Walpoles All the Way Down

The present Anglophone metapolitical commentariat may be serviceably apportioned among three factions: 1) a legacy leftist or progressive faction who hold that the Anglosphere is part of something called the free world, that the freedom of this free world consists in its respective polities’ government under the auspices of something called democracy, and that democracy consists less in heeding the will of the people of a particular polity than in protecting the rights of people in general irrespective of their country of origin or residence; that Western history falls into three periods—an age of monarchy, when individuals governed the various polities with absolute sway for their lifetimes merely by accident of birth and ran roughshod over the people’s rights, an age of triumphant democracy when the various peoples secured their rights by overthrowing the monarchs, and the present age, an age of embattled democracy when humankind’s rights are threatened anew (anew as in since ca. 1920, not since ca., say, 2010) by the incursions of dictators, individuals who come to govern polities with absolute sway for their lifetimes merely by accident of coup or real or feigned popular election; that while democracy did indeed originate with the U.S. Constitution (along, subsidiarily, with some unwritten British contemporary-cum-counterpart), that Constitution should not be regarded as the last word on democracy even within the U.S. itself, and that there are plenty of non-Anglophone polities that are more democratic than the U.S. (or any other Anglophone polity) merely in virtue of being more protective of a more extensive array of more important rights than those enjoyed within the borders thereof; and, finally, that if need be, any polity should be compelled, by force of arms if necessary, to modify its laws for the sake of becoming more democratic and less susceptible of government by dictators. 2) A legacy conservative or classical-liberal faction who hold that the Anglosphere is part of something called the free world, that the freedom of this free world consists in its respective polities’ government under the auspices of constitutions (whether written or unwritten) founded partly on democracy understood strictly as the will of the people and partly on something called the rule of law that prevents the will of the people from becoming tyrannical; that the Anglophone polities are now the freest in the free world in virtue of being protected by constitutions that most judiciously divide political powers between the will of the people and the rule of law; that Anglospheric political history is relatively autonomous from that of the rest of the free world and dates from the promulgation of the Magna Carta in the early thirteenth century; that this history has consisted in the extension of the rights and liberties granted by the Magna Carta to an ever-greater proportion of the Anglophone polities’ population (occasionally in defiance of would-be despotic monarchs) and is heteronomous both with economic self-determination (otherwise known as liberalism, as formulated by philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith) and with a heedfulness of cultural tradition, a heedfulness that is known as conservatism and was formulated in the late eighteenth century by a single philosopher, Edmund Burke; that while portions of the free world have indeed been dominated by dictators and continue to menaced by the prospect of their recurring domination, the Anglophone polities can guarantee their avoidance of ever suffering this fate by dint of adhering tenaciously to their respective constitutions. 3) An emergent neoreactionary or modern-right faction [modern-right being the preferred designation of the man who perhaps best deserves to be regarded as the faction’s founder-cum-leader, Curtis Yarvin] who hold that there is no such thing as the free world and nothing politically special about the Anglosphere or any of the other countries regarded as being part of that pseudo-world by the other two factions; that politics in every polity has always been a matter of the negotiation of purely transactional relationships between friends and enemies (or clients and patrons) and the imposition of the will of a small elite on the mass of the population; that nations and national cultures are real and worth safeguarding but relatively autonomous from politics; that the Anglophone and continental-Europeans’ present obsession with protecting rights and liberties originated immediately after the Second World War as a result of an overestimation of the historical distinctiveness of the post-World War I Continental right-wing dictators; that no form of government is intrinsically preferable to any other and that in many respects monarchy is preferable to democracy; that in many respects the happiest polity in the world to date was England during the reigns of the Tudors, where and when monarchy was embodied and practiced in its most nearly pure form. This last faction traces the formulation of their core axioms to Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Carlyle (whom it regards as a heroic outlier from the dominant Burkean vein of Anglophone political thought), and a handful of twentieth-century philosophers and political theorists, notably Vilfredo Pareto, Carl Schmitt, and James Burnham.

In terming this last faction emergent, I mean that it did not exist at all twenty years ago and that it has only assumed enough prominence to be regarded as part of the metapolitical landscape within the past decade. I myself first learned of its existence only about three years ago. Until then, as far as I knew, the entire field of publicly entertainable discourse about politics was exhaustively occupied by the first two factions, a metafactional fact that I found rather irksome, because inasmuch as I had come to regard myself since ca. 2010 as an adherent-cum-exponent of Johnsonian Toryism—i.e., the metapolitical philosophy articulated by the self-described Tory Samuel Johnson in his writings and in his table talk as recorded by James Boswell and others—none of the commentary of the commentariat seemed to be “speaking to me.” To be sure, I could not help being somewhat sympathetic to the second faction owing to its belief in a continuous Anglo-American political history, a history wherein the U.S. Constitution, despite having grown out of the Americans’ severance of all political ties to their mother country, marked a summation and synthesis of English political principles rather than a break with them, and to the fact that metapolitical conservatism had grown out of the self-“rebranding” of the Tory Party as the Conservative Party; but as an of exponent-cum-adherent of specifically Johnsonian Toryism, I could not but be put off by that faction’s anointment of Burke as its founding father, inasmuch as Burke had been a self-described Whig, and the Whigs had after all been the Tories’ official arch-enemies, and no Tory had after all ever been a more implacable detester of Whigs than Johnson, who, although on personally friendly terms with Burke, had never even attempted to see eye-to-eye with him metapolitically, and had once even been so intemperately Whiggophobic as to disparage another of his contemporary metapolitical adversaries, Sir Adam Fergusson, as “a vile Whig” to his face. My repulsion was grounded in something more substantial than mere hair-splitting over nomenclature, because the entire raison d’être of the Whigs had been their opposition to established political institutions including the English crown, such that the very notion of a conservatism founded on the political thought of a Whig had more than a whiff of the oxymoronic about it. To be sure, the only text by Burke that the conservative faction ever seemed to cite was the Reflections on the Revolution in France, a work wherein he took an essentially Tory position, a work wherein he expressed categorical disapproval of the French Revolution, of the overthrowing of the French monarchy qua established institution, but it was to my mind very wrong of them to pass over in silence his earlier quintessentially Whiggish advocacy of the American revolution qua two-fingered salute to George III. But in a way it made perfect sense for them to be citing Burke in the teeth of his card-carrying Whigdom because they extolled democracy as solemnly and fulsomely as the progressive faction did, and at least in the Anglo-American political context of the 1770s and 1780s, democracy had been a super-Whiggish—i.e. a super-tradition-defying—concept, one that not even Burke himself or the American rebels themselves had gone so far as to champion during their struggle for independence. And I found the conservative faction’s faith in the numinousness and intrinsic political potency of constitutions whether written or unwritten, their belief that the maintenance of the forms of government therein or embodied thereby would guarantee the preservation of essential liberties, and even their belief that liberties needed to be jealously watched over, decidedly un-Johnsonian. For had not Johnson pooh-poohed the very notion that the House of Commons had been founded as a check on the power of the Crown, and had he not said that he would not give two shillings to live under one form of government rather than another, and that, indeed, a common Frenchman of his day, a day in which Louis XV was still ruling with absolute sway in France (for Johnson died in December 1784, more than a half-decade before the storming of the Bastille) enjoyed as much liberty as any man could ever desire? In short, there was entirely too much bad faith or confusion and too much un-Johnsonianness about the conservative faction’s fundamental thinking-points to allow me to dream of regarding myself even as a hypothetical member of that faction. As for the progressive faction, they were so unregenerately anti-Anglocentric and so fervently gung-ho about pushing change further and further along at any cost that I wanted nothing whatsoever to do with them. (And in case you wanted to know how Anglocentric and un-gung-ho about pushing change further and further along I am, in the light of “gung-ho”’s Chinese provenance and recent year of origination [1942, according to my 1990 Concise Oxford Dictionary], I committed it to virtual paper in the preceding sentence only with extreme reluctance.). And so I had resigned myself to metapolitical homelessness. But when the third faction came to my attention, I could not help thinking that I might have found a metapolitical home after all. For after all, they were the first metapolitical discursive faction of my lifetime that did not fetishize democracy and the first to assert that monarchical forms of government were not intrinsically tyrannical. After all, had not one of Johnson’s chief complaints about the then-current state of British political affairs been that “the Crown has not power enough”? And I appreciated their general nominalizing attitude to political institutions, their belief that parliaments, congresses, constitutions, and so forth arose out of and survived thanks to the maneuvers of specific historically and geographically situated people and groups of people and did not signify or embody any principles or powers guaranteed to subsist and exert political force on their own. I particularly strongly approved of their emphasis on patronage as a mainspring of political motion, given that the political history of eighteenth-century Britain as revealed by Johnson and his contemporaries’ interactions with one another had seemingly proved to be largely the sum total of their bestowal and reception (and non-bestowal and non-reception) of political or quasi-political favors. But the more I read of this faction’s leading lights’ essays and blog posts, the longer I listened to their podcast interviews with each other, the more I found to dislike about it and them. I did not care for their positing of the Anglophone countries as mere historically and geographically contingent sites for the manifestation of historically transcendent political phenomena—effectively as real-world counterparts of Orwell’s Airstrip One—and indeed I could not but be suspicious of any quasi-school of metapolitical thought that took its inspiration almost solely from Continental writers. I was especially annoyed by their vouchsafing of pride of place to Machiavelli in conjunction with their veneration of the Tudors given that in England il vecchio Niccolo had already become a notorious byword for sinful political cynicism by the age of Elizabeth I (as notably witnessed by the future Richard III’s anachronistic boasting of his facility at “playing the Machiavel” in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI). To be sure, they fairly gushed with affection and esteem for the English people and their “culture” (and for the American people and their “culture” as outgrowths of the English motherland), and I could not but be appreciative of this esteem and affection, but by the same token, I did not see how they could simultaneously flaunt not only misgivings about but outright contempt for Anglo-American political institutions and thinkers across the board given that these institutions and schools of thought were more deeply rooted in Anglo-American “culture” than the Anglo-American manifestations of many other domains of “culture”—notably painting and music; given that, in other words, however little, say, the House of Commons may ever have represented the authentic voice and will of the English people, or, say John Locke’s political theory ever have represented the actualities of English political life, the English had evidently historically been much more interested in rearing and electing men capable of debating Lockean principles in the House of Commons than in rearing and fostering first-rate painters and composers (for the only pre-twentieth century English painters of international standing are Gainsborough and Turner [and, just perhaps, Hogarth] and to this day, no English composer is named in the same breath as “the three German Bs” [Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms] or even as Rossini, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky. [And no, the worldwide fame of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, et al. emphatically does not refute my assertion, just as the equally true assertion that there are no American composers of international standing is emphatically not refuted by the international fame of Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, et al.]). (But of course, being accursed so-called Millennials and Zoomers almost to a man [for they are all men], these neoreactionaries are almost all complete ignoramuses vis-à-vis all the non-verbal fine arts [and most of them are such near-complete ignoramuses vis-à-vis literature that they think The Lord of the Rings is the literary masterpiece of the twentieth century], the sole exception who springs to mind, a cagey expat English “anon” who styles himself John Dee, being a so-called Gen-Xer evidently only a few years younger than the present writer [for he has mentioned having been a college chum of the actress Claire Danes]. [The abovementioned Mr. Yarvin, being a year younger than the present writer, is also a Gen-Xer but also enough of a philistine to count his discovery of the Rolling Stones qua aesthetic outrankers of Bon Jovi a turning point in his life and to base his entire overview of contemporary American political life on a conceit derived from Tolkien—viz., the distinction between “MAGA” types qua Hobbits and upmarket right-wingers like himself qua Dark Elves.]) But the straw that if it did not quite break the back of my love affair with the third faction (for I remained and remain grateful to it for shifting the so-called Overton Window on the question of democracy-versus-monarchy) at least gave it an apparently incurable case of lumbago (incidentally, as I type this sentence, I cannot help wondering how a metaphor as cussedly inefficient as “the straw that broke the camel’s back” ever made it through the first stress-test at the metaphor idiom-engineering shop because of course one cannot place anything immediately on a camel’s back on account of the interposition of the beast’s hump or humps. Surely if it had been determined that the vehicle of the metaphor absolutely had to be a camel rather than, say, a mule, the hump or humps should have been brought into play [so as to result, perchance, in a phrase like “the straw that crushed flat the camel’s hump(s)”]. Of course the present parenthesis has nothing to do with the subject-matter of this essay, but if I don’t register this sad commentary on the genius of our language here, who will register it anywhere? [Incidentally, the complete etymological and semantic unrelatedness of lumbago to plumbago constitutes no less sad commentary, but I have registered that commentary elsewhere.]) was its never-ending stream of derisive commentary on the first faction’s longstanding demonization of Donald Trump as an American Hitler. If, the third faction unanimously maintained, Adolf Hitler had never assumed the Führerschaft of Germany, the legacy left never would have had a collective conniption fit over the prospect (and later, fact) of Donald Trump’s election (and later, reelection) to the U.S. presidency and indeed would have regarded him at worst as a sort of less soporific Calvin Coolidge, because before the rise of Hitler the Anglosphere had never regarded any single political figure as the quintessence of evil-cum-potential enslaver of humankind in its entirety. This assertion induced a rolling conniption fit in me because I knew it be altogether false, because I knew full well that more than two hundred years before the advent of the Third Reich roughly half the population of Great Britain had been at least as hysterically alarmist about a living English political figure as the early twenty-first-century Anglophone left had been and continued to be about Trump. The figure in question was Robert Walpole, the first great Whig statesman and Britain’s first Prime Minister, who had served (or ruled) in that position-cum-quasi office (for his official position-cum-office had been that of First Commissioner of the Treasury, the designation of “Prime Minister” being then merely colloquial and even now apparently not officially official) for the staggeringly long stretch of twenty-one years, from 1721 to 1742, and who throughout this period had been regarded by the entire membership of the opposition party, the Tories, and even a goodly proportion of the membership of the Whig party itself, as what the current cant of the commentariat would term an “existential threat” to the established liberties of Britons and indeed to the political and territorial integrity of Great Britain itself. My disgruntlement at the modern right’s seeming obliviousness of Walpole was no mere academic nitpicking over historical precedence because the facts that none of Walpole’s successors in the premiership had proved even remotely comparably divisive and that even his most hysterical critics had come to look back on his premiership almost with nostalgia suggested that the hysteria about Trump might eventually yield to another era of relative equability towards the U.S.’s prospective and presiding chief executives. It seemed to me that if Walpole’s notoriousness in his own time could by some miracle be made to acquire even a soupçon of salience in the “discourse” of the Anglophone metapolitical commentariat, Anglophones across the board might soon come to think of Trump as a second Walpole rather than as a second Hitler, and thereby come to look forward to the middle decades of the American twenty-first century as a resumption (or continuation) of American political business as usual rather than as the prolongation (or aggravation) of an American Fourth Reich. Whence the penning and posting of the present essay. Not that I am even so hopeful as to expect that this essay will acquire even a soupçon’s soupçon of a readership within the commentariat; on the other hand, I do not see whence else the just-mentioned Walpolean notoriousness is even improbably to derive the just-mentioned soupçon of salience therein (cf. the above sub-parenthesis on the laundering of my speculations on “the straw that broke the camel’s back” herein). Not that Walpole is technically an obscure figure, for the sheer lengthiness of his Wikipedia article proves otherwise, but that such mere widely accessible typographical bulk gives me no reason to suppose that he is talked about even within some sort of minuscule coterie of history-buffs nowadays. Indeed, from the total absence of reference to him or it in the titles of the thousands of history-related podcasts and blog-posts that the almighty algorithm has so far shoved before my gaze, I gather that not only Walpole himself but the entire epoch of British political history that he inaugurated, the so-called Whig Supremacy of 1714 to 1760, has never participated in the discourse at all, that at least since of the dawn of the internet he and it have been deemed insufficiently “sexy” even to furnish background for discussions of the immediately succeeding period (which does attract a fair amount of attention on account of its concurrence with the American and French Revolutions and its inclusion of metapolitically useful figures such as Burke and George III). But it would be hypocritical of me to grouse about this neglect, for although it would be no exaggeration to say that I have fallen in love with Walpole, nothing could be farther from my intention than to make him or his epoch “sexy” in the eyes of present-day Anglophones, inasmuch as one of my central contentions is that he and it are impervious to being made “sexy,” inasmuch as in a metapolitical context the “sexiness” of a given historical figure or period emanates largely from his or its susceptibility to being incorporated into a “narrative” in the service of some present-day “ideology,” and neither Walpole nor his fellow-Whig successors nor any of the chief events and transactions in which they were involved is at all susceptible to incorporation into any “ideology” of the present, whether of a leftist or a rightist stripe. As the de facto Ur-Whig, as the first de facto British chief executive who was a member of the party that would eventually both find a namesake and counterpart in the United States (for until just before the Civil War, the Whig Party was the Democratic Party’s sole competitor, and the Republican Party was in some respects an outgrowth of it rather than a usurper of it) and “rebrand” itself as the Liberal Party in Great Britain, Walpole deserves by default to be claimed as a poster boy and founding father by everyone who today styles himself a liberal—whether in the name of the free exercise of human rights or in the name of free markets. But he is destined never to be claimed in such a capacity because neither his personal “ideology”--his own understanding of what it meant to be a liberal--nor his actualization of that “ideology” in domestic and foreign policy, even half-consistently tallies with that of any present-day self-styled liberal.

This essay will also salutarily afford me an opportunity to explicate and champion Johnsonian Toryism, but in concurrently doing so I will be not so much killing with the stone I will be hurling at the Walpolean bird a second Johnsonian one (I reach first for the hackneyed metaphor because it most concisely conveys the principal idea of two effects springing from a single agent-actuated cause, although because I flatter myself that I am performing a positive service for others rather than merely ridding myself of a nuisance, I wish some expression like “delivering two sackfuls of gold in a single sack” were as hackneyed as “killing two birds with one stone”) as killing a pair of copulating snakes (a vehicle-half that admittedly imbues the metaphor with even more infelicitous subsidiary connotations than “two birds”; but here, too, the main idea must be given pride of place), for Johnsonian Toryism is indeed “inextricably intertwined” with Walpole as a political phenomenon inasmuch as Johnson’s metapolitical development was strongly conditioned by his life-history during Walpole’s premiership, and inasmuch as although the bulk of his metapolitical speculations and observations date from several decades after Walpole’s death, most of them take as their point of departure his political experiences as a child of the Walpolean epoch. And he was a child and indeed a grown man of that epoch in a more than figurative sense, being only five years of age in 1714 when the first British governmental cabinet that included Walpole was formed, ten when Walpole assumed the premiership, and thirty-two in 1742, when Walpole was unseated; and by the time Walpole’s disciple and successor Thomas Pelham Holmes, Duke of Newcastle, had the reins of power wrested from his grip by John Stuart, Earl of Bute, the head of the first Tory government since the death of Queen Anne, in 1762, he was already a borderline oldster of fifty-two. And he was not merely some metapolitically apathetic eighteenth-century Joe Bloggs who happened to grow up and old during the Whig Supremacy but rather a born true-Blue Tory who from quite an early age was immersed in the political hurly-burly of the time—not, to be sure, as a seeker or occupier of any political office, but rather, and “arguably” no less significantly, as a political journalist: one of his earliest literary productions, Marmor Norfolciense, is a satirical political allegory directed against Walpole and his cronies, and we owe our knowledge of the transactions in Parliament during the pivotal years of 1740 to 1743 largely to his reports on parliamentary debates for the Gentleman’s Magazine. (It would seem that to this day there is no consensus either on whether these reports come close enough to transcriptions to serve as an authentic record of the debates or on whether the manner and extent to which they appear to diverge therefrom merits their inclusion in Johnson’s literary corpus. [In the Life of Johnson, Boswell writes that from the outset Johnson had been expected to produce them only on the basis of “scanty notes furnished by persons employed to attend in both houses of Parliament” and that Johnson himself told him that “sometimes…he had nothing more communicated to him than the names of the several speakers, and the part which they had taken in the debate.”] As I shall be quoting these reports fairly extensively in this essay, it perhaps beho(o)ves me to throw in my own 2d. on the question here. My “gut feeling”-mediated opinion of them is that they discriminate so clearly and finely between the personalities and sentiments of the speakers [and often in ways that tally with their contemporaries’ appraisals of their characters in memoirs and letters] that Johnson must generally have been furnished with quite detailed and accurate notes, but that the style and tone are so prevailingly Johnsonian [such that even men who were reported to be complete boobies, like Lord Choldomeley, always sound intelligent even when their arguments are at their most vacuous] that one cannot but regard them as canonical, or at least no more apocryphal than Johnson’s numerous forays into ghost-writing [e.g., his sermon for the clergyman-turned-forger William Dodd].) Such being the case, my explication of Johnsonian Toryism can and therefore will flow (or, more properly, unfold) “organically” from my account of Walpole and Walpolism, and in particular my account of the Tory reaction to Walpole and Walpolism, a reaction of which Johnson’s literary activities (and even certain of his extra-literary activities) form an “organic” part. As to my championing of Johnsonian Toryism, a moment’s reflection will shew that it must to some extent in turn flow (or, more properly, champ) “organically” from the explication of it, inasmuch as I have already made clear that our own political epoch is a Whig Supremacy-like epoch centering on a Walpole-esque figure, and any person who like Johnson thrived under and survived the original Whig Supremacy as a metapolitical subject clearly must have been doing something right that we could do with taking some cues from. But as it happens I am not intending merely to defend Johnsonian Toryism as a sort of transient mode d’emploi for Anglophones of the present political and metapolitical moment, as a body of knowledge that they will be obliged to discard and replace with, say, Teddy-Rooseveltian Bull Moose-ism or Shavian Fabianism should the Anglosphere enter a political-cum-metapolitical epoch that bears little or no resemblance to the Whig Supremacy (not that I think there is any great likelihood of that happening, inasmuch as, as I shall shew, the principal features of the Whig Supremacy have been “baked into” the political and metapolitical constitution [with a sub-lowercase “c”] of the Anglosphere, such that they by now constitute that sphere’s very bedrock [if anything spherical can have a bedrock], such that even during the most seemingly un-Whig Supremacy-like periods of post-Whig Supremacy Anglospheric history—say, the twenty years leading up to the passage of the Reform Act, or the fifty years straddling and encompassing the American Civil War—were periods in which it was still at bottom Whig Supremacy-like business as usual throughout the Anglosphere despite all the overlying pre-or post-Whig Supremacyesque hype and hooplah). For you see, Johnsonian Toryism is not merely a metapolitics of its own time or place—a body of thought that attempts to describe and predict the political behavior of eighteenth-century Britons or eighteenth-century people in general or Britons in general (although, to be sure it does attempt to do that); or even more capaciously a comprehensive metapolitics like that of Machiavelli, Burke, or the twentieth-century Continental characters favored by today’s self-styled reactionaries—a body of thought that attempts to describe and predict the political behavior of people and peoples all over the world and across the ages (although, to be sure, it also attempts to do that); it is also and most significantly a comprehensive meta-metapolitics or perhaps more properly speaking a comprehensive ethics of metapolitics—a body of thought that describes and predicts people’s (and peoples’) responses to other people’s (and peoples’) political behavior and prescribes modes of responding to such behavior that are assimilable and practicable by anyone of any time or place regardless of the particular political-cum-metapolitical dispensation he finds himself grunting and sweating under. (Perhaps not quite needless to say, in crediting Johnsonian Toryism with such predictive and prescriptive force I am not crediting Johnson himself with a sort of pedestrianly supernatural metapolitical omniscience that would allow one to infer from some assertion of his how to behave down to the level of each muscle-movement without any preceding adjustment of the sense that takes into account the material changes in everyday life that have supervened in the course of the intervening quarter of a millennium. Roughly speaking, I am ascribing to each of Johnson’s meta-political utterances the same kind and degree of prescience that may be plausibly ascribed to even the most at-first-blush-super-superannuated laws in the Old Testament, such as the one promulgated in Deuteronomy 22:8: “When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man fall from thence,” which a certain Reformed Presbyterian pastor of today has cannily interpreted in twenty-first-century terms as, “If you have a swimming pool in your backyard, make sure you put a fence around it so as avoid being sued by the family of some passerby or guest unlucky or foolish enough to have drowned in it.”) And short of asserting that Johnsonian Toryism even applies to extraterrestrial and superterrestrial beings of past and future eons (which, for aught I know, it very well may do), I cannot think of a more compelling pitch than this for the relevance of Johnsonian Toryism to any potential reader of this essay.

