Tea at Trianon: Conservatives Have Failed at Culture

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, March 23, 2026

Conservatives Have Failed at Culture

Well, at least one of my books has been made into a film. I never received a cent, however. From Splice Today:

Over the last century, beginning with movies, jazz and literature, liberals have been the great artistic visionaries. They defended James Joyce. They founded magazines like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Orson Welles put on groundbreaking plays in the 1930s and directed Citizen Kane. The Beatles worked all-nighters in Hamburg. Jann Wenner turned a $7500 loan into Rolling Stone magazine. And Lena Dunham was 24 when she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture. Go ahead and hate her and the film. Then shut up and make a better one.

Wealthy people like Ben Shapiro won’t even fund the arts that could change the culture. Writing for Commentary, social historian Fred Siegel once explored how the American masses embraced the art in the 1950s even as philanthropists and gatekeepers were offering the best of Western culture. Americans at the time, wrote Siegel, “were sampling the greatest works of Western civilization for the first time.” The book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America revealed that “twenty years ago, you couldn’t sell Beethoven out of New York. Today we sell Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, and Renaissance and Baroque music in large quantities.” There was a 250 percent growth in the number of local symphony orchestras between 1940 and 1955.

In 1955, writes Siegel, “15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games. 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million.”

Siegel notes there were gatekeepers to get this great art to the people: “NBC spent $500,000 in 1956 to present a three-hour version of Shakespeare’s Richard III starring Laurence Olivier. The broadcast drew 50 million viewers; as many as 25 million watched all three hours.” Siegel observes that “on March 16, 1956, a Sunday chosen at random,” the viewer could have seen a discussion of the life and times of Toulouse-Lautrec by three prominent art critics, an interview with theologian Paul Tillich, an adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Hook, a documentary on mental illness with Dr. William Menninger, and a 90-minute performance of The Taming of the Shrew. Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” a National Book Award winner, sold a million copies in paperback in the early-1950s.

John F. Kennedy supported the arts. “The life of the arts,” he said, “far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose.” (Read more.)

From The Chivalry Guild:

I often read complaints about the failure of Hollywood to bring the life of Richard the Lionheart or Scanderbeg or Godfrey of Bouillon to the screen in a blockbuster epic.1 It certainly sounds like a grand idea—but always be careful what you wish for. Even if the studios could be trusted to depict the hero as heroic (rather than “problematic,” perverted, or overrated) and show his cause to be just (rather than brutal Christian aggression against noble Muslim victims), little subversions still have a way of creeping into the projects and undermining the whole thing—democratic cliches, enlightened pieties. Then there’s the question of quality. Truly getting Richard right would require a director with elite vision, a screenwriter with a deft touch and knowledge of the past, an actor who could credibly pass as one of the greatest men who ever lived, and more—and the likelihood of all these pieces coming together are increasingly slim. More likely they would just make him a toxic mediocrity and/or a repressed homosexual.
Would you rather have a C- version of the hero or no movie at all?
With every passing year I grow less and less interested in shows and movies. My divorce from Hollywood is certainly made easier as everything on the screen turns embarrassingly shoddy and emotionally manipulative—an inevitable consequence of frenzy for sidelining talented white men in favor of DEI hires. But I’ve come to suspect something larger at work than just declining skill and political machinations. The current embarrassments are likely more of a feature than a bug, the kind of thing that can’t really be solved by simply putting “based” people in charge of the studios.2 (Read more.)