Tea at Trianon: The Trump Assassination Attempt and "Representation" in Crisis Roles

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, August 6, 2024

The Trump Assassination Attempt and "Representation" in Crisis Roles

From Mary Harrington:

At the most basic level, it should be obvious that a close protection role, that may involve taking a bullet for the person being protected, requires the people in that detail to be as big as or bigger than whoever they are protecting. At the very least if they were going to assign a woman, it should have been one as tall as Trump, who is 6ft3. No available 6ft3 women in the Secret Service? Don’t assign any women then. If you’re tempted to bend this rule for the sake of “representation”, you’re going to end up making your team less effective, and the resentment this creates will have negative repercussions for precisely the group whose positive profile you are trying to raise. Everyone loses. As, in fact, just happened.

At the broader level - and here I find myself on more sensitive ground - there is a sex-realist case for making exceptions to egalitarian principle, where combat and combat-adjacent professional roles are concerned. I made this case in Feminism Against Progress, in the chapter on men (republished here by The American Mind). In a nutshell: as noted above, there are clear physiological reasons for caution in making combat roles co-ed, in that men are, on average, taller and physically much stronger than women. But there are psychological grounds, too. (Read more.)