But let us contract the field of our “observation with its extensive view” from the entire universe to the ground zero of this essay—to the particular social, political, and geographical circumstances amid which Robert Walpole came into the world and thence into British political life. He was born in 1676, seventeen years after the restoration of the Stuart dynasty and twelve years before the Glorious Revolution (hence at just the right time both to take the reestablished solidity of monarchy for granted and to be made most vividly aware of the precariousness of the Stuarts’ hold on the institution), at his family’s country seat adjacent to the village of Houghton in the county of Norfolk in southeastern England. While I certainly won’t insist on attributing any radically formative influence to Walpole’s Norfolkian origins or even rule out the possibility that he might have become essentially the man he actually became had he been born in Cornwall or Cumbria (although any Cornishmen or Cumbrians among my readers will doubtless bristle at the conjecture and reach for a pasty or a Cumberland sausage to fling at me [and perhaps not entirely without reason, per the below-cited observation on John Carteret’s Cornishness]), I would be guilty of hermeneutic malpractice if I did not mention that the county seat of Norfolk, Norwich, had been the center and capital of England’s wool cloth-manufacturing-and-distribution industry since the fourteenth century, a fact which, inasmuch as wool cloth was still England’s leading export product in the late seventeenth century, meant that Norwich was then England’s industrial hub and its largest site of commerce outside London. And although Norfolk was otherwise completely rural, its countryside was largely devoted to the grazing of sheep for wool to supply Norwich’s factories. Of equal mandatory mention to Walpole’s birth in Norfolk is his attendance of university in the county next door, Cambridgeshire, at its namesake university, because in antagonistic contrast to Oxford, which had long been the university of the Anglican Church establishment, Cambridge was associated with the Puritans and later-originating dissenting Protestant sects, although perhaps not-insignificantly (i.e., inasmuch as tending to preempt any temptation to regard Walpole as not merely a supporter but a rabid champion of dissent), his college, King’s, was not one of the five that had most conspicuously bristled with Puritan agitators in the run-up to the Civil War. These two facts of Walpole’s early biography tally with his development into an arch-Whig, as the Whigs were from the outset a faction supportive of trade, productive land-ownership, and Protestant dissent. There is one more fact thereof that I personally like to think contributed to his political ethos and fate, although I don’t know if historians have ever made much of it. This is the fact that he was born a third son and inherited the family estate only thanks to the deaths of his two older brothers, such that he must have grown up expecting to become a merchant or a clergymen as the younger sons of the great landowning families tended to be expected or even forced to do. At any rate, we know that he had to be taught the duties of squireship by his father, who even went so far as to instruct him in the art of heavy drinking. While it would be all too fayly arch to speculate that he went through life feeling as though he were “playing the role” of a country squire rather than actually being one, it is eminently blokily commonsensical to speculate that his not having been able to take his accession to the squirearchy for granted imparted to him a substantial degree of insight into and sympathy with the Whigs’ non-agrarian-minded constituencies. And before leaving Walpole qua East-Anglian country gentleman behind for good I really must discuss a momentous act that he performed in that capacity, an act whose consideration will mark our first foray “into the weeds” of his pan-Anglospheric metapolitical significance—namely, the rebuilding from scratch of the Walpole family manor house, Houghton Hall, beginning in 1722, the year after his accession to the premiership. According to the online reference work of first resort, the construction of the new house necessitated the complete demolition of the village of Houghton, and the townlet erected just outside the estate to replace old Houghton in 1729 is “one of the locations claimed to be the inspiration for [Johnson’s friend, disciple, and fellow-Tory] Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village.” This poem, written at some point in the late 1760s (its publication year being 1770), has long been of interest to social historians for its documentation of the practice known as enclosure (or officially “inclosure”) wherein with Parliament’s permission (and locally negotiated none-too-generous compensation) a big landowner would appropriate the holdings of small-time farmers in his neighborhood, most often in order to group them into one larger farm, and very most often also in order to turn land thitherto dedicated to the raising of crops to land dedicated to the grazing of sheep and cattle, but sometimes (as in Walpole’s case) for the sake of aggrandizing his estate as an end in itself. Needless to say, in instantly depriving rural people of their livelihoods the practice tended to depopulate the countryside, whence the title of the poem, which is of course an outraged lament at (or of or against) this depopulative effect. Enclosure had been a legal option in England for centuries, but it really only picked up steam (to employ a quasi-anachronistic expression [but only a quasi-anachronistic one, for the steam engine was after invented at the beginning of the eighteenth century even if it wasn’t much used in industry until the late-middle thereof]) during the Whig Supremacy, and hence, owing to its dependence on parliamentary approval, the enclosure boom deserved to be regarded as the handiwork of the Whigs. In the pre-Civil War Tudor and Stuart periods, when Parliament had not yet definitively wrested executive as well as legislative power from the king and indeed the so-called divine right of kings was most aggressively feeling its oats, enclosure projects tended to be unfavorably received by the monarch. In his History of England, Johnson’s great bugbear David Hume (himself a proud Tory [although Johnson scornfully termed him “a Tory by chance”]) reports: “Some laws had been enacted during the reign of Henry VII, against depopulation, or the converting of arable lands into pasture” and adds that about a hundred years later, during the reign of Charles I, “by a decree of star chamber [the star chamber being an organ of monarchical power bitterly resented by Parliament]” a certain Sir Anthony Roper “was fined four thousand pounds [approximately ten gazillion pounds in today’s money] for an offence of that nature.” Complementarily, by the time of the penning of The Deserted Village, enclosures had become an integral part of a mighty agricultural revolution that in addition to destroying the entire old easygoing English rural mode of existence had catalyzed a massive increase in crop and livestock yield and made Britain virtually self-sufficient food- supply-wise. In short, the history of enclosure from about 1620 to 1770 nicely illustrates how in Anglophone countries the division of political power has long been not merely a neatly stable and bifold one between the state and the people but rather a murky, volatile trifold one between (or among) the people, the state, and “the great,” a division vis-à-vis which the state and “the great” are susceptible to being cast as either the friends or the foes of the people depending on the degree to which one regards “the great” as a subsection of the people and the projects initiated by the state or “the great” as beneficial or detrimental to the common good. Goldsmith’s poem boldly presents itself as a cri de coeur on behalf of the people and against “the great,” but its conception of the people is rather narrow and skewed toward the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder: its eulogistic catalog of the inhabitants of the thriving pre-deserted village consists of “a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,” a “village preacher” with his “modest mansion” and “forty pounds a year, [approximately, I don’t know, twenty thousand pounds in today’s money?]” a “village [school] master” whose “parlour” is so humbly furnished that its “chest contrive[s] a double debt to pay, a bed by night, a chest of drawers by day,” his swarm of noisy pupils, a “broken [i.e., retired] soldier,” a barber, a “swain” or two, and a milkmaid. Here there are no ironmongers, cattle-drovers, brewers, innkeepers, solicitors, booksellers, clergymen with not-so-modest mansions, or schoolmasters with beds distinct from chests of drawers. (Here of course one can’t help interjecting that the obvious reason these types do not figure in the poem is that its setting is a village, a locale-type in which such people were seldom to be found, but by the same token, one might ask why Goldsmith did not choose to write a poem about the locale-type in which they were positively rife--viz., the thriving English market town, as he must have passed through many of examples thereof [e.g., supposing the original of his poem to be Houghton—Diss, Thetford, and King’s Lynn] on his way to the village.) Equally narrow is his conception of “the great”: time and again he emphasizes that the village has been despoiled specifically by a parvenu landowner grown obscenely rich through wholesale commerce, “a man of wealth and pride,” a satrap of “trade’s proud empire” who squanders his newly ill-gotten gain on a “midnight masquerade with all the freaks of wanton wealth arrayed,” “horses, equipage, and hounds,” and “a robe that wraps his limbs in silky sloth.” Goldsmith has nary a harsh word for the titled aristocratic landowner up to the same sort of mischief, and he never would have dreamed of casting aspersions on the wealthiest man in the kingdom, George III, for his masterpiece, the short novel The Vicar of Wakefield, contains a lengthy rant wherein the eponym, clearly speaking in loco autoris, extols the monarch as the common Englishman’s sole bastion against the depredations of his wealthier fellow-subjects. But the untitled landowners who were performing all the enclosures saw the matter in quite a different light; they saw themselves as common British subjects exercising the liberties their grandfathers had secured at great and often mortal cost in the Civil Wars, liberties that had been wrested from their ancestors by a tyrannical monarchy and that they thought it their duty to exercise lest the Crown should once again get any ideas about reverting to absolutism into its head (so to speak). Moreover, while the above-mentioned enclosure-catalyzed agricultural revolution was undoubtedly the net result of hundreds of landowners selfishly aiming to make their own estates as profitable as possible, there is and was no denying that it was it was a genuine technological revolution that in the not-so-long run improved the well-being of all Britons including the uprooted peasantry, that it was a classic example of “private vices” leading to “public benefits,” to employ the terminology of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714), the Whigs’ secular Bible and the very first in that long line of Anglophone defenses of enlightened self-interest that extends through Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and down to the writings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman (if admittedly not much further down since). In short, on the matter of the enclosure-boom “there was [and still is] much to be said on both sides,” to quote, no, not “Cheeto Hitler,” but rather the personage from whom he doubtless unknowingly plagiarized that expression, Sir Roger de Coverley (a synecdoche for the above-mentioned titled aristocracy despite being a mere Sir), the fictitious arch-Tory of that most celebrated journalistic organ of early eighteenth-century Whiggism, the Spectator. And to this day throughout the Anglosphere any potentially locally disruptive alteration in the use of land is susceptible to being represented as tyrannical or beneficial depending on the aim of the alteration and the relative social positions of the alterer and the person or persons whose mode of existence threatens to be disrupted by the alteration. A project involving the leveling of an entire city and hatched by the biggest billionaire or the State itself may come to enjoy the championship of the humblest of the burg’s citizens provided it can be “spun” as beneficial to their interests (or the interests of the nation as a whole, of certain “underprivileged” demographic tranches thereof, of the long-term survival of human or animal life on earth, autc). On the other hand, the owner of a two-acre plot of land may find himself cast as the villain of his community by encircling his property in a wall only inches taller than the maximum height permitted by local zoning laws (as a certain kulak in my community seems to have been recently cast to judge by the demolition of such a wall only weeks after a zoning hearing advertised in front of it), and the resident-cum-owner of a humble shack on an eighth-of-an-acre plot may be no less intensely vilified by his neighbors for protesting his forced relocation to make room for a children’s hospital. One would be tempted to write off this morally muddleheaded attitude to land use as an endearing crotchet of our Übervolksgeist were it being “kept in the family,” but unfortunately it colors our attitude to land use in non-Anglo-Saxon countries and thereby unhelpfully contributes to our overall moral appraisal of the citizenry and governments of those countries, and consequently, and no less unhelpfully, to those countries’ chattering classes’ attitudes thereto. I think in this connection of a certain Russian film from about 15 years ago that dramatized a poorly heeled Soviet-Afghan-war veteran’s ultimately futile efforts to avoid ceding his tiny scrap of property to the Russian Orthodox Church. The film was unanimously lauded throughout the Anglosphere as a depiction of the miseries of the average Russian living under the boot-heel of the then-other second coming of Hitler, Mr. Putin (George “Dubyah” Bush then being the main second coming thereof, of course). But as it turns out, at least according to the online reference work of first resort, the director took his real-life inspiration not from any event that had occurred in Russia but rather from a white, middle-aged, “blue-collar” Colorado man’s tussle with his local government over the appropriation of his property by some local grandees for the construction of a concrete plant, a tussle that had ended in his committing suicide immediately after bulldozing the town hall. In short, the hero of the film was based on a textbook example of a sort of person that has always been despised by the Anglosphere’s “progressive” faction and that has since been “demonized” by that faction as the epitome-cum-embodiment of every sort of objectionable “ism.” And in the light of my discovery of this fact, I cannot but wonder if the film ever would have been so roundly eulogized in the Anglosphere had it (the fact) been widely known; moreover, given that the director has gone on to make another Putin-bashing film and (at least per the online reference work of first resort) remains firmly ensconced in Russia’s own “progressive” faction, I cannot help wondering in the light of the internationally synergistic fusing of anti-Putinism with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” if the director now wishes the archival evidence of his sympathy with the mad white “killdozer”-driver could somehow be “memory-holed.” Anyhow (and speaking of holes), for all the seeming “rabbit hole”-like digressiveness of the preceding half-dozen sentences, in point of fact they make for the smoothest of transitions to the second part of my discussion of Houghton Hall, inasmuch as this part centers on the mediation of the Anglospheric political domain by (or the infusion of that domain with) the domain of the aesthetic. For you see, no sooner had Walpole finished building Houghton Hall 2.0 than both the new house itself and the objects d’art housed within it began drawing aesthetic snipery from his opponents and detractors. Henry Harley, the Second Earl of Oxford, an ex-Tory MP, said of it, “it is neither magnificent nor beautiful, there is a very great expense without judgment or taste.” With all due deference to his lordship (i.e., none whatsoever, for reasons that will shortly become clear), we should let ourselves be the judges of that, or rather, the meta-judges of it—which is to say that rather than simply determining if the house and its contents were tasteful according to our personal aesthetic lights, we should try to figure out if it was aesthetically satisfactory by the general standards of taste its time (whence the undesirability of simply taking Lord Oxford-qua-individual critic’s word for it that they were tasteless). The online reference work of first resort’s article on HH informs me that it is a “key building in the history of Neo-Palladian architecture in Britain,” the Neo-Palladian style being the predominant one for big buildings throughout Britain in the early-to-mid eighteenth century. And from the photograph of the house embedded in the article, I can confirm that apart from the four vaguely martial-Venetian-looking domes that sit atop its roof, it is an absolutely typical specimen of Neo-Palladian architecture—starkly parallelepidal in shape, mirror- symmetrically proportioned, its front entrance flanked on each side by a pair of ionic columns and surmounted by a triangular tympanum. So it by no means pushed the envelope of early eighteenth-century good taste (not that envelopes had been invented by then). As for the collection inside, my source for the Lord Oxford quote, The Whig Supremacy by Basil Williams [which, incidentally, I have selected as my chief source of material on the political situation of our central period simply because in virtue of its antiquity {being originally published in 1939 and not revised since 1960} it is perforce devoid of full-fledged “wokery” even if it is at bottom frightfully “proto-woke” in being frightfully whiggish in the Butterfieldian sense in constantly running down the English of the early-to-mid eighteenth century for not being as “progressive” and “democratic” as their fellow-countrymen of the late nineteenth] informs me that it consisted of “gigantic casts of the Laocoon, the Tiber [i.e., presumably, the famous ancient statue thereof with Romulus and Remus] and the Nile [i.e., presumably the famous ancient statue of the god thereof], and the Gladiator [i.e., presumably, the famous ancient statue of an unidentified circus fighter] ” and a “vast collection of pictures, including besides Snyder’s ‘Markets’ and the works of such fashionable Italians as Guido [i.e., presumably, Guido Reni] and Domenichino, others more agreeable to our modern taste [i.e., the taste of us Britons of 1939 or perhaps 1960], which became the pride of Catherine the Great’s galleries at the Hermitage.” I suppose by “Snyder’s ‘Markets’” Williams means the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Frans Snyders’ Market Scene on the Quay, a graphically realistic “still death” depicting a heap of fresh game-bird and game-beast carcasses presumably awaiting preparation for sale at the eponymous market. I guess I can see how that painting might have put the average early-eighteenth-century Briton off his dinner (lunch being a later eighteenth-century or possibly even early nineteenth-century invention). And I suppose he might have been put off by the casts of the Laocoon given that they were mere casts rather than the genuine articles, but had they been those GAs, he would doubtless have been positively wowed by them. Yes, I know: they were (and are) flamboyantly huge and that since, say, the mid-nineteeth century good taste has been supposed to be all about restraint and dimensional modesty, but that is beside the point: in early eighteenth-century Britain, bigger did not necessarily mean worse and was often taken to mean better by default, for that time-cum-place was after all ground zero of the aesthetics of the sublime (the first essay in which is not Lessing’s Laocoon or even Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into our Notions of the Sublime, but Joseph Addison’s number on the attribute of ‘greatness’ in the above-mentioned Spectator). The same counter-objection applies mutatis mutandis and a fortiori to any meta-aesthetic cavils elicited by the inclusion of Guido and Domenichino, for to say that they were fashionable is merely to say that they were tasteful by certain standards of the collector’s time that have not proved to be timeless, and aesthetic timelessness is not a bar that we are asking them to clear. And as for the balance of the collection, Williams practically gives the meta-aesthetic game away to both Sir Robert and us when he says that that balance became the pride of the Hermitage collection, for the Hermitage is after all one of the world’s great art museums, but just to be on the safe side, I have checked the online reference work of first resort, which has informed me that the portion of the Walpole collection acquired by Catherine included paintings by Van Dyck, Poussin, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velasquez—all painters of the first or second rank in twentieth and twenty-first-century rankings. In short, in Walpole we are not dealing with an early eighteenth-century analogue to a collector of velvet Elvis portraits or poker playing-dogs interiors but a perfectly respectable connoisseur, and Lord Oxford’s description of Houghton Hall is not a fair appraisal but a smear. And this is a smear the conveyance of whose full metapolitical significance requires a bit of biographical contextualizing. You see, as his enumeration suggests, the Second Earl of Oxford was the son of the First Earl of Oxford, and this First Earl, Robert Harley, had been Lord Treasurer and head of the Tory government in power at the time of the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, and had been obliged to give up his office upon her death and the accession of George I, who had immediately accepted the installation of a Whig cabinet, a cabinet that had eventually come to include Walpole and via which Walpole had further eventually come to assume the premiership. While in power the First Earl had also been a friend and patron of the two greatest British literary figures of his time, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, and with them he had formed a sort of coterie of super-snooty tastemakers who had taken it upon themselves to dictate to their banausic fellow-subjects not only how poems should be written but paintings painted, buildings built, and so on. While the Second Earl had been debarred from following in his father’s footsteps in virtue of his Toryism, he had in virtue of his inherited wealth been able to follow in his aesthetic footsteps without missing a beat, and this he notably did by swelling his library into the largest and yet most discriminating private collection of books in Britain. Consequently, via a confluence of familial, aesthetic, and political causes, the Second Earl had been practically duty-bound to regard Walpole as an aesthetically tone-deaf and tone-blind lout. And in his pooh-poohing of Houghton Hall, one sees the beginning of a trend that has continued to this day--namely, the tendency of Anglophone “elites” to triangulate their political animosities through aesthetics, their tendency to employ aesthetics simultaneously as a political-rhetorical cudgel and as a metapolitical vineyard of sour grapes, their tendency to elide their opponents’ philistinism with their plebianism and to console themselves for their exclusion from the center of political power by reflecting on the superiority of their own aesthetic refinement. For of course the Second Earl’s Houghton Hall-bashing instantly recalls today’s “bicoastal progressive elites”’ endless “pearl-clutching” at the supposed unspeakable ugliness and vulgarity of both the exteriors and internal furnishings of the buildings acquired and maintained by the current president of the United States over the course of his pre-presidential career as a buyer, seller, and developer of real estate. The truly interesting thing about this trend-cum-tendency—at least for us twenty-first century Anglophones both left and right, who have all imbibed a Marxist understanding of the socioeconomic organization of our polities, and of the place of aesthetic taste therein, with (or like) our mothers’ milk—is how poorly it generally correlates with substantial distinctions of “class” and taste despite being cast in starkly hierarchical terms with respect to both the socioeconomic and aesthetic domains. Lord Oxford certainly saw himself as representing a higher “class” of Englishman or Briton than Walpole, but in reality he was only literally entitled to do so, being as he was but the Second Earl of Oxford and the grandson of a commoner, Sir Edward Harley, who like Walpole’s grandfather had been a middling country squire (his family seat being in Herefordshire in the West Midlands [i.e., almost exactly as far from London as Norfolk, only in a northwestern rather than northeastern direction]) whose genealogy, however ancient it may have been (for I am not about to be bothered to find out how ancient), could hardly have outclassed that of the Walpoles, who could at least get away with plausibly claiming, per Williams, that they had “settled in Norfolk at the time of the [Norman] Conquest [i.e., in 1066], or even before.” (It must further be remarked here by way of illustrating the muddledness of all the political distinctions in point that Sir Edward Harley was [I trust the reader will forgive my relaxing from the pluperfect into the simple past tense for the duration of this parenthesis] a Puritan who fought in the Parliamentary army in the Civil War—in other words, that he was a member of the political faction that developed into the Whigs—whereas Robert Walpole’s grandfather, Sir Edward Walpole, did not participate in the Civil War at all and entered political life as an MP in 1660, after the Restoration, by which time the differences between Parliament and the Crown had been temporarily neutralized, such that it would be a bit of a stretch even to term him a proto-Whig [although apparently by the following generation the Walpoles were sufficiently Whiggish to regard Sir Robert’s father’s younger brother Horatio as the black sheep of the family for standing for Parliament as a Tory].) And Oxford’s arrogation of meta-aesthetic superiority was ultimately superstructed on his father’s friendship with Swift and Pope (with whom and a couple of other literary men he formed a sort of gang who styled themselves the “Scriblerians”), neither of whom could boast of a particularly illustrious lineage, Swift hailing from the English “petty gentry” (the online AI engine of, say, fourth resort, calls the Swifts’ estate in Goodrich, Herefordshire [yes, yes, yes: the same county as the one in which the Harleys were based {although as Swift grew up entirely in Ireland and his father had relocated thither as a consequence of being dispossessed even of those “modest holdings” for fighting on the Royalist side in the Civil War ,it’s hard to imagine he “bonded” much with the First Earl over their being fellow-Herefordshire lads}] “respectable but modest”) and Pope being the son of a humble London scrivener, a sort of freelance law clerk; and neither of whom, for that matter, seem to have possessed much interest or discernment in painting or the plastic arts for all their (and Pope’s in particular) high-horsedness about them. The Scriblerians’ obsession with painting was essentially a “viral,” or, perhaps, rather “fungal,” outgrowth of a single phrase in their favorite classical poet Horace’s metrical guide to writing a good poem, the Ars Poetica—“ut pictura poesis,” meaning “poetry should be like painting.” Because Horace had been such an amazing poet with amazing insights into human nature they reckoned that he must have been an amazing art critic as well and that they had at least to go through the motions of setting up shop as art critics if they were to prove themselves as fully rounded eighteenth-century reincarnations of old Flacco. To be sure, Pope’s interest in architecture was more than trivial, as evinced by his authorship of a full-blown verse treatise on the subject, the “Epistle to Burlington,” and by his putting his Baukunst-fandom’s money where its mouth was in designing and building a house of his own; but the principles inculcated in the poem are straightforwardly neo-Palladian, and surviving drawings and paintings of the house (for it was demolished by some harridan of a baroness about twenty years before the invention of photography) shew it to have been a miniature replica of Houghton Hall with terracotta roof-slopes instead of domes. And it doubtless would have been a full-scale replica had Pope had a grandee’s fortune the size of Walpole’s on which to lavish its construction instead of being obliged to finance that construction with his humble scrivener’s son’s patrimony. And yet for all his humbleness of origin Pope did not scruple to look down his nose at Walpole as an early eighteenth-century analogue of a “jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place.” And complementarily perversely, the First Earl, despite looking his nose down at Walpole just as snootily, by no means thought he was stooping to pantry-boy level by rubbing elbows with a humble scrivener’s son like Pope or a mere petty gentleman’s son like Swift. And one sees the same sort of perverse disregard of socioeconomic and meta-aesthetic-cum-meta intellectual actualities in the twenty-first century Anglosophere. At the very start of his political career, when he was running (or in Britspeak “standing”) for mayor of London in 2007, the Eton-and-Oxford-educated Tory toff Alexander “Boris” Johnson was described as “the thinking man’s idiot” in the BBC’s London radio station’s trailers for his debate with the Labour incumbent, the grammar-school dropout and fish-trawler’s son “Red” Ken Livingstone (so much, incidentally for the Beeb’s legally obligatory political neutrality, what what?). When the concluding question of that debate proved to be “Which Shakespeare character would you compare yourself to?” Livingstone swiftly and smoothly rejoined in his plebeian South London twang with a full-fledged conceit worthy of an Oxbridge don: “I’d like to be Julius Caesar, but unfortunately, I seem to be sitting between Brutus and Cassius” (Brutus presumably being Johnson, and Cassius being the Ralph Nader-esque irrelevant third, Liberal-Democratic, candidate, Brian Paddick, whose answer to the question I cannot recall, as is of course only fitting in the light of his effective political nonexistence [which fittingly terminated in his being made a life peer as Baron Paddick]). Johnson hemmed and hawed for a good ten seconds, as if rummaging through his dim recollection of an O-Level acquaintanceship with the Bard’s oeuvre, before spluttering back in his Bertie Wooster-on-Benzedrine accent that he aspired to be like Pericles, a great statesman and guider of his people through periods of crisis. Whereupon Ken with even more donnish aplomb pointed out that the Pericles of Shakespeare’s play was a prince of Tyre, not the Athenian soldier-cum-benevolent dictator. Of course Ken, despite his “working-class” origins and years of left-wing activism, had spent his tenure as mayor striking and rubber-stamping deals with foreign capitalists and potentates that had facilitated the transformation of central London into a hideous skyscraper-dominated Dubai on the Thames (a development that, despite its manifest aesthetic rebarbativeness, is invariably touted as the main proof cum-centerpiece of London’s transformation from a stuffy, parochial warren of bowler-hatted bankers and baked beans-on-toast-gourmandizing Cockneys into an amazingly sophisticated cosmopolitan world-class city); and Boris eventually ascended to the premiership by not only continuing successfully to present himself as an uneducated moron but also successfully assuming the mantle (or, in class-appropriate terms, “mac”) of the more-than-literally insular working-class Briton’s best friend and champion, the man who finally made Brexit a done deal. And if any Yank among my readers thinks his withers unwrung by any of these observations, if he assumes that the sociocultural incoherence of the state of affairs encapsulated therein must somehow be rooted in Britain’s retention of a monarchy and titled aristocracy, he need only reflect on recent U.S. presidential-political history. Thinking back to the 2004 presidential election campaign and its mediatic presentation, he will naturally recall that the incumbent, George “Dubyah” Bush was relentlessly pilloried as a near-clinically retarded lout and hick, as he had been since the beginning of the 2000 campaign, while his opponent, John Kerry, was feted, nay fellated, as a sophisticate’s sophisticate and an egghead’s egghead, a purebred scion of the WASP elite who could be trusted to look after Joe Sixpack’s best interests precisely because he was so-gosh damned smart and well-educated. But he ought also to recall certain other factoids (I think, incidentally, that factette would have been a much nicer term for the entity-type in question, but journalists are not renowned for their niceness in either the oldfangled or the newfangled sense) about Messrs. Bush and Kerry that were either matters of public record or that came to light (however dim or dextral that light may have been) during the campaign: that both men were alumni of Yale University, that Bush’s SAT score was higher than Kerry’s, that Bush prided himself on reading a book a week in conjunction with is wife Laura, one of whose favorite authors was said to be Dostoyevsky; that Kerry was of Boston-Brahmin lineage only on the distaff side, what with his father’s being the son of an Austrian-Jewish émigré shoemaker—factoids that could have been used to “craft a narrative” entirely antithetical to the received one, had a “critical mass” of people with the wherewithal and inclination been disposed to “craft” it. (That the official “narrative” proved wholly persuasive at least to the Democratic Party’s “base” I can attest on the evidence of something my yellow-dog Democrat mother said at the time: “I want a president who is more intelligent than me.”) And of course during the previous presidential off-squaring of a Bush against a non-Bush, in 1992, a semi-anithetical narrative thereto was crafted, one wherein George H. W.’s WASPism was held up in illustration of his hopeless out-of-touchness with the concerns of ordinary Americans (recall the merciless Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life-esque “framing” of his visit to a supermarket with its “soundbiting” of his inability to contain squeals of delighted surprise on apparently beholding a checkout laser-scanner for the first time) and in unfavorable contrast to Bill Clinton’s “empathy”-imparting rural-Arkansan “white-trash” origins. At the same time, Clinton, like Kerry after him, was presented as an intellectual titan—in his case on the admittedly slightly less flimsy evidence of his having briefly attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. And in truth, Clinton was probably a standard-deviationette smarter than “Poppy.” “That said,” “Slick Willie”’s intellectual closet contains enough skeletons of howlers fit to be turned into a trove of “Clintonisms” à la “Dubyah’s” notorious “Bushisms.” For crying out loud, in his recording of Prokofiev’s Peter in the Wolf with Mikhail Gorbachev and Sophia Loren (!) he pronounces bravado with an accent on the first syllable! Barack Obama with his Clinton-dwarfing reputation for Ciceronian eloquence, super-Einsteinian intelligence, and super-Brummelian fashion sense, and super…I don’t know…Trillingian literary erudition may seem impervious to such ridicule, but in truth his superiority to both “Dubyah” and Donald Trump vis-à-vis all these qualities has always been much exaggerated. One has only to listen with tous les oreilles, so to speak, to juxtaposed snippets of Obama and Bush speaking ex tempore as presidents, to notice a striking similarity between Obama’s elocution and “Dubyah”s, to notice that both men take an agonizingly long time to get to the end of a sentence, that each of them deliberates for seconds on end over each and every word, and that when that word finally emerges from “Dubyah’s” mouth, it is all too often a “fifty-cent” one like “bloviate” or “opine”—to notice that the difference in their oratory essentially boils down to a superficial one of affective attitude, to the difference between diffidence and smugness. And in their shared tendency to endless temporization they both compare most unfavorably to Trump, who, for all the admitted idiosyncracy and exiguousness of his personal lexicon, has never wanted for fluency in the most basic sense, for an uninterrupted grammatically cogent flow of words. And why should this come as any great surprise, given that he, like Obama, Clinton and both Bushes before him (but not Joe Biden, the University of Delaware law-school washout!) is an alumnus of an Ivy? Yes, Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania only after transferring from the rich New Yorker’s “safety school,” Fordham, but then Obama arrived at Columbia only after what I hear tell was a pretty undistinguished academic career at Occidental College, a sort of poor man’s Pomona. I have already made mention of DJT’s love of gargantuan building-architecture qua supposed infallible index of loutishness, but what of his love of that nonpareil of landscape-architecture, a classic Scottish golf course? Is it not a fair match for Obama’s predilection for tonily picturesque Martha’s Vineyard as a vacation spot? And in sartorial habitus the two men are virtually identical, both of them favoring a succession of interchangeable two piece suit-and-tie ensembles, the only difference being in the color of the tie, wherein “there is much to be said on both sides”—Obama’s dark blue being more understated and therefore more “tasteful” than Trump’s bright red but also borderline funereal and therefore not quite seemly for a president on the majority of days in office, days when he is expected to embody the more alacritous side of statesmanship. Much contemptuous “elitist” fuss has been made of Trump’s complete lack of interest in books, fuss about which I am obviously in no position to raise a brazenly unlettered common man’s contemptuous fuss about; en revanche, though, one sees little evidence that Obama is literarily cultivated, and indeed one sees pretty damning circumstantial evidence to the contrary in his late-Boomer intellectually petit-bourgeois adulation of The Wire and so-called gangster rap, while Trump at least exhibits respectable old-school middlebrow taste in music by loving grand opera and being a Pavarotti completist. And socioecomically speaking, Obama is a virtual echo of Clinton (i.e., inasmuch as he is the child of a partially low-status “broken home”), and Trump a virtual echo of Kerry (i.e., inasmuch as he is the grandson of a German-speaking immigrant who married into New York high society). In short, now (in the early twenty-first century) as then (in the early eighteenth), the socioeconomic and meta-aesthetic differences between the principal mutually opposed political figures of the day are either so slight or so factitious that it is very easy to imagine any of them being “cast” as the embodiment of qualities antithetical to the qualities to the ones they are purported to embody and identical to those purportedly embodied by their opponents, and thereupon stepping into their new parts with panache and aplomb, much as Groucho would flawlessly play Chico’s part, Chico’s Harpo’s, etc., in the early days of the Marx Brothers, or Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory would effortlessly swap roles in stage performances of My Dinner with Andre. But from the facititiousness of these distinctions one should by no means infer, à la today’s Continental “elite theory”-gourmandizing “neoreactionaries,” that the entire political dramaturgy of the Anglosphere has always been mere “kayfabe” (“kayfabe” being inscrutable “pro”-wrestling slang for the factitious feuds between “heroes” and “heels” organized by the management of the WWF/WWE [feuds wherein each of the wrestlers is merely pretending to hate his opponent’s guts]) orchestrated by some “deep state” or “uniparty,” for the underlying differences between the two factions of the day (and there always only two of them) are often all too real. Although a landed grandee and a mainline Anglican rather than a merchant or a dissenter himself, Robert Walpole really did further the aims of a mercantile and dissenting bloc at the material expense of “high-church” Anglicans like Jonathan Swift and at the even greater material expense of Roman Catholics like Alexander Pope. And although a native member of the “bicoastal” elite, Donald Trump really is benefiting the “low-status” inhabitants of “flyover country” at the material expense of “high-status” New Yorkers, Washingtonians, Hollywoodians, and Ivy Leaguers.

