J.M.W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838, National Gallery, London.

The British Conservative Party frittered away its electoral mandate. One Tory PM after another incompetently briefly occupied No. 10 Downing Street before ingloriously decamping, chivied out by the ravaging British Press, and demonstrably failing the implicit test of leadership and backbone.

They turned on Margaret Thatcher and deposed her to make way for the first wave of Tory pygmies, who paved the way for Tony Blair who gleefully banned fox hunting, the most iconic British pastime, and opened the floodgates wide to a tide of color enthusiastically intended to effectuate a Great Replacement of the British people.

Post-the Revolutionary Era of Blair, the Tories restored to power could not even agree among themselves to exit the EU. Boris was flamboyant and consequently popular enough to challenge the consensus of mediocrity, but COVID stimulated Puritan gravity and Boris got in hot water for failing enforce pious conformity with official regs during the plague-time. Bill Clinton would simply have shrugged, brazened it out, and changed the subject. But Boris wilted and was unmanned. Sad, sad, sad.

Post-Boris, Tory PMs came and went like Mayflies. The media and commentariat attacked and one after another, they scuttled and ran.

It was depressing to see Britain ruled by a Pakistani. The world turned upside down, indeed! But Rishi Sunak demonstrated his much vaunted brilliance by scheduling a new election at a point in which his party’s and his own popularity had come to resemble COVID’s.

Labour apparently got slightly fewer votes this time than when it was last defeated by a landslide, but Tory voters stayed home and a bloodbath swept away the party, including a number of luminaries and big shots.

It is obvious that the Tory Party lost precisely because it stood for nothing but the “Me, Too, Just a Little Less” species of Conservatism. It is easy to understand why Peter Hitchens is mourning.

Conservatism has died, not from an assassin’s bullet, or even from old age or because it was run over by a bus. It has died because there is no call for it anymore. This isn’t to say that nobody wants it, but that nobody cares that we want it. The same thing has happened to most of the things I like, from the forgotten Aztec chocolate bar to railway restaurant cars, from woodland peace to proper funerals.

In fact, conservatism — not to be mistaken for its loud, overdressed cousin, the Conservative Party, which somehow lives on — will probably not even get a proper funeral. Its passing will not be marked by sonorous gloom and penitence, and stern dark poetry borne away on the wind at the muddy edge of a deep, sad grave. Nobody can stand that sort of thing now. It will get a cheerful informal send-off with jokes and applause. After all, it won’t be there to hate it. I shan’t be there either. There will be no call for me. …

I thought that there were still quite a few people who actually wanted and liked conservatism. But in fact, there are hardly any. The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal.

But you probably know what I mean. And all my life these things have been slipping away from me. I am using them as metaphors for conservatism in politics, in education, literature and music as well. My problems arise from the fact that I missed the last train of the old life. But I saw it go. I arrived, out of breath, on the station platform just in time to see it depart.

I saw official London when it was still black and battered, a great imperial capital. I saw the Church of England when it still possessed majesty, dominion and power. I saw, on a sultry August day in 1960, the final astonishing relic of British global naval might, the Royal Navy’s last battleship, towed to the breakers, a modern version of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. The scene was made more melancholy when the colossal vessel, reluctant to die, grounded on the Portsmouth mud. A great lump rose to my throat, and I still feel a sense of deep half-understood loss when I recall it.

But the nation swiftly got over it, as it had got over the Suez failure in 1956 and our (still unrepaid) default on our First World War debt to the USA in 1934. I felt and heard and lived amid a completely different set of rules from the ones which now exist. British people of that time had been formed by a completely different set of morals, manners and standards. I remember how they spoke and carried themselves, how they expressed disapproval, how even in their hours of relaxation they filled each moment with purposeful activity.

RTWT

Read The Free Press today and you’ll find that everything old is new again.

We’ve gone back to the prim “Banned in Boston” Puritan regime of the pre-1960s. No, actually, we’ve gone well beyond all that to a modern hellscape combining the sanctimony of the Puritan prig with the thuggish eliminationist inclinations of the totalitarian Stalinist.

As is often the case these days, the courageous J.K. Rowling has stood up Liberty and Reason and thereby provoked the mob.

Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous novel, featuring the memoirs of an unrepentant pedophile named Humbert Humbert, has often been a flashpoint for controversy—including at the time of its 1955 publication, when the only outfit that would touch it was a French press best known for publishing literal porn. But however foolish or prudish the mid-century imbroglio surrounding Lolita might have been, it pales in comparison to the one now raging on the internet, where a sizable crowd has been moralistically shrieking about the book for three straight days.

Like so many other digital-age absurdities, this one originates with a millennial who is mad at J.K. Rowling. Here’s what happened: in the year 2000, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, Rowling praised the novel, saying, “[A] plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabokov’s hands, a great and tragic love story.” Rowling’s sentiments about Lolita are not unique; Stanley Kubrick and Dorothy Parker famously felt the same, and my own copy even has a blurb on it from Vanity Fair, calling it “the only convincing love story of our century.” But nearly 25 years later, an actress named Sooz Kempner unearthed the interview and was shocked, shocked!

“JK Rowling doesn’t understand Lolita,” she wrote on X. “It is not a great and tragic love story, it is terrifying book [sic] written from the POV of a peadophile [sic], a very obviously unreliable narrator, and at no point are you meant to say ‘this is so romantic.’ She’s 12, Joanne. What the FUCK, Joanne.” Her sentiments were echoed by countless others, including novelist Ryan Ruby, who sniped, “Lolita is a moral test. Kempner passes it. Rowling does not.”

On the one hand, this is very much a tempest in a terminally online teapot. On the other hand, the wild virality of Kempner’s post (which has 5.2 million views and over 9,000 reposts) does unfortunately tell us something about the cultural discourse in the year 2024: namely, that people, in their fervor for recreational hatred, are rendering themselves functionally illiterate.

RTWT

BREAKING: NONCITIZENS ADMIT TO BEING REGISTERED TO VOTE

Footage from @realmuckraker shows non-citizens admitting they are registered to vote

A staggering 10% of the people surveyed admitted to this

If this percentage holds, the 2024 election is in jeopardy pic.twitter.com/j8ux3ydwsH

— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) July 4, 2024

Roger Kimball:

“The prospect of a President Harris for even ten minutes is not exactly encouraging. She is out of her depth in a puddle and is nearly as incoherent as her boss. But the Dems chose her because she was the only ambulatory black female they could find. Were they to jettison her now, their black base would revolt — and they would lose. Doubtless the entrepreneur David Sacks is correct when he observes that, ‘It seems that Democrats are considering every option except one: run the most dignified campaign you can, with the candidate you chose — and lose. Democrats insist on holding onto power at all costs. Whatever they do next will be a dirty trick or a hoax.’”

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

–Calvin Coolidge