can an historian living decades or centuries later ascertain the truth? And how can our country move forward when Americans strongly disagree on the facts of this recent history?

Think about what my pastor did not say, but could have said, as it is historically true, and highly relevant to our predicament: “We have had stolen elections before.” Perhaps he did not know that stolen elections in America are an historical certainty, or perhaps he did not want to suggest or imply that the 2020 election may have been stolen, too. Acknowledging that would offend the collective social entity which Plato metaphorically named “the Great Beast.” (Read more.)