So over the course of the preceding long paragraph we have managed to ascertain that ever since Walpole’s day Anglo-American metapolitical life has tended be characterized by a Manichean conception of its holders of and aspirers to chief-executive power, that there is a certain amount of meta-socioeconomic “false consciousness” “baked into” this Manicheasm, and that this “false consciousness” is mediated by phenomena that would seem not only at first but also at second and third blush to have little or nothing to do with politics. It now remains to be shewn how the political and metapolitical circumstances of Walpole’s premiership brought to life and set in motion this glorious or god-awful Manichean metapolitical phantasmagoria. And in order to shew this I am afraid I am going to have to move beyond and behind our Ground Zero to some ground postpositively designated by a negative integer, or, in non-metaphorical terms, to describe the political and metapolitical circumstances that allowed Walpole to come to power in the first place. To be sure, the question (of) how far beyond and behind Ground Zero I should move has furnished material for much lively internal debate. It seems to me that, if we enumerate the negative Grounds at one per decade, in order to treat adequately (of) all the circumstances in point, I would have to move all the way back to Ground Negative Twenty-Three Point Six—in other words to the seizure of the English throne by Henry VIII’s father, Henry Tudor/Henry VII in 1485, but were I to do that, not only “would the bulk of this essay fright away the student” (to quote Samuel Johnson mutato mutando) it would also doubtless elicit from him (the student) howls of alienated ridicule like those emitted by viewers of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin when the Russian leader remarked that in order to explain the origins of the current war with Ukraine he would have go all the way back to the Christianization of the Kievian Rus in the tenth century (as he “arguably” actually did have to do, inasmuch as present-day Ukrainian nationalism is in large part founded in the Ukrainians’ sense that they are “the real Russians” owing to their ancestors’ participation in this event, which took place before Moscow even existed). But I reckon I can treat (of) most of the circumstances semi-adequately without frighting the student or making a laughingstock of myself if I move only as far back as Ground Negative Six Point One, which is to say to the Restoration of the English-cum-Scottish monarchy and accession to the throne of Charles II in 1660. The monarchy had to be restored then because it had been effectively abolished by the execution by the Parliamentary faction of Charles II’s father, the conveniently named Charles I, at the end of the Civil War just over ten years earlier. In the intervening period, England had been ruled like an absolute monarchy by Oliver Cromwell, the ex-commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary army (or, rather, its anti-Parliamentary and ultra-anti-royalist offshoot), but Cromwell had shrewdly (if ever-so-reluctantly) declined to have himself crowned king of England, choosing instead to style himself Lord Protector, reviving a title most recently used by Humphrey Earl of Gloucester, the regent of the kingdom during the minority of Henry VI in the 1420s and 30s (so much for not straying past Ground Negative Six Point One, and while I’m back here at ca. Ground Negative Thirty, I might as well go all the way back to ca. Ground Negative One Hundred Eighty by remarking that Cromwell’s declining of the crown had inevitably been partly inspired Julius Caesar’s example), such that when Oliver’s homunculus of a son, Richard, had attempted to take his place after his death, nobody had taken him seriously as a ruler (whereas if he had instead been crowned King Richard IV, son of Oliver I, he could while remaining king have conveniently handed the reins of power over to another Lord Protector), such that even the most rabidly anti-monarchical Parliamentarians had been unable to think of anything more sensible to do than calling back Charles II from exile. Having no desire to suffer his father’s fate, Charles was happy to let Parliament call all the governmental shots as long as they voted him enough money to support his lifestyle of round-the-clock boozing and whoring, but his titled chums at court had different ideas, such that for the remaining quarter-century of his life England was effectively governed by a cabal of lordly courtiers (apparently their initials even spelled out the acronym C.A.B.A.L, at least with the help of a little creative orthography from their Parliamentary foes) while still being funded as a polity by Parliament, a state of affairs that bred intense resentment of the king and court among the MPs. To make matters even more fractious, Charles was on all too friendly terms with both the French and non-French Roman Catholics owing to—or at least suggested by—his sister’s marriage to the French king and his own to Catherine Braganza of Portugal. His younger brother James, Duke of York, was an even more enthusiastic Romaphile who had openly converted to Papism, and when Charles died heirless (Catherine having proved barren, although he had sired numerous children through several paramours [he being a veritable seventeenth-century Elon Musk in the siring department]), and James consequently ascended to the throne as James II, all holy heck broke loose as the new monarch set about trying to re-Catholicize the entire country (or, rather, the entirety of both countries, because we mustn’t forget the Scots [although we are well within our rights to forget the Welsh {because there were only a butcher’s-dozen thousand of them and Wales had been politically united with England for few Welshmen even knew how long} and the Irish {because they were already largely Popish despite Oliver’s efforts to kill off the Papist majority}]) or at least to make Roman Catholicism a rival established church. Certain people, by no means all of them Papists or would-be Papists, thought that the re-Catholicization of Britain was not too high a price to pay for not partying as though it were 1649 all over again, and these people collectively started calling themselves Tories (tedious and ultimately inconclusive meta-etymological digression here omitted), while certain others, by no means all of them retro-Puritans, were prepared to depose James for the sake of keeping Britain Protestant, and these people started calling themselves Whigs (Tedious and Ultimately Inconclusive Meta-Etymological digression No. 2 here omitted). The Whigs alighted on a knack for doing this while keeping the monarchy intact and preserving the line of succession—viz., inviting James’s son-in-law, the Dutchman William of Orange, to co-reign as William III with James’s daughter Mary. William accepted the invitation, and he being an established battlefield badass, James slunk away into French exile after a token struggle against William’s invading forces, taking his son and heir (another James) with him. Although William and Mary’s union proved fruitless, Mary luckily had a younger sister, Anne, whose accession as queen kept the creedal chip off the old block James III stuck on the Continent, but this only kicked the can of re-Catholicization down the road a few years, as Anne seemed unable to bear any viable children (though not for lack of trying on the part of her and her consort, some cipher of a Danish prince). And so via something called the Act of Settlement the Whigs and Tories (minus a substantial sliver of the latter who clung to the old Tory conviction that the original line of succession should be preserved at all costs, a sliver collectively known as Jacobites [so called because {and by no means to be confused with the Jacobins of French-Revolutionary infamy}] after Jacobus, the Latin name from which James ultimately derives) agreed to allow Anne’s closest Protestant cousin, Sophia, the ruler of the tiny principality of Hanover, or her heir, to become queen or king upon her (Anne’s) dying heirless. Shortly afterward via something called the Act of Union they combined England and Scotland into a single country called Great Britain. And why did they do that? Because until then the two countries had been ruled by a single monarch (or duoarch) only by accident of succession and for less than a hundred years. For if Elizabeth I had had any children, the throne would not have passed from her to Charles I’s father James I, by then already James VI of Scotland, and so Scotland had to be formally conjoined to England lest the Scots accept James III as a king of their own and thereby turn Papist. Wellsir, in 1714 Anne died still bairnless, and so George Lewis, eldest son of Sophia, wafted over from Hanover to be crowned George I of Great Britain, his mother having died only weeks before Anne. So where did that leave Hanover, kingwise, or rather, electorwise (for he was styled not the King but the Elector of Hanover, owing to his having a vote in who got to be Holy Roman Emperor)? It left it exactly where it had been until then, in the very capable and very happy hands of George Lewis. So did that mean Hanover was now a part of Great Britain? By no means, for the Act of Succession contained a clause insisting that Hanover was to remain a separate polity in perpetuity and that Great Britain owed Hanover absolute zilch in the way of, say, military support in the event that, say, it was invaded by France, or by one of the umpteen other German principalities. In truth, George would have much preferred to stay in Hanover and indeed ended up spending almost as much of his reign there as in Britain. So his immediate concern on being crowned was to make his personal life as free of drama as possible. And so he picked a cabinet staffed entirely by Whigs simply because the Tory cabinet in place at the death of Anne had contained a couple of pesky diehard Jacobites. And this choice of his immediately transformed the governmental gestalt of Great Britain into a kind of multilayered Mexican standoff wherein nobody could assert his principled political will without being accusable by everybody else of simultaneously betraying his principles and trying to bring about some political state of affairs that everybody (including the supposed betrayer cum disaster-monger himself) had agreed must never be brought about. The Tories were by tradition the party of the court, of the Anglican-Church hierarchy, and of champions of the crown as the center of governmental authority; the Whigs by tradition the party of the countryside, of non-Anglican Protestants, and of champions of Parliament as the seat of governmental authority. But how could the Tories now be anything but hostile to court, crown, and Church alike now that all three were in the hands of the arch-opponents of the Church hierarchy? And yet again, how could they express this hostility without seeming to be in favor of James III’s usurping George I, whom they had after all agreed to allow to become king? And how could the Whigs get away with posing as staunch defenders of parliamentary authority, the liberty of the subject, religious dissent, and good clean country living now that they were allied with the king and, via this alliance, in charge of the Church and ensconced in the court? And of course, they had to stand behind George qua Protestant, but if they stood too firmly behind him—notably in any way that involved expenditures that might somehow make their way over to Hanover with him—they risked being charged with favoring him qua foreigner. And what if, in foreign policy, they tried to use the Empire or one of its principalities that happened to be Roman Catholic as a counterweight to one of Britain’s classic foes, France or Spain? Why, then they stood exposed to the charge of favoring the Papists. And God forbid they should ever try to use France or Spain as a counterweight to any other power! About the only safe bet was lending assistance to the Empire’s biggest Protestant component, Prussia, but that was only intermittently possible owing to Frederick the Great’s pursuit of his own ambition to dominate the Empire, an ambition that not infrequently involved his joining his own interest with France’s. And so in becoming the leader of the Whig cabinet—as he did basically by default in 1722, thanks to his adroit handling as First Commissioner of the Treasury of the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, a sort of prefiguration of the great global financial crash of 2009 (I term it a prefiguration of that event rather than of, say, the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 because like that event it was precipitated by overvaluation in an easily specified financial locus, the South Sea Company’s stock-fund in its case and the federally subsidized portion of the US housing market in the GFC’s), together with the serendipitous death of his “powerful rival” (so Williams), Charles Spencer, the Earl of Sunderland—Walpole instantly made himself into a potential bull’s eye of all of the above-listed accusations. And becoming leader of that particular cabinet exposed him to an entirely separate and no less damning accusation, namely, one of nepotism, for you see, his brother-in-law Charles Townshend was already Secretary of State, an office that the salience of foreign policy not infrequently made more eligible for being regarded as the premiership than First Commissioner of the Treasury.

