Chilton Williamson, Jr.

‘He who is not a republican at 20 compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after 30, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.’ Thus spake M. Anselme Polycarpe Batbie, a 19th-century French academic jurist whose sentiments, variously phrased, have also been attributed to John Adams, François Guizot and Georges Clemenceau. A generous heart and the ability to learn from experience are very good things, certainly. An even better one is common sense: a native attribute that age does not diminish. Mencken claimed that he had never changed his mind on any matter of importance. Donald Trump said in regard to John McCain that he preferred war heroes who didn’t get captured. Myself, I like thinkers who were right from the beginning —and stayed that way.

An incident recalled from the days when I still counted out my age in coffee spoons has to do with a political conversation between my parents and two elderly Bostonian spinsters in the days when Republicans, even those of the female persuasion, were not unheard of in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The subject was the second Eisenhower-Stevenson set-to, which from the perspective of the 21st century looks as reserved as a difference of opinion between two members of the New York Yacht Club over a bottle of Evian and cigars. In those days my parents were still-recovering members of the FORWARD WITH ROOSEVELT set, and therefore MADLY FOR ADLAI in the campaigns of 1952 and 1956.

The instinct to admire and celebrate is as basic to the human psyche as the instinct to worship, to which it is related. In monarchical and aristocratical ages fame came from status and power; the most admired people in society were kings and queens, other royals and military heroes. In the bourgeois-republican age they were statesman of high rank, military men, political authors, poets, popular novelists, the prime donne and primi uomini of the theatrical and operatic stages, and prominent figures in high society. In the modern democratic age they are liberal politicians, best-selling novelists, pop singers, film and television stars, and fashion models: a downward progression that traces the steady descent in the public appreciation of human value and quality.

Thomas Carlyle, in ‘Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History,’ divided heroes into six categories in order of human greatness as he conceived it: the hero as divinity, as prophet, as poet, as priest, as man of letters and as king, the heroic ruler of men who in Carlyle’s own description is the actual philosopher-king. In the modern world, kings have been replaced by prime ministers, presidents, strongmen and dictators; that is to say, by politicians of one sort or another. No one with the qualifying virtues of such a man would descend to the moral level of a tyrant, while no mere politician is endowed with the wisdom, gifts and virtues either of a kingly philosopher or a philosophic king, whom no democratic electorate would elevate to the office anyway.

I suspect that were Mencken alive today having attained the respectable age of 140 years, he would be busy preparing The American Language: Fifth Edition and contemplating titling the book ‘The New American Language’ in recognition of the media-speak developed over the past couple of decades by news broadcasters and commentators, chiefly those belonging to the television industry. Each trade has its specialized lingo, due to the functional need for the terminology required to describe its unique operations. The electronic commentariat is no exception to this tendency of particular occupations to invent a vocabulary and idiom all their own. Where it does differ from a great many of them has to do with its reasons for doing so.

Laramie, Wyoming Nearly all the famous artistic controversies in the aesthetic history of the western world — the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns in France and the contest between the rococo and neoclassical schools across Europe in the middle of the 18th century; the subsequent rivalry between the Classicists and the Romantics and the contretemps in the late-19th century between the Realists and the Impressionists — are as dead, irrelevant and forgotten today as the wars between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

Laramie, Wyoming The refuge of a scoundrel is always the profession — in spades — of whatever a particular society prizes above everything else. In the United States from 1776 until the 1960s, that was patriotism. Since then it has been racial equality, succeeded in recent decades by crude and unapologetic racism of the anti-white variety whose virulence appears to contradict Newton’s Third Law, which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is why the death of George Floyd in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department last May was accepted by the left as proof that race relations in America have worsened in recent years to attain critical mass.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Kemmerer, Wyoming Before 1965, when immigrants to the American Republic came almost exclusively from Europe, the largest white ethnic group in this country was of German stock. It may still be so, though I am unaware of recent statistics that demonstrate the fact. Certainly, a linguistically sophisticated visitor arriving here today from Europe might easily arrive at that conclusion. The now ubiquitous ‘Yah!’ is phonetically indistinguishable from ‘Ja!’, and while ‘Yah-wohl!’ has yet to be widely heard in American streets, connoisseurs of the American language in the 21st century would hardly be surprised should it crop up there.