Tea at Trianon: J.D. Vance is the Ultimate Non-Compromise Candidate

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, July 16, 2024

J.D. Vance is the Ultimate Non-Compromise Candidate

From The National Pulse:

Drive along the banks of the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati and you will pass town after town of closed plants, boarded-up storefronts, EPA cleanups, and people invested in properties no longer valuable, because manufacturing has been transferred to China – under free trade agreements.
Trade!
What is left behind is largely low-skilled labor, with wages driven down by the abundance of illegal migrant workers. It is a despair-inducing mess. There is an opioid epidemic. Which brings us, finally, to J.D. Vance, whom President Trump has selected to be his vice-presidential nominee. Besides Brexit and Trump, a third thing happened in June 2016. Hillbilly Elegy was published. It was a first-hand account by author J.D. Vance describing the working-class discontent in those Ohio towns. That discontent would lead to Trump’s election a few months later, when he carried the mostly Democratic, working-class states of the industrial Midwest.
Vance was not connected to Trump, and he did not write a political book. He went on to ride his notoriety into fleeting Hollywood-darling status. Ron Howard made his book into a movie. But Vance refused to play minstrel in their Hollywood’s narrative of life, and he was abandoned by the smart people. He ran for Senate in Ohio and won. He has become Trump’s most effective defender in Washington. Sen. Vance is the third leg under the June 2016 table.
Trumpism and Brexit and Hillbilly Elegy. June 2016 were weeks when decades happened. This is an election about the discontent of the Western working class against the false god Solzhenitsyn described as “Trade!” J.D. Vance is the ultimate non-compromise candidate. He focuses the 2024 election on economic matters important to Trump’s base of voters. He is a great pick. (Read more.)