Before proceeding to shew how this gestalt played out (or perhaps, rather, “assumed reanimation,” for a gestalt is after all a sort of still picture like a cartoon-animation cell, and as we have seen, the gestalt in point arose out of a succession of previous gestalts, and it would subsequently scarcely ever remain stationary for more than a few weeks in succession) over the two decade-long course of “the Walpole administration,” I should point out that it already makes mincemeat or corned-beef hash (the second of these, incidentally, being by far the apter of the two metaphorical vehicles, albeit only by way of folk etymology [for my ever-trusty 1990 Concise Oxford Dictionary informs me that the corn in corned beef is derived from a Germanic root cognate with the Latin word granum meaning “grain” rather than from the name of England’s southwesternmost county], inasmuch as according to Williams, Walpole’s chief Tory adversary John Carteret’s signature aloofness from domestic politics was chiefly ascribable to his being a native of Cornwall, what with the Cornish being a Celtic people who were anciently as “proudly independent” of the English as the Irish and who more or less to this day [i.e., inasmuch in his late-1970s Desert Island Disks interview the opera-singer Benjamin Luxon huffily asserted that he considered himself a Cornwallman rather than an Englishman] bitterly resent their ancient absorption into the polity of England) of the elite theory-gourmandizing modern right’s pooh-poohing of principles as mere bullshittic window-dressing and fetishization of “traditions” and “ways of life” as phenomena or habituses organically alienable from principles. For as we have already seen, at each and every step of their respective individual and collective ways, the human constituents of this gestalt were actuated by closely considered principles that were tightly conjoined to their respective traditions and ways of life. Why, then, did each of them find himself constantly seeming to betray that principle at every step of that way? Why, simply (or at least mainly) because on adopting a given principle, a principle perfectly congruent with his way of life at the moment of adoption, he could not possibly see all the varieties of conduct that adherence to that principle would exact over the course of time. It was all very easy and straightforward as a typical Whig MP of 1704 (a date I have chosen because it both postdates the accession of Anne and precedes all of the above-mentioned acts) to be staunchly opposed to kings and queens and courts and the church hierarchy and Papists and foreigners and big-city living because the reigning monarch was then the sister of the Old Pretender ruling at the direction of a Tory cabinet, and because it was impossible to foresee that only fifteen years later the reigning monarch would be a solidly Protestant non-Briton ruling through policies devised and implemented by a Whig cabinet. The problem of political principle would thus seem to be epistemological rather than ethical at heart and in essence: men form their principles from a kind of epistemological snapshot of their place in the world at a particular moment and generally end up having to modify or discard those principles (and concomitantly being enabled to call out their contemporaries for the modification and discarding of their principles) as time brings to light inconsistencies in them, although even to call them “inconsistencies” is not quite fair because history is not predictably uniformly unkind to all principles and ways of life. For all the typical Whig MP of 1702 knew, Anne might have given birth to a viable heir who would be raised as a Catholic and on inheriting the throne from her would completely re-Catholicize Great Britain (or, rather, England, Scotland, and Wales, for had Anne birthed a viable heir there would have been no Act of Union and hence no Great Britain), in which case the withers of that MP’s old-school Whiggism would have remained unwrung until the day of his death. It perhaps does not go quite without saying that in insisting that principles are not mere bullshit and that they are epistemologically grounded I do not mean that they necessarily arise from an altogether accurate appraisal of the world and their upholder’s place in it even at the moment of the initial snapshot, for even at that moment the appraiser may overrate or underrate his affiliation with a given group or his dedication to a given cause. An MP of 1702 may have assumed his lot lay with the Whigs because he was a landowner without giving due consideration to his regular church attendance, friendly relations with the nearest-seated bishop, disdain for the landowning Whigs’ fellow-travelers the dissenting merchants either qua merchants or qua dissenters, and so on--considerations due consideration of which would have impelled him to cast his lot with the Tories. It is enough by my meta-epistemological standard for principles to be formed and modified on some not entirely inaccurate understanding of the extant political situation and one’s place in relation to it. It also perhaps does not go without saying that in maintaining that people reorder their principles in response to changing circumstances I do not maintain that their public representation of their principles subsequent to the reordering invariably corresponds point by point to the reordered principles themselves; to the near contrary, I maintain that this representation may be almost entirely hypocritical. But in every such case (so I maintain) the hypocrisy is ultimately a function or “knock-on effect” of sincerity, of one’s sincere adherence to certain principles—to certain beliefs or ideas about certain institutions or places (as in de Gaulle’s “certain idea of France”), beliefs or ideas that one simply finds one cannot let go of or pretend to care a jot less about than one actually does. One starts out with a half-dozen principles that one is prepared to defend with uniform sincerity and varying degrees of vehemence, and eventually one finds oneself with just one or two that one is willing to defend with the utmost sincerity and vehemence, having in the meantime determined that one wants nothing to do with the other three or four. But by then one will have been obliged to make common cause with people who want everything to do with one or more of those other three or four, and so one will have been obliged to pretend to continue caring very much about those other three or four. Walpole’s career is a locus classicus of this process: in virtue of both his personal disposition and “socioeconomic” and “cultural” position (although of course both “socioeconomics” and “culture” are themselves highly personalized) he started out caring just enough and no more about religious toleration, a thriving commercial sector, avoiding unprofitable wars, the Protestant line of succession, and so forth, to make an ideal Prime Minister for 1721. By 1742, he found that he cared more about avoiding merely symbolic, gratuitous wars than just about anything else; unfortunately, he simultaneously found that the near-entirety of the rest of the Commons—Whigs and Tories alike—were hell-bent on gratuitously and merely symbolically going to war with Spain, and so he had no choice but to resign from the premiership. In the meantime, he had made himself the most hated man in Britain (so ardently hated, indeed, that it was only by allowing himself to be “kicked upstairs” to the House of Lords that he avoided impeachment by his fellow-MPs and possibly even trial for treason by the judiciary), largely for seeming to care more about maintaining a thriving commercial sector than anything else. But by a very similar token, fifteen to twenty years later, in circa 1760 (he having died only a few years after his resignation, in 1745), virtually every Briton looked back on his premiership with nostalgia, for by then Britain was in the middle of a war with both Spain and France that had proved extremely disruptive to her commercial sector and showed no signs of ending in her favor.

To be sure, Walpole’s transformation from savior of the day into the epoch’s arch-villain and thence into its guardian angel was a slow one, and the record of that transformation is itself littered with precedents—or perhaps “cues” is a better word—for subsequent classic Anglo-Saxon political and metapolitical behavior. I have already asserted that Walpole started off on the wrong foot by laying himself open to charges of nepotism in governing alongside his brother-in-law, and I stand by that assertion. All the same it is “worth mentioning” that nepotism in the sense of “unfair preferment of nephews or relatives to other qualified persons” was quite a new usage in 1721, as the earliest occurrence of it recorded by the OED dates from 1670 (and interestingly if bemusingly the third occurrence, from 1705, originates from the pen of Joseph Addison, co-author of the Spectator, which, as mentioned above, was the Whigs’ chief instrument of “cultural hegemony”), which of course in turn suggests that before then unfairly preferring one’s relatives to other qualified persons wasn’t something that bothered Englishmen very much if at all. (En revanche, it is “worth mentioning,” if only parenthetically, that the seventeenth-century date of this first occurrence brazenly gives the lie to the notion, one very dear to the “modern right,” that it was only subsequent and thanks to the emergence of the twentieth-century “meritocracy” based on objective qualifying examinations and professional accreditation that nepotism and other forms of patronage began to be stigmatized.) And at reflection’s first blush it seems strange that it ever should have started bothering them, for after all, the entire English system of government and administration had been thoroughly nepotistic since medieval times, inasmuch as kings and queens had owed their right to rule to nothing but being the son or daughter of the previous king or queen, country squires had inherited from their fathers not only their property but also the right effectively to rule their neighborhoods as justices of the peace, and so on. The truth would seem to be that nepotism could begin to be a problem only with the solidification of the cabinet-based system of government, and that system did not even begin to take shape until after the Restoration, when the notion of allowing the monarch to govern on his own was “off the table” for the first time in English history. To be sure, English monarchs had long ruled with the assistance of (and in some reigns effectively at the direction of) a body of advisers known as the privy council, but as the very name of that body intimates, the monarch was always privy to their deliberations and could interrupt their meetings to receive an up-to-the-minute report from them or deliver peremptory orders to them whenever he or she chose, notably by summoning them into one of his private chambers from whichever cabinet—i.e., room--in which they happened to be meeting separately from him or her. The cabinet as an institution only developed once it began to be assumed that the monarch required a group of advisers entitled to meet as long as they liked entirely in secret, even from the monarch himself or herself, in a room of their own, and whenever they liked for as long as they liked. And “there is a case to be made” that the group of ministers that formed on George I’s accession to the throne, the one that Walpole soon joined and eventually dominated, was the very first cabinet in a fully institutionalized sense, for although the OED records two earlier-occurring instances of cabinet under the definition associated with this sense, they both unmistakably carry more than a whiff of the pejorative about them, an attitude that this isn’t the proper way to run a government in England. (The first, from 1644, and something called Mercurius Brit., refers to “your cabinet or Junto” in unfavorable contrast to “our State Committee,” thereby raising the specter of England’s turning into a kind of banana republic avant la lettre; the second, from James II’s fellow-Papist and chief literary beneficiary-cum-apologist, John Dryden, remarks “Everything was then managed by the jealousie of her Mysterious Cabinet”—i.e., apparently, a small group of confabbers that was unwarrantedly keeping the monarch “out of the loop” and wielding unduly great power.) Nepotism only became recognized as a potential problem with the advent of the cabinet system because it was only then, with the definitive retreat of the monarch from day-to-day governmental decision-making, that political offices became sufficiently important and specialized to require specific “skill sets,” such that the notion of being more or less qualified for one of them first became readily intelligible. To be sure, English monarchs had long had right-hand men who had more or less always occupied official court positions, and these right-hand men had always been recognized as being more or less competent qua right-hand men, but because these right-hand men’s positions had varied from reign to reign (and even within a specific reign) and their occupation of these positions had more often than not been a consequence of their provision of good advice and assistance in general (or merely of the monarch’s partiality to them for reasons having nothing to with their competence as advisers and assistants) rather than of their prior demonstration of competence at discharging the duties of the positions--because, in other words, and for example, Henry VIII had made Cardinal Wolsey Lord Chancellor principally as a reward for extricating him from his marital difficulties and James I had made the Duke of Buckingham Lord Admiral simply because he liked his looks and fashion sense (and only after elevating him to his dukedom for the same reason)--the notion of being, say, a well-qualified or badly qualified Chancellor of the Exchequer or Lord Privy Seal per se would not have made much sense to any Englishman before the very late seventeenth century at the earliest. As First Commissioner of the Treasury Walpole baled Britain out of the South Sea Bubble crisis and thereby demonstrated both that First Commissioner of the Treasury was an “existentially” important office and what it meant to be a qualified occupier of that office. But when on becoming chief of His Majesty’s government, he kept his brother-in-law Townshend in place as Secretary of State, he perforce sidelined the man who had demonstrated the “existential” importance of that office and his own qualification for it, John Carteret. “But at least to its credit (or perhaps, rather, even to its discredit) the pre-Hanoverian monarchs’ preferment of the likes of Wolsey and Buckingham could not have been called genuinely nepotistic inasmuch as such people were not relatives but friends (or ;friends with benefits’) of the monarch.” Indeed they were not relatives but friends, but by the same token, Walpole soon enough “took a page from those monarchs’ playbook” by being as generous to his friends as to his relatives, selecting as fellow cabinet-members, and even holders of sub-cabinet level offices, only men who had proved by their voting-record in the House of Commons that they could be counted on to side with him on any issue. You may have learned, if only from that awful multi Oscar-winning movie about the court of Queen Anne from a half-dozen years ago, that by the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a word for a courtier of such arbitrary influence as Wolsey or Buckingham, that he (or she, in the case of Abigail Masham, the figure who enjoyed such influence at Anne’s court) was known as the monarch’s favorite. Well, Walpole treated the House of Commons as a kind of parallel court, and he eventually showed himself so doggedly monarchical in his preference for his favorites among the membership that he catalyzed the coinage of another ism-terminating word, favoritism, whose first OED-recorded occurrence, in 1763 (and in the correspondence of John Wilkes, who out-Whigged the Whigs the following year by penning and publishing journalism so scurrilously critical of George III that it resulted in his conviction for libel and sedition [for, you see, by then a Tory government was in place, such that the Whigs had reverted to their old king-mistrusting ways]), shows how routine yet “controversial” the practice had become by that year. And of course nepotism and favoritism have been mainstays of Anglo-American political life ever since; every prime minister and president has run his government or administration with the aid of one or both practices in the snarling, blood-and-foam-flecked teeth of the opposition party and disgruntled non-picks within his own party. To be sure, one mustn’t categorically dismiss all three centuries of outrage against nepotism and favoritism--also decried under the more general heading of patronage--as so much or many sour grapes, for there are undoubtedly drawbacks to these practices. In a political system notoriously at the mercy of four and five-year election cycles, patronage and favoritism can be horribly disruptive of long-term “continuity of operations,” as when some pal or relative of the newly elected chief swoops in on a bureau or department and peremptorily decrees that “things ain’t what they used to be” and “there’ll be some changes made” in the absence of any effective knowledge of what things have used to be and what changes may need to be made owing simply to his having not been there or in any comparable setting—a shortcoming that can be offset only so far by even the most massive fund of innate talent and conscientiousness in the newcomer. And to be sure, patronage or favoritism can result in the occupation of a position by an unbudgeable complete nincompoop whom no amount of experience on the job will enable to do it competently; and indeed, for most of the two decades of the Whig Supremacy that followed Walpole’s ouster British foreign policy was a veritable “clown show” thanks to the continued occupation of the position of Secretary of State by just such a nincompoop, Thomas Pelham-Holles, the Duke of Newcastle, whose younger brother George Pelham, the prime minister, a reasonably capable and successful follower in Walpole’s footsteps on the domestic front via his occupation of Walpole’s old post of First Commissioner of the Treasury, did not have the heart (or even, in a sense, the right, owing to the formidable claims of rank and primogeniture) to replace him. On the other, more favorable, hand, when wielded by a dispenser with a strong and coherent “vision” and a keen eye for recipients who will be not only loyal but also conscientious and diligent, patronage tends to strengthen “continuity of operations” within the lifespan of a government or administration by ensuring a robust and smoothly concatenating chain of command. For after all, a functionary is more likely to try to do a good job if he knows he’ll be out on his keister if he displeases the boss than he is if he knows he can count on holding onto his position long after his boss is more than figuratively history provided he adheres to a set of long-established and in-all-likelihood permanent regulations (for once in place, a regulation can be nullified only by Parliament or Congress in a process requiring much “coalition-building” and “fine print-reading,” neither of which legislators, being prevailingly aspirant PMs or presidents in their own right-cum-cultivators of their own patronage networks among their constituents, are especially partial to); and complementarily, a president or prime minister can rest confident that his “vision” will be implemented when he knows that his bureaucratic subordinates are eager to please him even at the cost of flouting the regulations rather than to “stonewall” him by obdurately adhering to them. And in any case, as long as the boss is seen by the electorate as doing a good job himself, he will be reelected, such that long-term “continuity of operations” will be secured after all (at least until his political opponents impose term limits on his position, as the Republicans did on the presidency in the hope of forestalling the emergence of a second FDR qua Democratic quasi-monarch). In short, adeptly practiced patronage allows the state to function less like an organism dedicated to its own engrossment and more like a business beholden to its “customers” and “shareholders.” And Walpole was a true pioneer in the practice of patronage-powered statecraft as business-craft, for as Williams writes, “Being himself a first-rate man of business, he looked on his ministry in the light of a business firm, which must have one undisputed head, himself. Thus he gradually eliminated, or sought to render impotent, all who by their talents could have competed with him.” Of course this is written in a tone of “certainty that you will disapprove,” but this is hardly surprising given that Williams was a thoroughpaced Whig historian. “B-b-but how can that be? After all, Walpole was a Whig and indeed ‘arguably’ the biggest Whig of all? How, then can Williams, a Whig historian, disapprove of him?” Well, in the first place, it should be clear from his dates alone (b. 1867, d. 1950) that Williams can’t have been a Whig in the party-political sense because the Whigs no longer existed when he came onto the scene. To be sure, the Liberal Party were but the Whigs rebranded, but I am pretty sure the Liberals didn’t go on being colloquially termed Whigs as the Conservatives have on gone on being colloquially termed Tories. And for all I know (for his online-reference-work of first resort article is silent on this matter) he may actually have been a Conservative by party-political affiliation. But I think it most likely that he was a Liberal, and he may even have been a Labour man, despite his toffish origins and Oxbridge affiliation, inasmuch as he is an awfully thoroughpaced Whig historian and inasmuch as Labour were the most Whiggish of Britain’s political parties at their inception and have remained so ever since—unless one thinks the Communists or the Greens have ever played a substantial role in British political life (and I tend to think that they have not). For, you see, the essence of Whiggism is its opposition to the super-institutional status quo qua supposed obstacle to the appropriately remunerated flourishing of the talents and liberties of supposedly innately gifted individuals (such that, yes, yes, yes: Whiggism conceives of the status quo as inherently “favoritist”), and in being opposed to the so-called class system qua supposed obstacle to the flourishing of the supposed talents of the average British prole, Labour were far more Whiggish than the Liberals, who by the time Labour came along were hardly any more Whiggish than the Conservatives. And as Whiggism continues to dominate Anglo-American political life–as it has done since Walpole’s time despite the occasional supervention of Tory and Conservative governments and their US presidential-administrative counterparts (for political-orientation-wise the Republicans performed a sort of slow-moving half-do-se-do with the Democrats, starting out, as mentioned before, as rebranded Whigs with a radically Whiggish anti-slavery platform and only definitively becoming the less Whiggish of the two parties after the Second World War, when the Democrats “threw under the bus” the “Dixiecrat” contingent of their constituency in the Deep South)—it cannot but look back disdainfully on its earlier avatars as insufficiently Whiggish if not as downright crypto-Tories. And that is exactly what Williams is doing in his snide dismissal of Walpole’s ministry qua patronage-powered business firm, as one sees if one reads a bit further ahead in the passage I have just quoted and considers it in the light of the “overarching” argument propounded by The Whig Supremacy (a light that I shall be civil enough to supply in its proper place [i.e., almost immediately after supplying the just-promised balance of the passage immediately after this parenthesis]): “Thus he gradually eliminated, or sought to render impotent, all who by their talents could have competed with him [so reads the tail end of what I have already quoted], Pulteney, Cartaret, Chesterfield, even Townshend, not to speak of his old opponent Bolingbroke, or even Mr. Pitt, that ‘terrible cornet of horse,’ so that towards the end of his career he had reduced his ministry mainly to a set of second-rate men.” The conclusion of the catalog of potential competitors of Walpole with Mr. Pitt is highly significant, because, you see, Williams regards Pitt—in full William Pitt and a.k.a. “Pitt the Elder”—almost as a secular saint, dedicating an entire hagiographic later chapter to him. In his view, Pitt, the “great commoner,” got Whiggism headed in a truly “progressive” direction by giving voice to and acting on the will of the British people as a whole—down to the very ’umblest rag-and-bone man—rather than merely on that of merchants and country squires, and thereby “set the stage” for all the “great reforms” of the nineteenth century and ultimately for the transformation of Britain into a full-fledged (or, as I would prefer to term it, full-blown) democracy. He even has the effrontery to enlist Samuel Johnson in support of this view of Pitt by lopping off the pivotal end of his bon mot contrasting him with Walpole: “Walpole was a minister given by the king to the people; Pitt was a minister given by the people to the king—as an adjunct.” Williams ends his quotation with “to the king.” His omission of “as an adjunct” misleadingly conveys the sense that Johnson believed that the bestowal of a prime minister by a king on the people was somehow less “equitable” than the bestowal of a prime minister by the people on a king; and that he believed the people had dictated their will to the king in evincing their desire for his selection of Pitt and had expected Pitt to call all the shots of government on their behalf, and in complete disregard of the wishes of the king, once he was in charge of the cabinet. With “as an adjunct” kept in place, the remark leaves us agnostic as to which of the two sorts of prime ministers Johnson preferred or even if he had a preference, for he makes it plain that either way the prime minister had still been merely an adjunct, an adviser-cum-assistant to the king, who retained full veto power over all the prime minister’s decisions and was free to dismiss him whenever he chose, and that the people were “perfectly OK” with this. And he, Johnson, thereby emphasizes most fatally to the Whig historian’s conception of Pitt that the British system of government had not changed to a jot since Walpole’s day, and accordingly that institutionally speaking, Britain had not come a step closer to full-fledged democracy in 1756, when Pitt joined Newcastle’s ministry (and thereby became the de facto prime minister because that spot had been effectively vacant since the death of Henry Pelham in 1754), than it had come in 1741, when Walpole resigned, or indeed in 1722, when he became prime minister. This presentation-cum-glossing of Johnson’s complete bon mot obviously provides great supportive heft to my “global” thesis that the will to become more and more democratic has never defined the Staatsgeist of any of the Anglophone polities, and further supportive heft-bearers of that thesis will naturally follow “in due course.” For the moment I must provide further supportive heft to my “local” thesis about patronage by glossing the final sentence of the passage from Williams, in which he strongly implies that Walpole’s fall was precipitated by his abuse of favoritivistic patronage, that Walpole ultimately fell because he filled the ministry with men who couldn’t do their jobs properly. He strongly implies this, but the very epithet via which he disparages these men undermines the plausibility of the implication. For after all, a “second-rate man” is not necessarily incompetent for a specific job, or indeed, for jobs in general; he is simply a man who is not quite as clever as the “first-rate men” of his time. And for a CEO-like prime minister looking to run his government like a business firm, a second-rate man who is loyal and content to stay in a number-two-or-lower position is probably generally preferable to a first-rate man with his own prime-ministerial ambitions. In this passage, Williams would have us believe that it was Walpole’s patronage of mediocrities that brought him low, whereas all the evidence—including the evidence presented by Williams himself later in the very chapter in which the passage occurs (a contradiction that is neither anomalous nor detractive from Williams’s bona fides as a historian, for as Herbert Butterfield points out in his classic little magisterial hatchet-job on them, incongruity of the inescapable gist of their narrative with the nitty-gritty of their meta-factual assertions is par for the course among Whig historians: “[t]his whig tendency is so deep-rooted that even when piece-meal research has corrected the story in detail, we [i.e., they, the Whig historians {for here Butterfield is employing what I like to call “the ignoble ‘we’,” a ‘we’ that one opts for by way of signifying that the sentiments or practices in point are virtually mandatory or unquestioned despite being contemptibly wrongheaded}]) are slow in re-valuing the whole and reorganising the theme in the light of these discoveries”—suggests that he was brought low by his intense aversion to a war with Spain that he had only very reluctantly initiated. Complementarily, Williams intimates that Pitt righted a British ship of state that had been on a course towards running aground for decades thanks to its insufficiently democratic-cum-meritocratic dependence on patronage, whereas all the evidence—again, including Williams’ own—suggests that until the death of Pelham (who had, incidentally, been one of Walpole’s “second-rate” men) that ship had been sailing quite smoothly along a perfectly safe trajectory. Of course, as I have already acknowledged, Newcastle was a genuine nincompoop who owed his position in the cabinet entirely to the kind and deferential offices of Pelham qua near relation, so there is at least one sense in which patronage did not end up conducing to good governance in the pre-Pitt portion of the Whig Supremacy; but by the same token, one can argue against the Pitt-lovers that Pitt might never have enjoyed an opportunity to become prime minister had a more able man than Newcastle been in Newcastle’s place. And naturally the ever-crescent animus against Walpole in Parliament must have been partly fueled by resentment at exclusion from his patronage network. But it would be presumptuous to assume that all or even most of the resenters were first-rate men; most of them were doubtless third or worse-rate men whose resentment would have been better synonymized as envy or sour grapes rather than as jealousy; in other words, an attitude behind or beneath which there lay no semblance of a conviction that the resenter could have done a better job than the incumbent, any conviction that he was truly more deserving of the position in question himself. And in any case, even the most cravenly self-seeking of the resenters would not have had a rhetorical peg to hang his resentment on (or a rhetorical fig leaf to cover it with) had he not been able to recast his resentment as disinterested dissension from governmental policy, dissension founded on principles of the far-abovementioned sort. So now I have at last arrived at the point at which I both can and must describe how the above-described process of the sharpening, fragmentation, and reconstitution of political principles contributed to Walpole’s downfall. At first, he had quite an easy time metaprincipally speaking, because the only principle-imbued cause that anyone was exercised about to the point of outright anxiety in 1722 was that of keeping George II qua Protestant monarch on the throne, and this was a cause that united all non-Catholic Britons from the most miter-loathing Dissenter to the most incense-smitten High Churchman. And everybody was then quite anxious indeed about that cause. You see, as recently as 1716 there had been an attempt to restore the Pretender that had gotten as far as the beginnings of an invasion, and that had required the assistance of Dutch auxiliary troops to quash decisively, so the Jacobite menace was still uppermost in everybody’s mind. Then, less than a year into his premiership Walpole received a real defender-of-the-faith’s windfall in the form of the discovery of a new Jacobite plot involving scads of men in prominent political and ecclesiastical positions. By ferreting out and arresting all the hatchers of the plot—including a bishop—while it was still in the planning stages, he scored an enormous metapolitical win at little financial and no political cost. And for many years thereafter he managed to remain quite popular at least across the Whig portion of the metapolitical spectrum. But by the time a full decade had passed without so much as a whisper of another plot’s coming to ear, people were naturally becoming blasé about the possibility of a Jacobite invasion-cum-coup. By 1740, the blaséness had reached such a nadir of complacency that during a debate on the incorporation of a smattering of temporarily mustered soldiers into the army, a certain “Patriot Whig” MP (more on the “Patriot Whigs” anon), Mr. Heathcoate (which one is technically impossible to determine, as according to Johnson’s transcription of the debate [or at least the crummy Project Gutenberg edition thereof that I am obliged to use {will somebody out there send me a copy of the pertinent volume of the Yale edition, or at least point me to a library from which I might borrow it in the absence of any affiliation with any university?}] there were at least four Heathcoates in the Commons at the time, but in the light of the vehemence of his anti-Walpolean rhetoric, I am guessing it was George, as the History of Parliament reports that from 4 February 1730 onwards he “was one of the most frequent and violent speakers for the Opposition”) described the Pretender as “a chimerical invader, an enemy in the clouds without spirit, and without forces, without dominions, without money, and without allies; a miserable fugitive that has not a friend in this kingdom,” and the leader of that faction, William Pulteney, termed him a “bugbear” whose reputation as a threat to the Hanoverian dynasty was based on an “exploded story” (i.e., a debunked myth). The trouble for Walpole was that such an invasion-cum-coup remained a real possibility and at least seemed a real enough one to require the permanent presence on British soil of a combat-ready army, lest the country should once again find itself obliged to call on foreign military assistance the next time round. Not an enormous army of hundreds of thousands of men, mind you—just a medium-sized, respectable one of, say, twenty to thirty thousand; one just large enough to make it clear to those Frenchies (for the Pretender was perforce obliged to look for any military assistance to France, where he was residing in exile) that they wouldn’t be able to conquer the entire island with a couple of shipfuls of soldiers as they had tried to do back in ’16, that next time they would be compelled to assemble a full-fledged invading force, whose assembly would be very difficult to conceal and therefore fairly easy to prepare for. You see, truth be told, and as hard as this truth may be to comprehend in the present day and age, when virtually every Anglophone lives within a half-day’s driving distance of a military base of some sort or service, the very idea of a standing army was quite a novel and disagreeable one to most English people of this period. It was novel to them because--well, simply because England (or, perhaps, rather, “Britain” [it is cussedly difficult to know how to name an entity of such ontological and geographical instability as the master polity of the British Isles was at this point]) had never really had a standing army in the fullest sense, even if it had long had one in the technical sense of a ranked organization chart with permanently named and numbered regiments. For until then the established practice had been to allow most of those regiments to subsist on paper in peacetime (during which the commanding officers, most of whom hailed from the titled aristocracy and the high gentry, and many of whom had purchased their commissions, could while away their uniformed hours by playing cards and flirting with young ladies in the drawing-rooms of their civilian socioeconomic peers and superiors), and to resuscitate them as flesh-and-blood fighting units by an infusion of newly enlisted or drafted men only when some major conflict required immediate military action. And the above-mentioned attempted Jacobite coup of ’16 did not count as a major military conflict in the minds of Englishmen (or perhaps, rather, Britons) of the 1720s, 1730s, and early 1740s. No, in their minds the last big war, and indeed the last real war (and indeed, it is frequently referred to simply as “the last war” in the Johnson-transcribed parliamentary debates) was the War of the Spanish Succession, which had ended way back in 1714, with England resoundingly triumphant over France, at least if the PR originating from the Duke of Marlborough’s battlefield career and the Treaty of Utrecht was to believed (and for the most part it was believed). This conflict occupied more or less the same sort of place in the average late early-eighteenth-century Briton’s imagination that the Second World War was to occupy in that of the imagination of the average American of the 1950 and 1960s, with the difference that because there had been no need to “pivot” to a new enemy immediately after it, it was not followed by anything analogous to the Cold War; so while at its conclusion the men all came home and resumed their civilian jobs as butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers, just like their mid-twentieth-century counterparts (a reversion memorably choreographically caricatured in the number “Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army” in the film White Christmas), there was no sense of any need to fill their places in the armed services with their sons, and so no sense of a need for anything like a draft. In these Britons’ minds, in “the last war” Britain had decisively proved that the average Briton was more than a match for the average Frenchman on the battlefield, and there was an end on’t. So this was why the idea of a standing army was not only novel but also disagreeable to them. Howbeit, Walpole was determined to have one, and while raising one proved not to be particularly difficult, figuring where to lodge them all proved to be a particularly sticky wicket (as he himself conceivably may have termed the problem [for cricket was already a fairly popular sport by then]), because in the historical absence of such an army there were hardly any barracks. So the people of the various towns and villages at which the regiments were headquartered had to be ordered to take the soldiers in as lodgers. Most often they were billeted in inns or public houses (if there was any “meaningful distinction” between the two back then) rather than in private residences, and thanks to allowances disbursed in advance to the commanding officers the billeters generally received prompt market-rate payment for their provision of room and board, but they understandably found the mere presence of such rowdy transients quite disruptive. And because this disruptiveness seemed unwarranted in the light of the supposed chimericality of a prospective Jacobite coup-cum-invasion, it naturally led both the people en bloc and a goodly proportion of both houses of Parliament—a proportion consisting not only of all the Tories but also of all the Whigs who had been shut out of Walpole’s patronage network or simply had different priorities—to wonder if Sir Robert wasn’t inflicting this horde on them not because he was actually afraid of an invasion but for the sheer thrill of throwing his weight around and feathering the nests of his lackeys via the numerous exchequer-draining positions and contracts that had had to be generated for the execution of the project. And this wondering naturally furnished ample material for invective in parliament and satire from the press; whence the penning and publication in 1739 of Johnson’s Marmor Norfolciense, a satirical magazine article that framed itself as an antiquarian’s report on an ancient plinth recently discovered in Walpole’s native county and bearing a prophetic Latin inscription (the text provides both the “original” and an English translation) teeming with imagery guaranteed to evoke the government’s supposed incursions on ancient English liberties. The screed leveled its most scurrilous shafts at the billeted troops, describing them as “scarlet reptiles” spreading “rapine and pollution” wherever they went, “rob[bing] without fear and without toil,” and “glutton[in]g on the industrious peasants’ spoil.” (Here it is “worth remarking” and perhaps even necessary to remark that the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 contains a passage that no less vehemently, if a trifle less scurrilously, complains of the billeting of British troops among the colonial people. While I shall not go so far as to assume the American colonists’ vexation was a jot less real or intense than that of their transpondial fellow-subjects of thirty-seven years earlier, given that by 1776 troop-billeting had long since become “standard operating procedure”—procedure whose warrantedness had become generally recognized by the intervening irruption of several proper wars, notably the Seven Years’ War, to the British side of which the colonists [including then-Colonel George Washington] had proudly and illustriously contributed, I cannot help conjecturing that the passage is partly imbued with the spirit of “larping,” that the colonists took a “miserable conceit” in knowingly reenacting the bellyaching of the Walpole-epoch transpondial Britons qua standard-bearers of ancient British liberties.) But rather sooner than later, specifically in July of 1745, Johnson and all the other Pretender pooh-poohers were given a chance to eat their acrimonious words qua dish of humble pie when the would-have-been James III’s far from chimerical son, Charles Edward Stuart, alias Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed in Scotland with a tiny band of fellow-exiles who were immediately joined by a massive confederation of Highland clans to form an army of about 9,000 men that penetrated as far south into England as Derby, 130 miles north of London, by December and that was not decisively defeated until the following February—and only then by a British force heavily fortified with borrowed Hessian troops. Unfortunately for Sir Robert he was no longer in any position to say “I told you so” to his detractors, for by July of ’45 he had not only been out of office for four years but dead for four months. (Whether any of the scarlet reptile-resenters for their part said mea culpa either during or subsequent to Prince Charles’s invasion is, alas, beyond at least my present ken, for Johnson’s parliamentary transcriptions end in 1743, and in my thirty-five years as a Johnsonian I have yet to come across even the faintest allusion to his “in-real-time” attitude to “the ’45” [as the invasion was thereafter popularly nicknamed], either in his own writings or in Boswell’s or any of his other contemporaries’ memoirs of him.) In any event, he had been proved right and indeed had if anything been shown to have been too accommodating toward the anti-standing-army crowd. Does this mean that we should simply regard that crowd as a bunch of “bitter clingers” pathetically yearning for a superannuated status quo ante? Not necessarily, for the quarter-millennium in which such armies have been in place throughout the Anglosphere has shewn that they have their drawbacks. To be sure, the troops are now all housed in barracks, and indeed even further removed from the civilian population thanks to the siting of these barracks on bases, but they still have to go into the adjacent town for goods and services not available on-base, and while their visits undoubtedly “create jobs” for the townsmen and “boost the local economy,” they also frequently occasion social friction, what with soldiery (and the sailory and flyery) still consisting prevailingly of rowdy young men with strong penchants for drinking, brawling, and whoring. (I hear tell that in the other Norfolk, the city in Virginia, the sailors from the naval base there are so strongly despised and resented by the civilians that they are called squids thereby.) And of course there is always the danger that some general will side with a particular political faction and use the troops at his command in an attempt to bring that faction to power, thereby precipitating (and sometimes winning) a civil war. The Spanish Civil war is of course the most famous or notorious such an example of such an employment of a standing army, but the English one was also effectively an epiphenomenon of it (among umpteen-thousand other causes, of course), as the troops who came to form the Royalist army were originally raised to put down a rebellion-cum-invasion by the Scots; and of course the so-called Commonwealth that arose out of that war was in reality a standing army-underpinned military dictatorship. And last and possibly most, there is always the danger that nominally private individuals and organizations that benefit financially from the existence and activity of a permanent military force will agitate for wars as ready expedients for swelling their coffers. President (and ex-General) Dwight Eisenhower made the excessive influence of such individuals and organizations present to the collective mind of the Anglosphere when he coined the term the military-industrial complex, but as I have already hinted it has been a problem all along, and it had evidently become such a prominent one by 1770 that Johnson devoted a passage to its vehement denunciation in a tract written in approval of Britain’s recent narrow avoidance of a war with Spain over the picayune Falkland Islands (an avoidance that has since of course proved to be technically temporary by the Falklands War between the UK and Spain’s colonial heir Argentina in 1982):

