Tea at Trianon: What’s Wrong With the 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, March 21, 2024

What’s Wrong With the Right

From Modern Age:

The Failure of American Conservatism consists of mostly previously published material in the form of articles, essays, and excerpts from books by Professor Ryn, with a sixty-nine-page introduction written specifically for the present volume. It is at once a brilliant summation of the state of Conservatism, Inc. and a crushing indictment of a political movement that professed to be a cultural one as well, though lacking, in Ryn’s estimation, the intellectual resources to be either in a comprehensive and effective way. Ryn holds that conservative intellectuals who proposed to reclaim the American party system from the liberals—the Democrats and the left generally—while, in twenty-first-century lingo, “taking back the culture,” lacked the historical and human imagination to see how the job could be accomplished given the social and intellectual context of the times. To have succeeded, he argues, they would have needed to have had a far wider knowledge of, and a firmer grasp on, the principles of Western philosophy and a greater familiarity with serious culture—literature, music, the plastic and fine arts—in which they had little to no interest, but rather a mild disdain for them. If their aesthetic and intellectual world were indeed a Sahara of the Bozart, as Mencken called the American South in the 1920s, they neither cared nor noticed, secure in the belief that civilization is foremostly a pragmatic business centered on politics, economics, and the law, and that the way back to responsible conservative governance and a sane culture is through concentrated and nearly exclusive attention to these things. (Read more.)