Tea at Trianon: The Emerging Populist Majority

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, January 30, 2024

The Emerging Populist Majority

From The National Pulse:

In many ways, the Trump coalition that would shock the political world in the biggest upset in American presidential politics since 1948 is a combination of Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge and Ross Perot’s candidacy and issues. The first vote for president that Donald Trump would ever receive was actually from Perot’s political party that launched and then was unable to find any sort of successor—the Reform Party in California. Both Buchanan and Trump were possible candidates in 2000 for that nomination. All of this occurred before Trump switched his registration to Democratic in New York, among six other party switches in that closed primary state. Yet despite all those switches there remains a remarkable clarity and consistency on the actual issues and vision. The future anti-Trump coalition are those most committed to the globalization consensus that became established after the 1992 election, which was then brought into hyperdrive and defended by the party establishments of both the Democrats and the Republicans.

The Third Civic Order was articulated as needing to make the world safe for democracy, and in the twenty-first century, the more democracy would begin to slip into a recession after the first few years of the War on Terror, the harder it would become to maintain the consensus. Consider the 1992 election results but between only the two challengers to the incumbent (see the map below). (Read more.)