[At]t the conclusion of a ten years war, how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes and the expence of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors and whose palaces rise like exhalations. These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich as their country is impoverished; they rejoice when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh from their desks at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.

Walpole, to his credit (I mean, of course, the credit he should have received from the anti-standing army faction, at least to the extent that being a full-fledged hawk is incompatible with advocating for a completely ad hoc army), although eager to help his friends build their palaces and equipages through the maintenance of the army itself, never went out of his way to let them to do so through the profits of an actual war. Indeed, he had little interest in military or foreign affairs and was content to leave foreign policy entirely in the hands of his brother-in-law Townshend for about the first two-thirds of his premiership. And his chief object of governmental interest was always what would now be called economic policy, and he was both actively and productively “interventionist” in all aspects of it. He wanted to make Britain (understood as an economic bloc comprising not only the British Isles but also the North American colonies and Indian trading posts) as economically self-sufficient as possible both through the production of a wide and varied range of commodities for domestic use and the export of an equally wide and varied range of commodities to foreign markets. To this end he granted generous subsidies to promising fledgling industries, levied heavy tariffs on imported goods in industries that he was cultivating domestically, and imposed wage caps in industries in which “invisible hand”-set labor costs were threatening to make Britain uncompetitive on the international market–wage caps that were peremptorily enforced by the local justices of the peace acting entirely at their own discretion. All of this is “worth pointing out” by way of taking the three leading present-day Anglophone right-wing types (the first of whom is wholeheartedly sympathetic with the legacy-conservative faction of the commentariat and and the second and third of whom each straddle their sympathies between the legacy-conservative faction and the modern-right one) down at least a peg apiece. The success of Walpole’s economic policy most obviously “problematizes” the claims of the Friedmanian laissez faire-pushing type simply by being both aggressively pro-business and aggressively “interventionist” in three domains simultaneously. But it also shows up a lacuna or blind spot in the unapologetically “interventionist” “America-first” tariff-boosting type’s outlook. This type seems to take for granted that high import tariffs and subsidies on their own will boost domestic production, but Walpole’s accompaniment of them with wage caps suggests the stimulus to production provided by tariffs will be insufficient if domestic labor costs are allowed to continue seeking their own level. Finally, Walpole’s enlistment of justices of the peace in the imposition of his wage caps flatly belies the claim of the Magna Carta and trial by jury-idolizer (and here I will be so bold as to name a name: the historian David Starkey) that “rule by judges” is utterly foreign to the British constitution, that historically the framing and enforcement of every British law has ultimately been subject to the will of the people, either directly in person through their membership of juries or indirectly through their representation in the Commons. What all three types have in common, however stridently they may differ with each other in the matter of the value of full-fledged democracy, is a resistance to the notion of the State’s or the “elites’” standing in an essentially paternalistic relation to the people (such that, for instance, the “America-firster” is duty-bound to balk at wage caps because they imply that “the little guy” does not deserve to sell his labor at highest obtainable price, whereas he is complementarily obliged to smile on tariffs, because an exporter of foreign commodities is seen by default as a “big guy” or “fat cat”). In Walpole’s day (and in the day of every single preceding leading British or English political figure, whether monarchical or ministerial) such a paternalistic principle was utterly uncontroversial “across the political spectrum.” Walpole’s parliamentary opposition objected to his specific economic policies because in their view these policies unfairly benefited the members of the “ruling elite” who happened to be his friends, but they had no objection whatsoever to their implementation exclusively by members of that elite in the absence of even any informal “input" from the populations on whom they were imposed. So confident were the “ruling elite” of Walpole’s day in their superiority to the lackland-cum-uncultivated majority that they interchangeably referred to that majority as “the people” and “the vulgar” (as in Johnson’s remark “The vulgar are the children of the state.”). It was only at some point in the early-late eighteenth century that “the people” ceased to mean “those of our fellow-subjects who are inferior to us” and began meaning “all of us Britons or Americans.” That point obviously antedated the drafting of the US Constitution, because that document begins “We the people,” and it possibly antedated Johnson’s utterance of his apothegm on Pitt, because the crowd who agitated for the king to allow Pitt to run the government was not composed exclusively of peasants and petty artisans; it included Britons of every rank and station. To work out why this transition occurred is cussedly difficult and probably impossible. One obviously can’t blame it on the French revolution because that revolution hadn’t happened yet (and in any case that revolution was prevailingly a “larp” of the English Civil War), and less obviously but no less certainly one can’t blame it on the American War for Independence because that was a war waged to secure the colonists’ rights as British subjects irrespective of socioeconomic standing (such that there really was no “class divide” between the colonists and the so-called loyalists, Washington, Adams, Jefferson et al. being among the richest and best-educated men in the colonies). I tend to be inclined to blame it on the pan-European population explosion that culminated in Malthus’s notorious immodest proposal for population control at the end of the century. And by blaming the transition on the explosion I do not mean that the “elites” were consciously responding to that explosion, because they were probably unaware of it, because it was only just beginning, and indeed it followed hard on a long period in which the going assumption had been that the population of the British Isles was in steady decline. (That that assumption was at least still hobbling feebly along as late as the early 1770s is evident in Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield’s eponym-cum-narrator’s assertion that he has gone out of his way to sire lots of children by way of doing his bit to counteract the population shrinkage.) I merely mean that the increase in population then began to be materially felt by the elites and sub-elites alike in some fashion or other. (This transition, incidentally, ought by no means to be pigeonholed as yet another epiphenomenon of the so-called rise of the middle class, as by the late eighteenth century that rise, to the extent that it was real [i.e, inasmuch as first, the borders of the middle class have always been murky and redrawable at will, and second, the notion of a middle class is of nineteenth-century provenance, such that to apply it to an eighteenth-century context is whiggishly anachronistic: the term in use for the unrich-cum-unpoor throughout the eighteenth century was the middle station, and it somehow seems residually attached to a providential view of society {as in “this is your station in life,”; i.e., this is where God has chosen to place you in the world}, whereas the notion of class in originating in the science of political economy was secular ab ovo] had been underway for well over a hundred years. Nor should it be reflexively conjoined to or with the “run-up” to any change in the official legal status or privileges of any sub-population. For example, women were not granted the voting franchise until the 1920s, and the possibility of granting them that franchise did not even begin to be seriously discussed until the 1830s [i.e., in the wake of the Reform Act extending the franchise to all adult males], and yet “the people” have always been understood as including women.) In any case, from the present essay’s point of view the transition itself is of less interest than are certain of its infelicitous meta-political knock-on effects. I am thinking here in particular of certain effects associated with the interaction between foreign policy and certain domestic interests. As I have already mentioned (albeit not in quite so many words), in seeking or forming an alliance with a Continental power, a prime minister of the Georgian era always laid himself open to the charge of being more devoted to that power than to Britain, or of somehow putting the fabric of the British constitution at risk. This charge naturally cannot but evoke present-day assertions that a certain president or prime minister has shown himself to be a “stooge” of the leader of some foreign country in virtue of seeking closer relations with that country, and more broadly that the “elites” of the various Occidental polities are more devoted to each other’s shared interests than to the specific interests of their respective polities. But while the eighteenth-century accusation is indeed formally identical to the twenty-first century one, it by no means implies the same underlying state of affairs, and this is because in the eighteenth century the charge was always leveled by MPs in their capacities as British men of property and upper station rather than qua British subjects generically. To be sure, they always concurrently presented themselves as champions of the people in the old-school sense, but they did so from a lofty paternalistic pinnacle, presuming a union of their interests with the people’s interests vis-à-vis whatever phenomenon they were positing as an essence of Britishness supposedly being betrayed by the prime minister’s policies, and the people dutifully fell in line by agitating in support of that supposed essence—whether it was Protestantism or liberty or the unimpeded flow of commerce—and against the prime minister qua supposed traitor in virtue of his betrayal of that essence. Thanks to this presumed hierarchical relation between the MPs and their constituents, the British “elites” were kept tightly “siloed” with the people in an impermeable cocoon of patriotism, such that while it was easy for the average Briton to regard a particular prime minister as a would-be Frenchman or Spaniard, it was impossible for him to conceive of an international cabal of “elites” concerned only with feathering their own international border-transcending nest and indifferent to the welfare of the average Briton, Frenchman, or Spaniard, however real such a cabal might have been (and it always had been fairly real owing to the intermarriages of English and British monarchs with members of foreign dynasties, intermarriages that solidified existing international affinities perhaps even more often than they gave rise to them. And as the matrimonial alliances had been invariably strongly facilitated if not entirely engineered by the princes’ “adjutants,” their ministers, regents, and favorites, they had indeed fostered the nascence of a sort of international “deep state” of proto-technocrats who came to regard the princes they nominally served as mere pawns or studs and prize fillies in a never-ending and ever-friendly game of international chess or international pedigree horse-trading [the 1975 French film known in English as Let Joy Reign Supreme contains a scene that beautifully illustrates the spirit of breezy cynicism that animated this game, a scene wherein Louis XV’s regent Philippe d’Orleans strikes a deal with a delegate of his British counterpart Stanhope {Walpole’s most powerful antecedent in the Whig supremacy} for a Franco-British alliance that each man openly admits will drive his fellow-countrymen stark raving mad on account of its flouting of the Catholic-Protestant divide]). But once “the people” had come to stand for all Britons, or at any rate all Britons apart from the king (as attested by the emergence of “Rule Britannia as an alternative national anthem to “God Save the King” among the Whigs), it became impossible for “elite” politicians not to represent their own interests as directly consusbstantial with those of the average Briton. But as they were then concurrently in fact (or in Commie terminology, “materially”) still principally advancing their own interests first and foremost and still only paternalistically advancing those of their less educated and less wealthy fellow-subjects, the portion of the populace whose interests were advanced by a given politician could not but begin to see their own “socioeconomic subculture” (here the inverted commas are uncharacteristically intended to convey that the phrase in point is my own coinage rather than that it is anachronistic or otherwise of dubious validity) as most essentially “people”-ish and concurrently to see the other “socioeconomic subcultures” and their political champions as un-“people”-ish, and consequently to become cynical about the patriotism of their political class as a whole (vis-à-vis which the other “subcultures” came to be regarded as “fifth columnists”). In short, I am as it were standing the entire “problematic” of “populism” on its head. I am saying that this “problematic” arises “organically” from the de facto and willy-nilly absorption of the “elites” into the populace rather than “inorganically” from the deliberate demagogic manipulation of the populace by certain members of “the elite.” The present metapolitical commentariat would have us—or, perhaps, rather, each other—believe that the present Anglophone super-population is divided between “populists”-cum-“nationalists” and “elitists”-cum-“cosmopolitans,”(one also sometimes hears of a divide between “somewheres” and “everywheres”—i.e., between Anglospheric individuals who are attached to the locales, regions, and national territories in which they were born and still reside by both necessity and inclination and Anglospheric individuals who flit from one city, region, and country to another by financially powered choice), but that is not really true, which is to say that while the terms “populism” and “nationalism” have indeed become dirty words to a massive proportion of the super-population, no member of that super-population, be he ever so wealthy or so lavishly festooned with academic credentials, actually believes himself to be better than “the people” or opposed to the aims and interests of the polity of which he is a citizen. The two (or perhaps more than two) factions of the super-population merely have radically incompatible notions of which segments of “the people” are worthy of sympathy (or, rather, as everyone insists on styling the affective state in question [because such a styling allows one to one-up the possessor of mere sympathy as deficient in feeling], “empathy”) and which ends constitute the best interests of the nation, or which ends and qualities most richly express the essence of the nation. The average “shitlib” does indeed look down his (or, rather, her [for a “shitlib” is always a woman or a man who wishes he were a woman or fancies that he is one]) lorgnette at the average “MAGA”-affiliated “chud” (or, in the British context, UKIP or Reform-affiliated “gammon”), but she supposes that she is doing so not from up in the boxes but rather from down amidst the groundlings, groundlings composed of a combination of under-remunerated “knowledge workers” or “creatives” such as herself (for in the light of the unquellable Anglosphere-wide belief that one’s socioeconomic status is determined by one’s level of income from one’s own labor, it is possible for even the most well-heeled “trust-fund kid” to regard herself as poor) and destitute third-worlders. And consequently, by an irrefragably logical if perverse argument, the “shitlib” believes she is helping the nation fulfill its destiny as a land of “equality” by reveling in its inundation by such “folks.” This is why Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is as likely as Donald Trump to be proudly standing in front of an American flag in “photo-ops.” Such a confused, cross-purposive use of shared terms by mutually antagonistic factions was still mercifully impossible in the Walpole epoch because it was an epoch of liberty without any politically propulsive impetus to equality (in saying which I must make it abundantly clear that I do no mean that wealth and power were less evenly distributed than in subsequent, more equality-minded epochs [for indeed, the empirical evidence seems to suggest the contrary, viz., that the concentration of wealth has been growing at least since the mid-eighteenth century]), but merely that liberty could then be talked about as a supposedly established fact, whereas owing to the just-explicated discursive relegation of “the people” to the lower orders it never would have occurred to anyone of any political salience to discuss equality even as a pie-in-the-sky goal). The rich Whigs were then feeling their oats as free British subjects and therefore constantly treating the word “liberty” like a brand-new toy. Indeed, they seemed to be so cussedly fond of the word that they managed to work it into their discussions of matters to which liberty would have appeared to be entirely irrelevant—France’s geopolitical ambitions, for example. Time and again the possibility of France’s conquest of its Continental neighbors is bewailed in the parliamentary debates, and nearly each time this possibility is presented a threat to the liberty or “liberties” of the inhabitants of the territories in France’s sights; MPs were forever banging on about the need for Britain to intervene in Continental affairs to protect the liberties of mankind from the enslaving genius of Louis XV. I admit that mere spillover of partiality to “liberty” as a lexeme-cum-concept is a rather feeble and implausible explanation of this rhetorical innovation. En revanche, I am quite stumped for an explanation of it that is stronger and more plausible. It certainly made sense enough for a Briton to regard France as a less liberty-minded polity than Britain on account of its lingering acquiescence in absolute monarchy, its absence of an elected national legislative body, and so forth—and of course, merely in virtue of having Roman Catholicism as its established church it was a less free country for Protestants, especially since the revocation of the edict of Nantes way back in 1685. And it also made sense enough to regard France as territorially acquisitive in the light of its military behavior over the preceding century (albeit, perhaps, not to regard it as preeminently territorially acquisitive in the light of Spain’s behavior over an even longer period and in the light of Prussia’s conquestive ambitions from Frederick the Great’s ascent to the throne in 1740 onwards). And so it was entirely sensible to represent a French invasion of Britain as an event that was both not unlikely to happen and likely to rob Britons in particular of their liberties. It even would have made sense to represent a French invasion of, say, Prussia, as an event that would have robbed the Prussians qua fellow-Protestsants of their liberty of conscience. But I cannot work out how it made sense to regard a French invasion of any Continental territory as an event guaranteed to rob the inhabitants of that polity of their liberties across the board, given that apart from the Low Countries and Switzerland no Continental polity was a jot more liberty-minded than France; for after all, apart from those two all the Continental polities were abjectly (or perhaps even blasély or even proudly) subject to an absolute monarch of some sort. In any case, for whatever reason British MPs started representing France in such terms, they did start doing it and thereby set in motion a rhetorical juggernaut that has been in motion ever since. Ever since the 1720s, politicians of the English-speaking polities have been addicted to representing some Continental European power as an “existential threat” to liberty, as a threat to the possibility of anyone’s living freely in any part of the globe. From the 1720s to about the 1850s, their liberty-threatening bogeyman was France, which briefly yielded pride of place to Russia during the mini-epoch of the Crimean War. And when Britain’s inconclusive expenditure of “blood and treasure” in that war in combination with Russia’s lackluster performance therein made rabid Russophobia an impermeably hard sell, the unification of Germany helpfully came along to make that country the new bogeyman, as it remained until the end of the Second World War, and of course Russia has been the bogeyman ever since, first, from 1945 to 1991, qua bastion of Communism, and thereafter (barring, of course, the Iraq-bashing interregnum of 1991 to 2004) qua bastion of “authoritarianism.” So so much, pace our “neocon”-bashing neoreactionaries, for regarding the scapegoating of Russia as a unique and unprecedented epiphenomenon of the “postwar consensus.”

