Tea at Trianon: Liberal Shibboleths are Eroding

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, May 2, 2025

Liberal Shibboleths are Eroding

From First Things:

Liberal shibboleths are eroding. Concerning abortion, several data points from November bear this out. According to exit polls, women aged sixty-five and over were the only female age cohort to vote as loyally for Kamala Harris as they had for Joe Biden. Younger women shifted away from the Democratic candidate, sometimes splitting their tickets to vote for both Trump and state-level ballot initiatives that favored abortion access. Many of those ballot initiatives succeeded, continuing a trend that has held since Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the enshrinement of legal abortion in the Constitution. But a ballot initiative is a single-issue vote by definition. Thus, though it can hardly be said that young women are becoming pro-life, neither can it be said that they are single-issue pro-abortion voters when it comes to choosing their elected representatives. A generation gap may be emerging, with the gray lobby wondering why young women can no longer be relied on to rally to pro-abortion candidates.

With a record number of votes expected to be determined by abortion preferences, 2024 was supposed to be the “abortion election.” Political strategists reasoned that women—especially women under thirty, four in ten of whom said during the fall that abortion was their top priority—would secure the presidency for Harris.

The election results paint a different picture. In exit polls, only 13 percent of young voters named abortion as their top priority, down from 44 percent in 2022. Harris lost support from women overall, compared to Biden: Whereas Biden had won women by fifteen points (57 percent to Trump’s 42), Harris won them by eight (53 percent to 45). Only in one age group, the sixty-five-and-over set, did Harris improve on Biden’s performance, taking 54 percent. Meanwhile, Trump won 4 percent more of the overall female vote against Harris than he had against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

A surprising share of Trump’s female swing was delivered by eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds. Youth turnout was lower in 2024 than in 2020, and though the majority of under-thirty women voted Democratic, the gender gap between young men and young women shrank, with 7 percent more women favoring Trump than had done so four years before. Only women aged sixty-five and over were as motivated by abortion as pollsters had predicted, according to post-election analysis by the AARP.

Thus, the women who most reliably support the abortion industry and its candidates are those who least need its services. Well past their childbearing years, the sixty-five-and-over demographic has nothing personal at stake in the legality of abortion. Thus one pro-choice premise, that women vote in favor of abortion for pragmatic reasons, is not always true. The most reliable pro-abortion votes appear to be ideologically motivated, with women choosing Democratic candidates due to a belief that abortion access is a fundamental right. (Read more.)