Tea at Trianon: Seven Lessons the 2024 Election Should Teach America’s Leaders

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

Friday, November 15, 2024

Seven Lessons the 2024 Election Should Teach America’s Leaders

From Return to Order:

1. America Wants New Leadership

A restoration cannot be accomplished solely by removing bad laws and failing programs. It will not happen by promising free benefits, tax cuts or other assistance. The election showed that people want new leadership that can change the direction of the country and lead the way back to common sense and stability.

This attitude was reflected in the debate. People did not want platitudes but leadership.

2. We Want (and Need) God!

The left hates it, but there is a “Ten Commandments” American who is an essential part of the public and has a special attachment to all things pertaining to God and His Law. One candidate welcomed references to God, prayer and Scripture throughout the presidential election. The other candidate did not embrace this message. The results show that religion still resonates with the American public. It is time to bring Our Lord back into the center of American Life.

3. Politics Cannot Replace Families

The traditional family is the basis of all order in society. God created the family to meet each person’s most basic needs. Children learn basic lessons at their mothers’ knees. Fathers teach their offspring to work and support themselves. Parents teach children to love God and His Law.

The election was all about families. It was a dispute between two visions of the family. One vision saw “family” as whatever individuals decide they want it to be, thus leading to abortion, broken unions, classroom failures and ineffective social welfare programs. The other vision adhered more to the traditional union of a man and a woman directed toward the upbringing of offspring. It is time to abandon the fallacy that the government knows best for the family.

4. The Permissive Society Destroys Everything

For too many years, leftists in government, academia and the media have misrepresented morality as repression and tyranny. The ruins of that premise lie everywhere in a society that is falling apart. This revolution inside society is pushing everything—identity, sexuality and behavior—to ever greater violence and radicalism. This election questioned these premises and promises of the permissive society. (Read more.)

From Daniel McCarthy at Chronicles:

Make no mistake: Any Republican other than Trump would also have been branded a “fascist” and woman-hater, but unlike a typical politician, Trump never tried to soften his image to please his enemies. Biden could only compete with Trump because he reminded voters of the days before Democrats went woke.

They wanted to believe they could still vote for the party of Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy, a patriotic party with a focus on blue-collar workers, not just the financial interests and identity-politics obsessions of the college-educated elite. Biden challenged Trump for Trump’s own voters, even if in truth Biden wasn’t so different from the politically correct yuppies who’ve run the Democratic Party since the 1990s.

Biden was too infirm to fight a second election, yet Democrats had no one else—and no one on their horizon today looks ready to compete with the populist Trump-Vance version of the GOP.

This leadership crisis began with Barack Obama.

What’s true for kings is true for presidents as well: Success depends on producing an heir. But Obama left his party without anyone who could do what he did—maybe because what he did was less impressive than his admirers assumed. After all, Obama chose an already senior Biden as his vice president because Obama was inexperienced and unsure he could count on older Democrats’ support. Biden was a crutch in 2008—and still was in 2020.

Once Democrats didn’t have anyone with Obama’s charisma to deflect concerns about the drift of the party, what did they have? They had Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, who thought that being female—and, in Harris’ case, black and Indian—would earn them points regardless of their bankrupt policies.

By contrast, Trump was an outsider, and that’s what voters longed for: someone to break with the weak border policies, foreign-policy incompetence and “Americans Last” globalist economics of Washington’s leadership class. Clinton and Harris—and other Democratic hopefuls from Pete Buttigieg to Gavin Newsom—only offered more of the same, plus identity politics and transgenderism for children. (Read more.)