But to get back to Walpole, and indeed to write the concluding act of my “treatment” of a tragedy with him as its hero: the sacred verbal petard that ultimately hoisted him out of office was not liberty but patriotism, and as if Providence (or, if this tragedy must be “framed” as a classic pagan one, Nemesis) were striving to make sure that his downfall were less tragic than pathetic, after years of being lambasted for being Louis XV’s stooge, he was in the end forced to resign owing to allegations of collaborating with France’s far less illustrious junior bugbear, Spain. As I mentioned far above and subsequently illustrated, Walpole’s ruling passion-cum-pet project was British commercial prosperity. Because he was so single-mindedly devoted to this prosperity, he could not help taking a bird’s eye and long-term view of it; he could not bring himself to make any move or enact any policy that threatened the long-term fortunes of the mighty international British commercial machine. Unfortunately for him, few of the chief and immediate beneficiaries of his stewardship, the merchants and manufacturers, were as capable of safeguarding their interests as prudently as he was—as capable, that is, of dealing with disruptions of commerce that were manifestly trivial or transient, disruptions whose elimination or obviation was of merely symbolic import (few if any puns intended). But beginning in the late 1730s, British commerce was beset by a succession of trivial and transient disruptions whose symbolic import could not have been greater—namely, the raiding and capture of their commercial ships by Spanish privateers. By then, commercially as in all other respects, Spain was but a feeble ghost of the mighty empire of Philip II and Elizabeth I’s day. It (or as the old-school historians like Williams [for at least at the level of style there is nothing more old-school than an early twentieth century Whig historian] would say [and as I have already once said in tribute to them], “she”) was continuing to operate in accordance with the superannuated sixteenth-century “playbook” of acquiring and investing as much New World-originating gold as possible. But the mines were yielding less and less gold, and she/it lacked any sort of fleet large enough to transport it in sufficient bulk anyway. And so it/she had resorted to petty thievery, hiring private ship-masters to board and loot British merchant vessels crossing the Atlantic brimful of gold and commodities originating from or destined for their own colonies in North America and the Caribbean. The material economic damage incurred by these raids was minuscule, but naturally that was scant consolation to the underwriters of the raided ships, not to mention the captains and crews thereof and their families back in Blighty (or whatever the nickname for Britain was back then). But the most significant blow dealt by the Spanish privateers was to Britain’s pride as a maritime power, and it was painfully felt and lamented not only by merchants and sailors but also by Walpole’s opposition in the Commons and seemingly a goodly proportion of “the people” as well. For Britain was then competing neck-and-neck with France for transatlantic-cum-trans-indianoceanic maritime supremacy (it was not for nothing that “Rule Britannia” commanded its allegorical eponym to rule the waves), and yet she/it was allowing itself to be bullied by a country that didn’t even have a proper navy. The “optics” of the whole thing were terrible, and so everybody was champing at the bit for a war with Spain that would prove to the entire world that reports of Britain’s formidable sea power were not exaggerated. Of course a sensible yet adequately “patriotic” rejoinder to the warmongers would have been that a showdown with Spain would gratuitously squander military resources that needed to be kept in reserve for a well-nigh-inevitable conflict with France, and Walpole doubtless voiced this objection in camera (or in various cameras—i.e., not only at cabinet meetings but also, for example, in whispered chinwags at that PM’s regular meet-and-greet inscrutably known as a levy), but he didn’t have the heart to voice it in Parliament, and once he had reluctantly started the war he found that he didn’t have the heart to prosecute it with full vigor or even with concentrated attention. Instead of confining the campaign to naval engagements as prudence dictated, he centered it on the attempted occupation of the South-American colonial city of Cartagena (now in Colombia), an operation that came to naught owing to the majority of the would-be occupying troops’ perishing of malaria (as fresh-off-the-boat Europeans were well known to be prone to doing in the American tropics). Meanwhile he failed to provide the admirals spying on the Spanish ports with sufficiently large squadrons of ships, such that one Spanish vessel after another slipped past them and out into the Atlantic and thence almost invariably completed the crossing to America unscathed. Naturally this led to insinuations bordering on accusations that the admirals qua Walpole-henchmen were deliberately allowing the ships to escape because Sir Robert was almost more-than-figuratively in bed with Philip V for some reason or other. He clung feebly, almost half-unconsciously, onto nominal power until February 1742, when he formally resigned from office as First Commissioner of the Treasury, George II having just provided him with face-saving cover by agreeing to “kick him upstairs” into the House of Lords in creating him the Earl of Orford. Not that this saved him from further persecution by his adversaries in the Commons. Indeed, at their very first session after his resignation, a certain James Hamilton, a.k.a. in the transcriptions, Lord Limerick (“But if he was a lord, why was he in the Commons and not in the Lords [why, because he was an Irish lord, specifically a viscount, rather than an English one {working out which lords count as lords for electoral purposes and which ones don’t is incidentally one of the chief delights and vexations of a student of the eighteenth-century Parliament}]) “described [so the History of Parliament Online] by [Sir Robert’s son] Horace Walpole as ‘a pale ill-looking fellow with a bent brow, a whoreson voice and a dead eye of saffron hue…belonging to Lord Bath [i.e., a flunky of William Pulteney, the leader of the so-called Patriot Whigs {I surmise that Pulteney was the actual initiator of the motion and delegated the submission of it to Limerick because he, Pulteney, had just been “kicked upstairs” to the Lords alongside Walpole because George II wanted to make sure he didn’t fill the power vacuum in the Commons left by Walpole’s departure}],” presented a mighty trawling net of a motion with the ludicrously capacious aim of “inquiring into the conduct of affairs at home and abroad, during the last twenty years.” Naturally, the motion had to be framed in such abstract and impersonal terms, but nobody was under any illusions that it was targeted at the ministry in general, that it was not targeted at the former Sir Robert in particular, although only the house’s staunchest and most cantankerous Tory, Sir John St. Aubyn, could get away with pointing this out, thus: “This motion is of a general nature; whom it may more particularly affect, I shall not determine. But there is a great person, lately at the head of the administration, who stands foremost, the principal object of national suspicion.” Nor were Limerick and his buddies merely hoping for the inquiry to result in some sort of ex post facto censure or rap on the knuckles; no, they were hoping to have Walpole committed to prison, as the following passage from the future “Great Commoner”’s contribution to the debate makes clear: “If those to whom the administration of affairs has been for twenty years committed, have betrayed their trust, if they have invaded the publick rights with the publick treasure, and made use of the dignities which their country has conferred upon them, only to enslave it, who will not confess, that they ought to be delivered up to speedy justice?” In the end—meaning the end of that very day’s session—the motion failed to pass, albeit only very narrowly: the votes were 244 “for” and 242 “against,” presumably along “partisan lines”—i.e., with all the Tories plus the “Patriot Whigs” voting “for” and all the regular Whigs voting “against.” Limerick did manage to get an investigative committee formed by the Lords, but its proceedings terminally stalled at the witness-gathering stage, basically because the only witnesses it stood a decent chance of acquiring were petty criminals who would have had to be bought off with indemnity for their involvement in any Walpole-actuated crime, with the prospective result that they would have made up political horror stories about Walpole just to escape punishment for their own offenses. One opponent of the continuation of the committee, Lord Islay (presumably the Third Duke of Argyll-in waiting, the Earl of Ilay [sic] being his title while his older brother the Third Duke still lived [the Dukes of Argyll being heads of the Campbell clan, the Whigs’ and Hanoverian succession’s sole champions among the otherwise wholly Jacobite Scottish Highlanders]) tartly hypothecated an extreme but by no means inconceivable instance of such blame-pinning: “[I cannot] discover…what shall exclude a conspirator against the life and government of his majesty from pardon, if he swears, that in a plot for setting the pretender on the throne, he was assisted by the counsels of Lord ORFORD.” In any case, as early as 1744 all the outrage at Walpole at least specifically regarding his handling of the War of Jenkins’s Ear (as the war against Spain is now nicknamed in condign trivialization) had dissipated because by then Britain was engaged in a full-blown war with France that had made Britons forget all about their comparatively trifling grievances with Spain. And by 1758, when Britain was in the darkest period of the Seven Years’ War, a conflict with France that made the one of the mid-1740s look like a trifling war game, the Tory David Hume found himself compelled to append to his original 1741 “character” of Walpole, in which he had expressed a wish to “see him retire to HOUHGTON-HALL, to pass the remainder of his days in ease and pleasure” (such wishing to see the chief-executive retire permanently to his estate having of course since become a favorite trope of Anglospheric oppositions, a polite formula whose true meaning is understood to be “the stupid bastard has no business being anywhere near the reins of power, the nuclear button, etc.”) the following note:

The author is pleased to find, that after animosities have subsided, and calumny has ceased, the whole nation almost have returned to the same moderate sentiments with regard to this great man, if they are not rather become more favourable to him, by a very natural transition, from one extreme to another. The author would not oppose those humane sentiments towards the dead; though he cannot forbear observing, that the not paying more of our public debts was, as hinted in this character, a great, and the only great, error in that long administration.

So in the end the worst that Hume could find to say about Sir Robert was that he hadn’t been enough of a fiscal hawk. But what president or prime minister has ever been enough of a fiscal hawk to satisfy the cravings of dedicated national debt-slashers? Anyhow, it should go without saying that the entire plot-line of Sir Robert’s final days in office and subsequent rehabilitation foretokens that of every U.S. presidential scandal of the past fifty years if not of the past hundred-and-seventy (for I am but vaguely familiar with the particulars of the Teapot Dome Scandal and Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, but I don’t doubt that they were both primarily politically actuated—i.e., that they involved “abuses of presidential powers” that would have been yawningly overlooked by the scandal-mongers had the presidential shoe been on a foot of the opposite party). The opposition declares that the sitting or just-unseated chief executive has abused the constitution in ways of unprecedented egregiousness (with some “rising star” of the national political firmament supplying the most incendiary item in the list of charges, as one sees in Pitt’s contribution to the debate on Limerick’s motion); a committee is formed to investigate the abuses with much fanfare; either nothing conclusively inculpatory is turned up or only the opposition half of the legislature agrees that what has been turned up is conclusively inculpatory; the chief executive retires from political life more or less gracefully, and a short while later even some of the big guy’s former harshest critics are nostalgically opining that he might after all have been the greatest president or prime minister ever. It is often complained among the so-called dissident right segment of the commentariat that we in the Anglosphere seem condemned to the perpetual reenactment of the political drama of World War II. The truth is that we seem perpetually condemned to reenact the political drama—or perhaps rather comedy or even farce [a word that perforce evokes Marx’s observation, apropos of the 1848 French revolution and its aftermath, that Hegel forgot that history repeats itself as farce the second time around; and for aught I know he may have had the Whig Supremacy in mind as an example of such farcical repetition {i.e., inasmuch as the British of the Whig supremacy period recycled the rhetoric of the English revolutions of 1648 and 1688 to much the same unconvincing effect as the French of 1848 recycled the rhetoric of the revolution of 1789}]--of the Whig Supremacy period. Yes, nowadays Anglophones are perpetually “demonizing” this or that foreign leader as the reincarnation of Hitler or the current president or prime minister as a collaborator with that reincarnation if not as Hitler 2.0 himself. But in these “demonizations” Hitler is ultimately fulfilling the same function as Louis XV or the Pretender fulfilled in the rhetoric of early-to-mid-eighteenth-century British MPs—viz., that of a figure embodying a way of life radically inimical to that of the Anglo homeland and yet somehow also potentially irresistibly alluring to certain influential native sons thereof, and that Walpole fulfilled as the first and most influential of those native sons. The dissident right are also given to complain that the current Republican party is “fake and gay,” by which they mean that its politicians lack the honesty and fortitude to stand by the party’s purported key principles. But the truth is that Anglo politics as a whole has or have been largely fake and gay for going on three hundred years: since the Walpole administration this or these politics has or have been signally characterized by principle-grounded hysterical outrage that subsides so swiftly into an apathy so total that one cannot help wondering—or ought not to be able to help wondering—if the outrage was entirely feigned and if the outraged person or faction ever cared at all about the principles he or they purported to be championing. The “largely” in the preceding sentence is there to accommodate my earlier remarks on the role of principles in the Anglophone political scene, remarks that I am not at this point retracting by so much as an inch. For per those remarks, principles do matter to both sides at each step of the debating path (or, rather, to employ a more apt if regrettably anachronistic metaphor, each flipper or bumper-actuated ping of the ball inside the pinball machine that is the debating chamber), but by the time there is talk of impeachment or legal prosecution of the chief executive, the will to power of the would-be impeaching or prosecuting side has reached such a fever pitch that they are wielding principles with brazen disingenuousness, and complementarily, while at that point the prospective impeachee or indictee is still sincerely motivated by principles, he is no longer in a rhetorically practicable position to cite those principles in defense of his conduct because by then those principles carry no rhetorical weight, as they have been displaced from public consciousness by the principles of the moment. The “Patriot” Whigs argued for a war with Spain qua Catholic power and major impediment to British commerce, but while they did sincerely detest Spain qua Catholic power and minor impediment to British commerce on the high seas, they did not sincerely believe that Spain was a serious threat to the survival of Protestantism in Britain or the prosperity of British commerce on the high seas. And while Walpole sincerely and rightly detested the idea of a war with Spain in the light of Spain’s nugatoriness qua just-mentioned bipartite threat, because everyone else was then affecting to be so riled up about Spain qua that bipartite threat, a war with Spain could not be presented as gratuitous on any grounds. In the light of this scenario, one sees that present-day doves’ citation of George Washington’s valedictory caution against “foreign entanglements and animosities” in defense of their opposition to the “neocons’” drum-beating for war with Russia, Iran, or China is risibly wrongheaded at least insofar as that caution is being presented as organically and distinctively foundational to the American system of foreign policy, for in delivering that caution at that valedictory moment in proto-Ike-like fashion, Washington was merely voicing a dissension from the status quo of a kind that Walpole had been debarred from voicing, for as the run-up to the War of Jenkins’s Ear shows, foreign entanglements and animosities are as Anglo-American as turkey and baked potatoes, and today’s “neocons” are but reincarnated “Patriot” Whigs.

But to revert to my “largely”-free vein: the histrionic character of British political life quickly led to politics being treated as a theatrical spectacle by the British people (“people” in the above-described post-mid-eighteenth-century sense, not in the further above-described residual classical sense). As one prime minister after another was embroiled in a scandal over an apparent mere-pseudo crisis and one war bled into another without seeming to affect daily life at all, Britons began regarding prime ministers and their parliamentary adherents more in the manner of fans of actors or sports teams than than of constituents with any real “skin in the game,” as one says nowadays, and this in turn sometimes led to their developing perverse attitudes to matters of policy, especially foreign policy. One sees evidence of this sub-development in the behavior during the Seven Years War of Monsieur le Noir, a character in one of Johnson’s Idler essays,

A man who, without property or importance in any corner of the earth has, in the present confusion of the world, declared himself a steady adherent of the French, is made miserable by a wind that keeps back the packet-boat [i.e., the boat carrying mail to and from the Continent] and still more miserable by every account of a Malouin [i.e., pro-French] privateer caught in his cruise; he knows well that nothing can be said or done by him which can produce any effect but that of laughter, that he can neither hasten nor retard good or evil, that his joys and sorrows have scarcely any partakers; yet such is his zeal, and such his curiosity, that he would run barefooted to Gravesend, for the sake of knowing first that the English had lost a tender, and would ride out to meet every mail from the continent, if he might be permitted to open it.

And lest the nominal fictitiousness of this example should raise a skeptical eyebrow, I shall furnish a real-life one in the form of James Boswell’s irritation on reading the news that a battle in the American War for Independence resulted in few British casualties [citation needed but unobtainable owing to the present writer’s above-mentioned lack of access to a decent circulating library]. Of course this tendency, including its perverse knock-on effects, has continued with full vigor to the present day. Once a Yank or a Brit has chosen the Democrats or the Republicans, Labour or the Conservatives, as his favorite team, he will cheer at every victory scored by that party and howl with dismay at every victory in the polls or legislature scored by the opposite one, almost in complete indifference to the material character of the policies expected or planned to result therefrom. The Conservative Party since Cameron’s election have been well to the left of Tony Blair’s Labour on virtually every issue, and this has done nothing to stop loyal Labourites from blaming the UK’s every ill on the Tories. And of course we have concurrently witnessed such a streak of metapolitical irrationality on this side of the Pond: Democrats had no problem with the notion of a rapprochement with Russia when it was being forthrightly proposed by Barack Obama; ever since it was first musingly entertained by Donald Trump on the campaign trail back in 2015 or 2016, they have been more rabidly Russophobic than the fiercest Cold-Warrior Republicans of the 1950s and 1960s. And while back in the 1990s, Democrats vituperated Republicans principally as would-be destroyers of so-called entitlement programs like Medicaid and welfare (their bugbear elephant then being the then-speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, who did indeed succeed at placing certain caps on certain of those programs thanks to the traitorous compliance of the Democratic then-president, Bill Clinton [by whom every Democrat nevertheless steadfastly stood in the subsequent presidential election and throughout the impeachment proceedings that commenced shortly after his reelection]), the fact that Mr. Trump has repeatedly promised not to cut such programs and abided by that promise has cut absolutely no ice with them; complementarily, since Mr. Trump’s de facto assumption of leadership of the Republican party, no Republican legislator of any influence has proposed cutting entitlement spending; indeed, that once proud and formidable fixture of American political life, the fiscally conservative Republican (a.k.a. the deficit hawk) is now as extinct as the woolly mammoth (or perhaps even more extinct, if rumors of the laboratory achievements of certain mad geneticists are not exaggerated).

At this point, I somehow seem to have no choice but to get all St. Thomas Aquinas-like by posing a series of enumerated questions one right after the other, thus: 1) Why does this dynamic keep recurring in the Anglosphere? 2) What is it that makes it peculiarly Anglo-ish (nice quasi-synonym-cum-homophone of English that, Anglo-ish?) 3) (or 2a) Why is it not expandable into a general theory of politics-cum-metapolitics, or at any rate, a theory that also explains the politics and meta-politics of Continental European polities? 4) (or 3a) Is there any prospect of its ceasing or developing into a different sort of dynamic?

