Tea at Trianon: What Ties Still Bind?

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

Saturday, November 2, 2024

What Ties Still Bind?

From Bethel at Further Up:

Conservative journalist Daniel McCarthy recently developed this observation in a thread arguing that real-life Alex P. Keatons grew up to be cultural leftists, because the culture gave them no choice. If they wanted to remain respectable, they would either cross the aisle and become Democrats or become the sort of neocon “mediocrities” despised by McCarthy’s wing of the GOP. They certainly wouldn’t put up a serious fight on messy third-rail topics like abortion or the eventual redefinition of marriage, and they would punch right when it was politically expedient to distance themselves from Christian “extremists.”
As for the Keaton parents’ gentle leftist ethos, McCarthy proposes it “died without heir.” If you’re a traditional conservative, maybe Steve and Elyse would have tolerantly agreed to disagree with you. Maybe they could even have been your friends. But in 2024, heaven help you if you fall into the hands of an angry leftist.
If I wanted to poke at McCarthy’s particular brand of American conservatism, I would point out that Donald Trump also represents a form of cultural capitulation, which sits in ironic tension with McCarthy’s contempt for the squishy neocon right. However, he’s not wrong that we live in an America where it’s harder than ever to nurture all kinds of relationships across a political divide, and he’s not wrong that this is in large part because the authoritarian left wanted it that way. Consider the reactions to a recent speech where J. D. Vance encouraged Americans not to cut off family or close friends over political differences, because some things are more important than politics. On Twitter, I scrolled through reaction after reaction violently rejecting what would seem like the most anodyne thing a vice-presidential candidate could say in the runup to a tight election. Those violent rejections consistently came from one political side. Guess which?
Last month, a writing professor penned a “career suicide note” announcing that while he’d been a lifelong Democrat, this year he would be voting for Trump. He said he was doing this “for the surveyor, the farmer, the HVAC man, the nurse, the hairstylist, the Deadhead, the veteran, and my fellow adjunct professors who have told me their stories about being bullied by the Democrats, their friends and family, and their colleagues at work.” It was also “for the young Black woman in my class last year who, on the day of Kamala Harris’s visit to campus, said, ‘You’re going to hate me, Dr. Armstrong, but I’m not going. I’m voting for Donald Trump.’” The professor was shocked. Why did this young woman assume as a matter of course that he would not just disagree with her, but hate her? What had happened to our country? (Read more.)