Tea at Trianon: Gottfried is Right: Wokeness Is Not Communism, It’s Demonic Narcissism

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

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Gottfried is Right: Wokeness Is Not Communism, It’s Demonic Narcissism

From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Gottfried, a former professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College, has authored many outstanding books—particularly on the question of Marxism—so I defer to his judgment on what qualifies and doesn’t qualify for the precise definition of Marxism and Communism. Rather than disagree with him, I’d like to offer a slightly different perspective. The woke, in fact, are clinical narcissists in the sense that term was defined by Christopher Lasch.

Narcissism, Lasch argued in his 1979 classic The Culture of Narcissism, is not self-love, but the opposite. The narcissist is not full of ego but has no sense of self. Lacking a stable sense of identity, the narcissist hunts for meaning in therapy, self-help, sex, or radical politics. This is the mental illness that is driving the politics of the left.

Lasch argued that human personality and psychology have changed over the course of the last century. Americans have transformed from strong, confident and well-adjusted people to those evincing a “minimal” self. Having cast aside our former understanding of man’s purpose and meaning in this world, American personality has become weak and dependent on government, corporations, radical politics, sex, and bureaucracies for a sense of meaning.

Central to Lasch’s analysis is an understanding how infants develop. Citing Freud, he argued that to an infant, interactions with the world result in two sets of feelings—either omnipotence or helplessness. In an infant’s fantasy world, that baby is either the king of the world, demanding that his needs get met right now, or he is totally helpless and dependent on others for survival.

To snap out of this infants must encounter limits or “transitional objects” as they grow. Toys, games, siblings, sports, and barriers introduce limits into the world of the child. These objects shrink the scale of fantasies, introduce reality, and allow a healthy transition into adulthood. In the latter part of the 20^th century, too much of the raising of children went to television, the helping professions, schools, and bureaucracies. (Read more.)