To cease being at all St. Thomas Aquinas-like by doing my best to answer these questions in sequential order immediately and directly (i.e., instead of starting with an “objection” to Question 1 formulated, perhaps, as “It would seem that there is no explanation for why this dynamic keeps recurring in the Anglosphere”): The dynamic seems to keep recurring owing to certain “lindyish” heritable shared features of our constitutions (here I am employing “constitution” with a lowercase c as it was employed by eighteenth-century writers on politics like Hume and Johnson: I understand it to mean something like “the system, whether formalized or not, according to which governmental power is exerted and politics is practiced” [I assume there is a definition of “constitution” in the governmental-cum-political sense in Johnson’s Dictionary, but I don’t wish to look it up, let alone cite it, lest I should be inconveniently and ultimately inappropriately constrained by it in the way that a literary critic is constrained by an assertion of authorial intention like “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”]) and our shared domestic-political and geopolitical situations. The first and most obvious such feature is the division of our political-cum-governmental life into two parties. This division may be terribly irksome, and it may only roughly correspond to the actual apportionment of political sentiment and loyalty (and, as we have seen, sometimes not even roughly correspond to that apportionment, for the “Patriot” Whigs hated Walpole and his adherents probably even more than the Tories did), but it seems to have been destined to remain in place in virtue of its sheer unbeatable dramaturgical efficiency. And as it antedates the first stirrings of the democratization of the voting franchise by several decades, there is every reason to suppose—contra certain antidemocratic neoreactionaries—that scaling back the franchise by restricting it to, say, heads of households or persons with income or assets above a certain threshold, will do nothing towards effecting a more rational and effective mode of governance. As to the domestic-political features: the concentration of political influence and “culture” in a minuscule number of urban centers has made the division of politics along court-versus-country lines remarkably durable. Of course, the United States has never been as abjectly dominated by a single city as Britain has been by London, but the Washington-to-Boston corridor has effectively functioned as a multi-centered capital ever since the first big expansion of US territorial holdings with the Louisiana Purchase, which made the nation overwhelmingly rural by default. Ever since then, residence in one of the five big cities of that corridor has, like residence in London, been regarded as a sine qua non of political and “cultural” salience and accordingly been looked upon with covetousness or scorn by everyone dwelling outside its confines; whence the inexorable tendency to pooh-pooh every politician of provincial origins as a philistine or, alternatively, to eulogize him as a man of the soil in touch with more fundamental realities than those accessible to effete city-slickers. Of course, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of two formidable provincial so-called Second Cities, Manchester on that side of the pond and Chicago on this, but for all their economic and cultural heft, in virtue of lacking such deeply rooted institutions as the old universities (Oxford and Cambridge both being reachable from London in less than a day even before the advent of the railway), banks, law courts, and so forth, they were cut off from vital patronage networks and therefore doomed never to become full-fledged rivals of the legacy metropolitan zones (and while the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco corridor has “arguably” become a rival to the Washington-to-Boston one, this has only been thanks to Los Angeles’s having started out [yes, I know the town was founded in the late eighteenth century, but it didn’t start to become a proper city until the movie-makers arrived] as an annex of New York thanks to the Broadway-to-Hollywood pipeline of the film industry’s first three or four decades). At an international resolution, both Britain and America have been geographically blessed in being cut off from the rest of the world by water (Britain as an island, the US as a prolate isthmus flanked by two oceans) and therefore encouraged to flourish as naval and commercial maritime powers, meaning, inter alia, to meddle in the military and political affairs of other countries with little danger of serious retaliatory consequences. (And no: neither Trafalgar nor the early part of World War II when “Britain stood alone” nor even the post-World War II era of worldwide vulnerability to nuclear annihilation counts as a serious counterexample, for what matters in this case is the collective “lived experience” of occupation or devastation from abroad as something that has actually happened.) Consequently the entire political-cum-metapolitical system has continuously thrived despite its irrationality verging on downright silliness, much like the celebrated or notorious British sense of humor (of which the American sense of humor, including the supposedly organically Jewish standup patter of the so-called Borsch Belt, is but an offshoot), and for essentially the same reason. “Irony cannot survive the hard bite,” to quote my fellow-Floridian, the “novelist in the southern tradition” Padgett Powell, and neither can histrionic “camp” survive that bite, and so far neither the UK nor the US has suffered that bite. Of course, in my mind’s eye I now picture the reader facing me with arms akimbo and more than figuratively spitting at me, “Are you calling the American Civil War a soft bite? And what about the Great Depression? And the Second World War—yes, yes, yes, pace your belittlement of the ‘Britain-standing-alone’ stretch of it, for I am talking about the whole war, which included the bombing of Coventry, the brutal rationing of basic necessities, and the evacuation of millions of children to places hundreds of miles from their homes.” To which I can only rejoin with shoulders half-shrugging and hands semi-concessively extended palm-upward, “Look, I’m not saying any of those events was a picnic or cakewalk. What I am saying is that none of them was disruptive enough to produce a complete break in the pseudo-drama and the material conditions underlying it, to require restarting everything at Stunde Nulle, to employ the term by which the Germans denote the immediate aftermath of World War II in analogy to the Nullpunkt or (above-mentioned) Ground Zero of an atomic explosion. And in saying this, I have effectively delivered the principal answer to my second question (or second and third questions). For it seems to me that every Continental polity has had several such Stunde-Nulle moments in the past three-quarters of a century--moments that have required the rebuilding of infrastructure and industry nearly from scratch, the redrawing of national borders, the renaming of the polity itself, the radical reconstitution of its government, or the severance and “rewiring” of patronage networks, any one of which changes on its own suffices to frustrate or annihilate an attitude of “nothing ever happens” (to employ the darling catch phrase of today’s neoreactionaries, who of course erroneously fancy this attitude is a phenomenon of very recent origin) among the citizenry. Of course the Magna Carta-thumping conservatives will maintain that nothing remotely resembling the English political-cum-metapolitical system ever could have come into being on the Continent owing to the absence of an English-style “tradition of liberty” there, but as numerous Tory historians going all the way back to Hume have persuasively argued, that tradition was a proto-Whig contrivance of the four decade run-up to the English Civil War, a period wherein Englishmen discovered that they no longer liked being governed like children by a capriciously asserted royal prerogative only now that it was being wielded by a mirthless, unprepossessing Scotsman, and then by his equally off-putting son, rather than by a charming and magnanimous Englishwoman. Had Elizabeth married and left an heir as magnanimous as herself and her father Henry VIII, the most “authoritarian” monarch in European history not to be styled Tsar, the English might have continued thinking of the Magna Carta as irrelevant to contemporary political life, as they had done practically since the ink on the charter’s parchment had dried, and never begun to care a fig about their personal liberties. (Of course it is entirely possible that Elizabeth would have ceased to be regarded by her subjects with the peculiar mixture of awe and affection that imparted such salutary stability to her reign had she married, and God alone knows along what sorts of lines the English’s political self-consciousness would have developed in that case.) Of course, because not all the Continental polities have differed from England-stroke-Britain to the same extent or in the same way, their respective political-cum-metapolitical histories have diverged from England-stroke-Britain’s in different ways and to differing degrees. Like England and unlike every other Continental polity, France has been geographically imposing, stably unified under a single name (and in this last respect it has been even more uniform than England-stroke-Britain), and dominated by its capital for several hundred years; hence, like Britain’s, France’s meta-political life has always been highly theatrical and dominated by jockeying for prestige and influence at the capital or via one’s geographical and social distance therefrom. Germany and Italy, on the other hand, have unified only fairly recently, consequently Berlin and Rome have never enjoyed London or Paris-like (or even New York or Washington, DC-like) dominance; consequently their political-cum-metapolitical history has not been nearly as theatrical as Britain’s or France’s. “B-b-but what about Nazism and Fascism?!! Have any political systems been more theatrical than those two?” Perhaps not, but their theatricality must be understood against the background of at-their-time very recent real polity-wide hard-biting political turmoil (unification in the case of both countries, and unification plus defeat in war in Germany’s case), which hard-biting imparted an intrinsically forced and unstable character to the theatricality: the Germans and the Italians of the interwar years simply could not go through the motions of reenacting a very old yet fundamentally modern political drama for the umpteenth time, whence their employment of theatrical dramatis personae, props, and scenery taken from ancient Rome and its barbarian hinterland. And since World War II political and metapolitical life in both countries has been unrelentingly untheatrical—or, at any rate, to the extent that it has been theatrical, few Italians and Germans have been interested in attending or participating in the performances. Of course the Anglophone “post-war consensus” requires one to attribute this lack of theatricality solely to “never-again-ism,” to the dread of repeating the horrors and atrocities of the Nazis and the fascists, but I surmise that it is at least as up-chalkable, in Germany’s case, to the sheer material Muskelkraft exacted by their self-extraction from the bomb-rubble combined with genuine political friction between the various Länder (that friction being a holdover from the pre-unification era), and, since 1990, the sheer material Muskelkraft exacted by the integration of the former Ostland into the economic system of the FRG; and in Italy’s to the sheer number and lability of political parties and the preemption-cum-permeation of orthodox politics by the “dirty war” with the Mafia. And to return to France: its political-cum-metapolitical theatricality is of quite a different character than Britain’s and the US’s (notably in being dominated by street demonstrations rather than debates in the legislature) for so many reasons that in lieu of tendering even a partial list I shall throw out what I believe to be the most important of them—viz., the perpetual glaring availability of three distinct and irreconcilable Stunden Nulle—the reign of Louis XIV, the 1789 revolution, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s self-coronation as emperor. As to my third or fourth and final question, the answer to it is obviously that the current Anglo-American political-cum-metapolitical dispensation will end when and only when the Anglosphere suffers a truly hard bite. Certainly if there is one point on which all three of the factions of our commentariat would concur it is that we are quite likely to suffer a truly hard bite in the more or less immediate future, but I would be hesitant to add my voice to the prospective chorus of concurrence simply because all the reportage on the prospective hard-biting events is perforce instinct with the current dispensation’s theatricality and therefore unreliable as an “objective indicator” of the likelihood of the supervention of such an event. Is the collapse of the US and UK bond markets in synchrony with the expiration of the US dollar as “the world’s reserve currency” about to plunge us into a pan-Occidental economic depression that will make the Great one look like a single afternoon’s fit of the sulks? Is a bi-continental civil war between the so-called Red-Staters (perchance in alliance with their UK-based Somewhere counterparts) and the Blue-Staters (perchance in alliance with their UK-based Anywhere counterparts) about to erupt and send the entire Occident spiraling into a post-apocalyptic dystopia that will make the one of Mad Max (or even The Road Warrior) look like the Land of Cockaigne? “Search me”—or, rather, don’t search me, Mr. Deep State who is supposedly spying on my every keystroke in search of treasonable “disinformation” that will get me confined to Gitmo or a maximum-security federal prison for the rest of my unnatural natural, or at least until the power grid collapses, setting all the inmates free to plunder and murder their fellow-former citizens along highways of the just-mentioned dystopia. I really don’t know the answer to any of these questions, and such being the genuine meta-epistemological case, until one of these catastrophes supervenes, I am not going to sleep an hour less a night or eat an ounce less meat a day. Mind you, even in this meantime interval—as, incidentally, since circa 1992, when I stopped caring about politics even as a spectator sport--I am not going to be able to get away with admitting that my sleep pattern and appetite are undisturbed by the current political-cum metapolitical scene. Throughout this interval, my fellow Anglophones are going to be badgering me to “take a stand” on this or that supposedly unconscionable and unconstitutional policy newly imposed by the current president or prime minister or newly proposed by some congressperson or would-be shadow president in the opposition party—occasionally explicitly, by thrusting petitions under my nose, demanding that I attend some rally or fundraising event, and the like—but more often than not implicitly, but for all that no less peremptorily, via utterances such as, “Of course, the current administration has already taken the axe to that program” or “Of course, you’ll never be able to claim your pension under the Stuckenschmidt administration [Stuckenschmidt here denoting the name of some person appalledly projected to be occupying the White House or Number Ten four or eight years hence]” uttered in a tone of “certainty that I approve” of the utterance. And so on each of these occasions I am going to have no choice but to shake my head and stamp my foot in feigned sorrow and outrage while rejoining, “Yes, it’s terrible, ever-so-terrible,” lest I come across as a closeted admirer of the bugbear of a politician and his evil policies and thereby permanently alienate my interlocutor (who will more often than not be someone on whose good opinion of me some vital facet of my well-being depends). Fortunately, during every head-shake and foot-stamp I shall be able to console myself with the thought that I am in very good company, and indeed in the very best of company, viz., that of Samuel Johnson. For Johnson came to inculcate the just-described metapolitical habitus in the course of advising Boswell on the matter of whether or not to seek election to the House of Commons:

BOSWELL. 'Perhaps, Sir, I should be the less happy for being in Parliament. I never would sell my vote, and I should be vexed if things went wrong.' JOHNSON. 'That's cant, Sir. It would not vex you more in the house, than in the gallery: publick affairs vex no man.' BOSWELL. 'Have not they vexed yourself a little, Sir? Have not you been vexed by all the turbulence of this reign, and by that absurd vote of the house of Commons, "That the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished?"' Johnson. 'Sir, I have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not VEXED.' BOSWELL. 'I declare, Sir, upon my honour, I did imagine I was vexed, and took a pride in it; but it WAS, perhaps, cant; for I own I neither ate less, nor slept less.' JOHNSON. 'My dear friend, clear your MIND of cant. You may TALK as other people do: you may say to a man, "Sir, I am your most humble servant." You are not his most humble servant. You may say, "These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times." You don't mind the times. You tell a man, "I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet." You don't care six-pence whether he is wet or dry. You may TALK in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't THINK foolishly.'

So there you have it: a “one-stop shop” for dealing with life under a “nothing ever happens” metapolitical dispensation. “Public affairs”—i.e., politics—“vex no man,” neither the spectator “in the gallery” (or in front of the House or Senate floor-mediating television screen) nor the politician himself even in the heat of a debate or committee-session. For all that, everyone makes as if public affairs vex him inordinately. The trick of negotiating this discrepancy consists in treating the feigned vexation as one does every other facet of one’s neighbors’ lives to which one is fundamentally indifferent—viz., through the use of cant, of starkly hypocritical formulas of deference or sympathy (or as today’s cant-lexicon would term it [as hinted above], “empathy”). But one must employ these formulas with great presence of mind, lest through sheer repetition of them one should be duped like Boswell into thinking they denote violent passions and firm convictions; one must keep one’s mind clear of cant even while liberally larding one’s conversation with it day in and day out.

At this point it may seem that I have “tied a bow on” this essay by conveying the argument simultaneously to the present metapolitical moment and to the metapolitical wit and wisdom of Samuel Johnson. But the sad or happy fact is that I have a ways to go before I can consider this essay finished and that I have scarcely begun discussing Samuel Johnson’s thought qua contributor to the just-mentioned ways. For as I said at the beginning, 1) this essay is meant to serve as a guide to metapolitical comportment in all political-cum-metapolitical circumstances (i.e., not merely during epochs of “nothing ever happens” [and as I have perhaps not made sufficiently clear, even during “nothing ever happens” epochs, very real things of a political nature that ought to disturb one’s appetite and sleep may be happening; it is merely that during such epochs the “current discourse” makes it difficult to recognize them, let alone intelligently discuss them]), and en bloc Johnson’s thoughts on politics and metapolitics comprise a comprehensive, coherent, and time-tested theory of those intertwined subjects. Moreover, it is “worth mentioning” that the above-cited conversation took place very late in Johnson’s life, in 1783—in other words, more than forty years after Walpole’s fall and more than twenty years after the accession to power of the first Tory government since Queen Anne’s reign, twenty years that had seen the Tories and Whigs switching the reins of the premiership to and fro to no discernible difference in the quality or character of everyday British life. Certainly by then Johnson was entitled to state “public affairs vex no man” in the durative present tense, but he had after all been a metapolitical animal since at least his penning of Marmor Norfolciense in 1739, and that that work’s satirical protest against the behavior of Walpole’s standing army was grounded in sincere outrage we may soundly infer from the following secondhand anecdote in Boswell’s Life relating to the period of Marmor Norfolciense’s genesis:

He told Sir Joshua Reynolds, that one night in particular, when Savage [i.e., the crazy poet Richard Savage, one of Johnson’s bosom friends during his early years in London] and he walked round St. James's-square for want of a lodging, they were not at all depressed by their situation; but in high spirits and brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several hours, inveighed against the minister [i.e. Walpole], and 'resolved they would stand by their country.'

Plainly in the 1730s Johnson thought that public affairs still gave many a man plenty to get vexed about (even if one cannot help wondering if he and Savage would have inveighed against the minister quite so vehemently or at such great length if they had not wanted a lodging). And even in 1772, in the midst of the “nothing ever happens” epoch, one finds him acknowledging that there are certain circumstances in which public affairs vex enough men sorely enough that an entire kingdom of them will rightly feel inexorably compelled to resort to “regime-toppling” violence: “[I]n no government,” he here remarks to the far-above-mentioned Sir Adam Fergusson seconds after calling him a “vile Whig” to his face, “power can be abused for long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.” Of course this remark invites the question of how tyrannical a government must become in order to provoke the natural and justified revolt of the governed. Johnson clearly did not believe that Britain as governed by George III and his prime-ministerial “adjutants” was in the remotest danger of becoming so tyrannical, because his disparagement of Sir Adam as a “vile Whig” was prompted by the knight’s assertion of the importance of “keep[ing] up a spirit in the people [here, incidentally, is an early use of “the people” to designate the higher orders along with the lower ones], so as to preserve a balance against the crown,” an assertion that Johnson scornfully dismissed as being motivated by “childish jealousy of the crown” and followed with the counter-assertion “The crown has not power enough.” And we can be sure that he did not regard Louis XV’s then-current wielding of the scepter in France as warranting a popular uprising because just before Sir Adam’s tendering of his assertion he, Johnson, rhetorically queried, “What Frenchman is prevented from living his life as he pleases?”, whence we may further infer that he would have been at least as scandalized by the French revolution as Edmund Burke. (Yes, I know that in 1772 that revolution still lay seventeen years in the future, but contra received Dickensian opinion on the run-up to the French Revolution, inside-dopesters on that run-up are in unanimous agreement that the French were freer and more prosperous in 1789 than they had been not only seventeen but fifty and a hundred years earlier.) And we know for sure that he did not regard George III and his ministerial and gubernatorial proxies’ governance of the American colonists on the eve of their revolution as intolerably onerous because in 1775 he wrote a tract defending the practice of “taxation without representation” in direct response to the American congress’s formal protests against the policy on the grounds that the colonists, like all but the small minority of the inhabitants of the mother country with the right to vote, were already “virtually” represented in Parliament. In short—which is to say, upon synthesizing the most constraining attributes of the systems of governments just listed—he did not think the people of any polity had a right to revolt just because they had no direct say in how they were governed or were prohibited from publicly criticizing their sovereign (for as the reader will recall, John Wilkes faced imprisonment as a result of denouncing George III by name in print). As for the list of conditions he seems to have thought justified a revolt, it is not long, but it is substantial. We know that outright enslavement counted as such a condition, because according to Boswell, in 1777, ‘when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, his toast was ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies’”; and in this matter he even put his money where his mouth was to the extent of composing pro bono a speech for the counsel for the defense in a sort of eighteenth-century anti-prolepsis of the Dred-Scott case (i.e. one in which the defendant was a West-Indian slave who had managed to escape from his master and arrive in “free” Scotland and in which the bench [i.e., that of the Scottish Court of Session, a juryless court like the US and UK Supreme Courts] came to rule in his favor), a speech that opened thus: “It must be agreed that in most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed to be the natural condition of man.” The occurrence of “natural” in this sentence “naturally” suggests that Johnson was inclined to regard as inherently tyrannical a fair proportion of the systems of government of modern Christendom (i.e. those of Tsarist Russia and the numerous German monarchies in which serfdom was still legal) and most of those of the ancient world, notably those of ancient Greece and Rome. This is “worth pointing out” specifically as a caution or “reality check” to that sub-faction of the “dissident right” that fantasizes about reviving the entire governmental system of ancient Rome whether in its republican, pagan-imperial, or Christian-imperial form. And it carries weight in such a capacity because Johnson was second to no one of his time in his understanding and appreciation of the literary heritage of the Greco-Roman world. He spoke and wrote in Latin almost as readily as in English and peppered his writings with quotations from Plato, Cicero, and a host of more obscure Greek and Roman sages, but for all that he did not yearn to be an inhabitant of Athens in the fourth century B.C. or Rome in the first century B.C., or even (say, for the sake of therein retaining his Christianity) Rome in the fourth century A.D. He did not yearn to be living in any of these polities partly because their systems of government were tyrannical but also because despite the vast literary corpus they had left behind, vast portions of their systems of life were unknowable and therefore irrecoverable. “We know very little about the Romans” he flatly declares in a 1772 interchange with Boswell, an interchange wherein he intimates that even at the height of their Republican phase, the Romans’ republicanism was not contradictory to their imposition of slavery (something “worth keeping in mind” when we are sighingly reminded by the Constitution-fethisizing conservatives that the founders of the American republic regrettably “did not live up to their ideals”) but rather completely in keeping with the spirit of it: “[S]urely it is much easier to respect a man who has already had respect [i.e. à la the current head of an ancient English landowning family], than to respect a man who we know last year was no better than ourselves, and will be no better next year [i.e. à la a Roman consul]. In republicks there is not a respect for authority, but a fear of power.” Of course to a present-day Occidental this assertion is bound both to be counterintuitive (for aren’t we perpetually told that the worst thing about a monarch is that he can’t be voted out of office?) and to draw a meaningless distinction—the one between authority and power (for do we not term those governmental bodies that must be obeyed on pain of imprisonment—the police, city hall, and so forth—“the authorities”?). But the assertion makes perfect sense and the distinction becomes quite meaningful when one considers that by “authority” Johnson is referring to a quality that has nothing to do with the State. An English grandee derived his authority—i.e., his non-coercive influence over his neighbors and hence his presumption by them of his right to serve in Parliament--not from his established or prospective voting record as a member of the Commons but from his established or prospective effectiveness as an administrator of local affairs in his capacity as head of a family resident in the neighborhood for many centuries. His influence was only incidentally official and grounded in both personal and inherited experience. And not to stray too far from the Romans, it turns out that the attribute of ancient Rome about which Johnson had the strongest misgivings likewise had no official connection with their system of government—and yet these misgivings were so strong that they compelled him to deny the Romans inclusion among the ranks of civilized peoples. For when Sir Adam Fergusson in the above-quoted conversation suggested the ancient Greeks and Romans as entertainable examples of peoples among whom tyranny flourished unresisted, Johnson shot back, “Sir, the mass of both of them were barbarians. The mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing, and consequently knowledge is not generally diffused. Knowledge is diffused among our people by the news-papers.” So Johnson believed that near-universal literacy and an extensively disseminated press were prerequisites of any civilized polity. He did not believe that the general population of a polity needed have any direct say in how they were governed, but he did believe that they had to know how they were being governed in order to become aware of whether or not they were being oppressed, and that in order to know that they had to know how to read and to have ready access to reliable information on their governors’ activities. Of course, in the matter of literacy the reader is likely to protest in classic Whig-indoctrinee fashion that the literacy rate in eighteenth-century Britain was some preposterously low figure like five percent and that accordingly the “overwhelming majority” of Britons were denied access to the newspapers and therefore being oppressed by default, but in point of fact the “overwhelming majority” of even the poorest of them could read and write in English thanks to an excellent patchwork of local parish-run grammar schools, and even the “underwhelming minority” of them who could not knew someone who would do them the favor of reading aloud to them. So that objection, along with any “downstream” assertions that any political system that has not discovered the top-down imposition of universal education is inherently tyrannical, is a “non-starter.” In the matter of the information to be disseminated, there are admittedly a number of questions to be answered: how much of that information did Johnson think it was reasonable for the mass of the people to know? And by what means did he think it should be conveyed from the halls of power to the newspaper-editors’ offices? And how, if at all, did he expect its reliability to be guaranteed (or, to put this last question another way, “To what extent, if at all, did he expect publishers or journalists to be punished for disseminating inaccurate information about what the government was up to?”)? We already know that he was a willing participant in the leaking of the substance of parliamentary debates, but this certainly does not imply that he was necessarily in favor of a newspaper that served as a kind of C-SPAN avant la lettre by providing a verbatim record of every speech delivered on the floor of each house of Parliament and every question and answer uttered behind the closed doors of every committee-room. Equally inconclusive on this matter is a superficially “free-speech-absolutist” sentiment voiced in inversion via the persona of a defender of Walpole’s ministry in the 1739 satirical tract A Vindication of the Licencers of the Stage--“Unhappy would it be for men in power, were they always obliged to publish the motives of their conduct. What is power, but the liberty of acting without being accountable?”—for the formal framing of the tract as an address to a “Patriot-Whig” MP suggests that the transparency here being called for is transparency of the ministry to its opposition within the House (although the use of “publish” intimates that at least a publicly available summary of motives is desired). Even so, in the light of the tract’s global purpose—to protest the ministry’s assumption of the right to approve and disapprove stage plays for publication and performance--we may safely infer that he did not believe that the State should serve as an unchallengeable “gatekeeper” of the dissemination of any sort of printed matter, and this inference is reinforced by the following passage “on the liberty of unlicensed printing” from his Life of Milton (1781):

