Tea at Trianon: What Was Great About the Great Communicator

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, September 3, 2024

What Was Great About the Great Communicator

From The Modern Age:

Democrats have celebrated their past presidents for decades after the fact long before Republicans venerated Reagan. Pictures of Franklin D. Roosevelt adorned the mantles of rank-and-file Democrats of my grandparents’ generation well into the 1980s. Bill Clinton is still dragged out of mothballs to address the Democratic National Convention every four years, avoiding a #MeToo cancellation. Jimmy Carter has been rehabilitated. Family members ritually denounced Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Trump endorsement because it ostensibly sullied the memories of his father and uncles Ted and John F. Kennedy.

Meanwhile, Republicans discarded Richard Nixon and George W. Bush quickly after their presidencies ended badly. Republican nominees from Bush all the way to Mitt Romney feel out of step with today’s GOP, with hundreds of their campaign alumni now quadrennially endorsing Democratic presidential candidates. George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford were respected, but not held up as examples for future Republican leaders. Herbert Hoover did get to speak at every Republican National Convention from the time he was voted out of office during the Great Depression until he died, but to little fanfare.

Reagan is unique in this respect because he is the only modern Republican to boast achievements that sit alongside those of the New Deal or Great Society. “[E]very American president will be remembered in history with but a single sentence,” Pat Buchanan declared at the 1992 GOP convention in his famous “culture war” speech. “George Washington was the father of his country. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the Union. And Ronald Reagan won the Cold War.” (Something to remember when prominent conservatives lament that the Reaganites have been replaced by Buchananites in the Trump era—Buchanan actually served in the Reagan White House.) (Read more.)