Tea at Trianon: When a Nation Loses Its Moral Language

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

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

When a Nation Loses Its Moral Language

From Unlicensed Punditry:

In nearly every nation surveyed, large majorities said their fellow citizens were good people. They might complain about politicians or corruption, but they still believed the average person around them was fundamentally decent.
Except in the United States.
In America, the survey found that a majority of respondents believed their fellow citizens were morally bad rather than morally good. The most common explanation offered is political polarization and there is certainly some truth to that explanation. Our politics have become increasingly hostile, and the language used to describe opponents often sounds less like disagreement and more like moral condemnation. Political arguments are increasingly framed as battles between good people and bad people, but the deeper problem may not be that Americans have suddenly become less moral than people in other countries. It may be something more basic: Americans increasingly disagree about what morality even means.
Words like “good” and “bad” sound simple, but they are not. Their meaning depends on the moral framework someone is using. For most of American history, that framework was broadly shared. Even people who were not personally religious lived within a culture shaped by religious assumptions about right and wrong. Ideas such as honesty, responsibility, loyalty, charity, and restraint formed a common vocabulary of morality.
Americans argued constantly about policy, but they were generally speaking the same moral language when they did so.
Over the past several decades, that shared framework has weakened. Religious affiliation has declined, church attendance has fallen, and the number of Americans who identify with no religious tradition has grown steadily. As those institutions faded, the common moral vocabulary that accompanied them faded as well.
In its place, several competing moral systems have taken root. (Read more.)