Tea at Trianon: Minnesota as a Systems Failure

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

Monday, January 26, 2026

Minnesota as a Systems Failure

From DataRepublican:

The current unrest in Minnesota is an example of an order that has reached equilibrium through mutual dependency between antagonistic subsystems.
After the Cold War, the Western world organized itself around a single moral injunction: Never again. Never again fascism. Never again totalitarianism. Never again a unified ideology capable of subordinating it to a single vision of man.
To prevent another Nazi Germany or another Soviet Union, the post–Cold War order built immunity to totalitarian ideologies.
Grand narratives were treated as dangerous. Politics was re-engineered away from totalizing visions and towards norms and institutional mediation.
For a time, this worked.
But Marxism could not simply vanish in the West. It was too culturally embedded, too intertwined with labor and academia. At the same time, the system could not tolerate permanent insurgency. Thousands of bombings, riots, and underground cells per year were incompatible with stability. That level of disorder threatened the system’s own survival.
An honest reckoning with Marxism as a coherent rival risked reopening the same ideological conflict the post–Cold War order had been designed to avoid.
So, instead of crushing Communist subversives, the system adapted.
Dissent was absorbed into civic infrastructure: NGOs, foundations, advisory boards, grant programs, legal advocacy, compliance regimes, and professionalized activism. Radical energy was translated into careers and metrics.
The result is a structural inversion. The Western order that was constructed to neutralize Communism now depends on its managed presence to generate legitimacy. At the same time, contemporary revolutionary movements depend on the same institutions they once sought to overthrow; for funding, protection, and survival. (Read more.)