The danger of such unbounded liberty, and the danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of government, which human understanding seems hitherto unable to solve. If nothing may be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth; if every dreamer of innovations may propagate his prospects, there can be no settlement; if every murmurer at government may diffuse discontent, there can be no peace; and if every sceptic in theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion. The remedy against these evils is to punish the authors, for it is yet allowed that every society may punish, though not prevent, the publication of opinions which that society shall think pernicious; but this punishment, though it may crush the author, promotes the book; and it seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

To judge merely by the ratio of words in this passage devoted to the dangers potentially arising from liberty of the press to those devoted to the dangers potentially arising from the curtailing of that liberty, one might suppose that Johnson took a prevailingly “authoritarian” view of the matter, and indeed he does here seem to lean towards approving of some sort or degree of preemptive censorship, some governmentally actuated means of preventing politically incendiary writings from being published to begin with. But it seems to me that this ratio is more than amply counterbalanced by the sequential pride of place granted to the conviction that power must not always be, or perhaps even must never be, the standard of truth. It is also “worth pointing out” that all the dangerous sorts of publications enumerated here are explicitly presented as conveyors of opinions rather than of mere facts. Presumably, then, Johnson would have been completely in favor of unbounded liberty of the press could the press have been counted on to simply to convey dispassionate accounts of the government’s current and prospective policies, but as these examples shew, the journalism trade of late eighteenth-century Britain was rife with people who were less interested in reporting on what the government was up to than in criticizing or “murmuring” at it as a matter of course, not to mention even more troublesome “dreamers” hell-bent not on merely criticizing the then-current ministry but on introducing “innovations” into the underlying system of government itself. And Johnson was certainly no fan of such dreams of political innovation. We know this for certain because on 26 October 1769, he told Boswell point-blank, “Why, sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.” Of course “laughable” is a much less scary word than “dangerous,” but it is also not a synonym of “harmless,” and the intrinsic laughability of a scheme is no impediment to its being taken very seriously by its deviser and the people to whom he pitches it and hence ultimately no impediment to its eventual attempted implementation. All the same, one must admit that “laughable” is inter alia a synonym of “impracticable,” such that it may initially seem puzzling why Johnson was so apprehensive about the publication of all those would-be innovatory dreamers’ schemes, for if he really thought they were doomed never to get off the ground (if I may be permitted to be so anachronistic as to use the phrase “get off the ground” in connection with a remark antedating the balloon craze of 1784 [a craze into which Johnson himself was swept up despite being nearly at death’s door by then] by fifteen years) there seems not to have been much point in his even “cantishly” pretending to be worried about them. Why, then, does he seem to be worried enough about them to bid fair to lose many an hour of sleep and eat many an ounce less meat on their account? The answer to this question is to be found in an unlikely source, and, indeed an at-first-blush completely irrelevant one, namely a passage in Johnson’s preface to his Dictionary treating of the topic of spelling—on his own editorial spelling policy and on various lately tendered proposals for the reform of the orthography of the English language:

[T]he chief rule which I propose to follow is, to make no innovation without a reason sufficient to balance the inconvenience of change; and such reasons I do not expect often to find. All change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage; and as inconstancy is in every case a mark of weakness, it will add nothing to the reputation of our tongue. There are, indeed, some who despise the inconveniencies of confusion, who seem to take pleasure in departing from custom, and to think alteration desirable for its own sake; and the reformation of our orthography, which these writers have attempted, should not pass without its due honours, but that I suppose they hold singularity its own reward, or may dread the fascination of lavish praise.

The load-bearing principle of this passage is contained in the sternly categorical assertion “All change is of itself an evil”; in other words, change in any setting—very much including that of any political system—is evil—i.e., lacking in any redeeming quality or character of any kind. This obviously means at minimum that Johnson is against any innovations introduced merely on the grounds that the present system is embarrassingly old-fashioned or has gotten “stuck in a rut” or “could use an injection of new blood”; that at minimum he is a proponent of the maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But one quickly sees that there is more to Johnson’s aversion to innovation than this, for he adds that change “ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage.” Evident was a much more forceful adjective than it is now; it meant “obvious” or “unmistakable” and not merely “seeming” or “likely.” So Johnson is saying that one should not “hazard”—i.e., even try--changing anything unless the result of the change is guaranteed to prove advantageous, unless one can be sure that the improvements or “conveniencies” that it will introduce will outweigh the “inconveniencies” occasioned by the thing in its present state. And as the paragraph immediately following the above-quoted passage shews, Johnson extended his proscription of alteration even to entities and practices that were manifestly inaccurate or ill-conceived:

The present usage of spelling, where the present usage can be distinguished, will, therefore, in this work, be generally followed; yet there will be often occasion to observe, that it is in itself inaccurate, and tolerated rather than chosen; particularly when, by the change of one letter or more, the meaning of a word is obscured, as in farrier for ferrier, as it was formerly written, from ferrum, or fer; in gibberish for gebrish, the jargon of Geber, and his chemical followers, understood by none but their own tribe.

“I know,” Johnson is saying here, “that a farrier, a shoer of horses, was originally called a ferrier because he worked with iron, which in Latin is ferrum or fer, and that it would be quite advantageous to readers to be reminded of the connection between the trade and the metal; I know, indeed, that the spelling farrier is apt to cause readers to form erroneous conjectural etymologies (to get them supposing, for example, that the word is derived from far on account of the greater distances that may be traversed by a shod horse), but farrier has become the customary spelling of the word, and so that is how I am going to spell it rather than occasion writers the minimal inconvenience of having to memorize the restored spelling.” This policy obviously evinces a more skeptical attitude to potential innovation even than that encapsulated in that darling metaphor of today’s conservatives, Chesterton’s Fence. G.K. Chesterton holds that if you see a fence standing in the middle of a field, you ought to find out why it was erected in the first place before you tear it down. Johnson more exactingly holds that even if you find out that the fence was erected for an absolutely nonsensical or nefarious reason, you should probably leave it standing anyway, lest you be descended on before sundown by an angry posse or mob of yeoman-farmers or peasants demanding to know why you tore down their beloved fence. And via this image of the angry posse or mob we have, I believe, arrived at an answer to the question why Johnson was so apprehensive about political dreamers: namely, that because although these dreamers’ innovative systems were doomed to fail, they were also bound to occasion a world of inconvenience and disorder in the run-up to their failure. For a sense of just how much inconvenience and disorder would be produced even by the introduction of such a system in the seemingly picayune domain of orthography, we need only consider George Bernard Shaw’s early-mid twentieth-century scheme to render English spelling entirely phonetic. He produced a sample paragraph of English prose rewritten in accordance with the specifications of this scheme: without a scintilla of exaggeration one might say (in the words of England’s first printer William Caxton regarding the English of pre-Norman-Invasion times) that this recasting looks “more like to Dutch than to English.” Imagine what it would have been like to be a civil servant or a journalist or even a greengrocer of ca. 1930, forced to look up the spelling of every single word in Shaw’s Dutchified OED before committing it to paper or signage (although I don’t see exactly how one would have gone about looking up any words in such a dictionary, given that such up-looking requires one to have an approximately accurate spelling ready to mind). And this example certainly gives us reason for joining Johnson in entertaining the notion of preemptively censoring “dreamers”; for Shaw was not merely some rural crank churning out a mimeographed village newsletter from his garden shed but the most influential “public intellectual” of his day, a man with carte-blanche access to Britain’s leading newspapers. To be sure, for reasons about which I can only speculate (my chief speculation being that the “dreamerly” portion of the British “establishment” were concurrently busy trying to to extirpate ninety percent of our language’s lexicon via Basic English and consequently relegated Shaw’s scheme to the back burner or “to-do list”), his spelling-reform scheme never got off the ground (a metaphoric idiom I am of course fully justified in employing in connection with Shaw, who lived not only to learn of the Wright brothers’ first flight but also to be endangered by bombs dropped by the first generation of jet airplanes). But he managed to do plenty of damage through his championing of the supposed social reforms of the god-awful Fabian Society, many of whose baleful knock-on effects we are suffering under to this day.

But even the most obliging acknowledger of the inevitability of such disorder may feel entitled to rejoin, “For all the inconvenience these ‘dreamers’’ schemes may occasion in the short term, are not at least the best of them justifiable on the grounds that in the long run they will result in a way of doing things that is more rational and convenient than the old way?” Johnson’s answer to this question would appear to be an unequivocal “No” grounded in an awareness that the long run cannot be counted on to serve as an even semi-serviceable bearer of the dreamers’ original intentions; that in the longish run the dreamers themselves, viewing the consequences of the implementation of their schemes with disappointment or horror, tend to get cold feet or reverse course; and that in the longer run they tend to be succeeded by disciples or imitators who either forget the scheme’s original purpose or knowingly repurpose it in the light of altered circumstances; such that in the longest run one tends to be dealing with a way of doing things that is at least as irrational or inconvenient as the old way. One gathers that he maintained such a jaundiced view of the long run, and maintained it specifically with regard to politics, above all from the following piece of the “Collectanea,” a miniature anthology of table talk “sourced” from another of Johnson’s amanuenses that Boswell inserted in the Life “to supply” the “blank” of a year, 1770, in which he neither saw nor corresponded with Johnson: “Whiggism, at the time of the Revolution [i.e., the “Glorious” one of 1688] he said, was accompanied with certain principles, but latterly, as a mere party distinction under Walpole and the Pelhams, was no better than the politicks of stock-jobbers, and the religion of infidels.” (It will be observed that here Johnson appears to take a much dimmer view of Walpole than my own and indeed, inasmuch as I have presented Walpole as a man who “fell on his sword” over a certain principle, that of avoiding gratuitous wars, a view of him that directly contradicts mine. And to a certain extent that appearance would appear to be a reality, such that I cannot but believe that Johnson was rather unfair to Sir Robert. In particular it seems to me that as a despiser of gratuitous wars he should have registered some appreciation of Walpole’s affinity with him in this regard. All the same, it ought to be observed in Johnson’s defense, first, that he is taking a highly “macroscopic” view of the latter-day Whigs that considers the Walpole and Pelham ministries as a single unit, and second, that it is worth distinguishing between Walpole as an individual political agent and Walpole as a begetter of general political tendencies that transcended his individual political consciousness and will. For while he doubtless saw himself as solely furthering commerce of the most wholesomely productive type, because his schemes for furthering that commerce were so heavily dependent on borrowing and lending by the government to and from extra-governmental bodies, they perforce led to an increased “financialization” of Britain’s economy and politics, to increased interest [in all senses of the word] in short-term investment on the part of voters and their representatives in the Commons.) This was a devolution of “principles” into “party distinction” that Johnson had quasi-personally witnessed over the course of his own life: the Whigs of his childhood years had retained vestiges of the first-generation Whigs’ principled resistance to the royal prerogative as an instrument of religious tyranny and to the imposition of Roman Catholicism on a Protestant people and had engaged in productive forms of commerce like the manufacture and distribution of goods by way of actualizing their Protestant piety, but by his middle-adult years the Whigs had become knee-jerk resilers against religion en bloc and purely lucre-seeking practitioners of an utterly unproductive form of commerce—buying and selling stocks in companies and governmental projects in whose fortunes they did not have even the most distant or fleeting material concern. But for all his admiration of the original Whigs’ principles, Johnson could not have sympathized with their invocation of parliamentary privilege as grounds for their assertion of those principles, for from his readings in English political history, he knew that the House of Commons had undergone a far more pronounced devolution than that of the Whig party, that, indeed, it had come to serve a purpose directly contradictory to the one under whose auspices it had first assumed political salience. “The House of Commons,” he observed to Boswell, “was originally not a privilege of the people, but a check for the Crown on the House of Lords. I remember Henry the Eighth wanted them to do something; they hesitated in the morning, but did it in the afternoon. He told them, ‘It is well you did; or half your heads should have been upon Temple Bar [i.e., the gate on which the impaled heads of executed traitors were displayed].” It will be seen that the political philosophy implied by these passage is fundamentally incompatible with Burkean conservatism’s notion of the rightly ordered political system as founded in tradition conceived as “a contract between the living and the dead and unborn.” For (per the just-mentioned implied philosophy) by dint of the transformations in political institutions effected by the sheer drift of history, the living will find themselves constantly betraying both the dead and the unborn, will find themselves justifying their political will in terms that would have been or are bound to be outrageous or unintelligible to them. And at least if one holds truthfulness to be a morally indispensable attribute of a political philosophy, one must regard Johnson’s version of conservatism as morally superior to the Burkean version, inasmuch as Burkean conservatism is founded in a fundamentally erroneous “narrative”—the “narrative” that English liberty (since “rebranded” as “democracy”) had its beginnings in the slightly “democratic” assembly of barons instituted by the drafting of the Magna Carta, a body that paved the way for the institution of the House of Commons as a more “democratic” assembly. One must indeed acknowledge that despite being the official political philosophy of Tories and Toryism, Burkean conservatism is a wholly Whiggish political philosophy inasmuch as it conceives of English political history as a process at least initially ineluctably vectored towards the institution of the “reforms” that its exponents prize most highly. It also tends to be Whiggish—i.e., deleteriously innovative--in practice, inasmuch as restoring an institution to its supposed original purpose perforce entails making modifications to it that are to varying degrees incompatible with its smooth functioning as a constituent of what Johnson called “the system of life”—the massive aggregation-cum-network of habituated practices that allows the current inhabitants of the earth to interact with each other in productive and mutually beneficial ways. Much more modest in both principle and practice than its Burkean pseudo-counterpart, Johnsonian conservatism calls for the maintenance of a contract between the living and the living, for allowing people to continue to interact with each other in the ways to which they have become accustomed over the course of their lives—a prescription that seems but bare-bones commonsensical even with regard to Burkean conservatism’s preoccupation with posterity, inasmuch as the living will never get around to begetting the unborn if they are not allowed to get along with one another in the present and near-term future. Perhaps a trifle less obviously, but no less inexorably, Johnsonian conservatism is radically incompatible with today’s neoreactionaries’ calls to restore political institutions to their actual original purposes. One often hears or sees these types mouthing or typing the slogan “The purpose of a system is what it does” (or its ungainly acronym “PoSiWID”) as ironic shorthand for “A system tends to serve a bad purpose directly contradictory to its original good one and this is an outrageous state of affairs that must be reversed.” One hears or sees them citing PoSiWID in connection with, for example, the Social Security system of regular benefits checks for all retired Americans over the age of sixty-five. They will point out that this system was introduced at a time when the average life expectancy of Americans was, say, fifty-five (the figure cited is always implausibly low and thereby revelatory of unseemly vestiges of Whiggism in the citer [i.e., inasmuch as the erroneous notion that average life expectancy has been steadily rising throughout the Occident since the early twentieth century is one of the most cherished myths of present-day Whiggism] and retired Americans tended to be significantly poorer than their still-working compatriots, and that now that life expectancy is much higher and retirees tend to be significantly richer than working people, the system ought now to restrict the issuance of its moneys to impoverished retirees over the age of, say, seventy). Johnsonian conservatism has no place for this kind of argument, for it affirms “The purpose of a system is what it does” unpejoratively. Per Johnsonian conservatism, even the best-heeled multi-billionaires should continue to receive government benefit checks on turning sixty-five until the cows of political doomsday come home, however unjust this may be from the point of view of the original instituters of Social Security. Of course the expression “the cows of political doomsday come home” invites the exquisite corpse-producing termination “to roost”—in other words, it invites the objection that we simply can’t keep financing rich over-65s indefinitely, that sooner or later—and perhaps soonest rather than later—the federal government is bound to default on its debt obligations in the effort to service all those rich pensioners, thereby precipitating a financial-cum-social catastrophe more akin to the Great Potato Famine than the Great Depression, and this is (at least to the present writer’s mind) an entirely reasonable objection and one that suggests that some sort of modification of Social-Security policy in the near term is highly desirable. But it is an objection founded on entirely different principles than anti-“PoSiWID”-ism; it is, in fact, an objection founded on an eminently Johnsonian fusion of the principle of “evident advantage” and the principle of the maintenance of the contract between the living and the living. For the moment (and I mean the quasi-literal moment, the moment comprising, say, the next half-dozen years), per Johnsonian conservatism, the federal government should continue doling out checks to all persons sixty-five and older because such out-doling is fulfilling the well-established expectation of the living to receive a Social Security Check on attaining the age of sixty-five, but if it can be ascertained that the out-doling of these checks will result in a financial-cum-social catastrophe within, say, the next ten years, because such a catastrophe would be an eye-burstingly evident disadvantage and would entail a violation of much more significant clauses of the contract between the living and the living (today’s living, mind you, not the Burkean living of fifty or a hundred years hence) than the one fulfilled in the out-doling of Social Security benefits checks—viz., the clauses corresponding to the expectations that US dollars will be employable in the purchase of basic foodstuffs, that there will be foodstuffs to purchase in the first place, that there will be sufficient electrical power to allow these foodstuffs to be prepared for consumption and keep people from freezing to death, and so on. And from this application of Johnsonian principles to Social Security it is an easy transition to the long-deferred provision of an answer to the question about tyranny in general and its potential actualization in censorship in particular. We may infer that from Johnsonian conservatism’s point of view a government has overstepped the bounds of acceptable interference in the dissemination of news when the people start to notice that it is trying to deceive them about some noteworthy event or to conceal information relating to that event from them, to notice when it is interfering with the degree of “transparency” about current events to which they have long been accustomed. Very recent Anglospheric history is rife with such moments, the most salient (if not ultimately the most deleterious in “knock- on” effects) probably being the US federal government’s politically motivated effort during the “run-up” to the 2020 presidential election to suppress and distort news of the discovery of a laptop owned by President-to-be Biden’s son Hunter, both via successfully applied pressure on social media to suppress the New York Post’s report on the discovery and knowingly false FBI “expert”-delivered testimony that the original tidings of the laptop were probably “Russian disinformation.” Most if not all of these instances of governmental censorship were tyrannical by Johnsonian conservatism’s standards, but whether even the worst of them called for “human nature’s remedy against tyranny” is debatable. For in point of fact, in each case the truth quickly came to generally accessible light in defiance of governmental power. One ultimately did not have to be a subscriber to the New York Post to learn about Hunter Biden’s laptop and to conclude that it was real because news both of the laptop and of the government’s meta- “disinformation” about it was successfully circulated by other organs of journalism, many of them enjoying a far more extensive “reach” than the Post itself, and the same pattern of more or less prompt disclosure has attended all the other instances (yes, yes, yes: as far as we know). In the light of this, one is to some extent inclined to think that according to Johnsonian Toryism’s lights none of them called for breaking out one’s pitchfork and torch, especially in the further light of Johnson’s notoriously partial definition of “Tory” in the Dictionary: “One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England.” The “constitution” Johnson refers to here is Britain’s celebratedly (or, among Stateside Founding Father-fetishists, notoriously) “unwritten” one whose constitution in the other principal sense of the word has never been precisely determined—in other words, there has never been a general consensus on whether the British constitution consists most narrowly in the totality of acts passed by Parliament and signed off on into kingdom-wide law by the King or Queen, or less narrowly of the totality of these acts plus the monarch and Parliament themselves (or, in a different register, of these acts plus the laws promulgated by bodies of smaller jurisdiction like county and borough councils), or much more broadly of all of the above plus certain quasi-governmental organizations and the regulations established thereby. It will be observed that in the definition Johnson implicitly separates the Anglican church from the constitution by devoting a separate, and-preceded noun clause to it, but according to even a narrowly broad understanding of the constitution of the constitution ([sic] on the repetition of constitution) that church is an organic constitution-constituent in virtue of the inclusion of its bishops qua “peers spiritual” in the membership of the House of Lords. (And indeed, inasmuch as at various points in his writings and in his Boswell-reported conversation, Johnson unambiguously treats of clergymen of various ranks as political figures, one cannot but infer that while penning the definition he was tempted to strike the and and replace it with including.) All of this being the case, it would have been plausibly arguable that the British constitution was being violated if, say, the vicars and curates across the realm had been instructed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to preach against some newly passed act of Parliament, or even if some “grassroots network” of vicars had collectively taken it upon themselves to preach against the act; but in the event that such a kingdom-wide ecclesial filibuster had taken place, it would have been no less plausibly arguable that the British constitution was not being violated by the oratorical opposition of the clergy because the Anglican clergy weren’t really a part of the constitution or (in a completely incommensurable “take”) because owing to the influentiality of the clergy on the populace, the law would never be generally accepted as a law. One sees evidence of this ambiguity of the precise boundaries of the English-stroke-British constitution vis-à-vis the Church—and of that ambiguity’s political and meta-exploitability by Britons nominally at the very center of power—in a debate in the House of Lords in February 1743 over a bill for an act regulating the sale and taxing of distilled spirits (which had only very recently fallen under the government’s “radar screen” owing to the wild popularity of domestically produced “bootleg” gin among the working poor [as was obliquely noted during the debate, which includes references to highly taxed “foreign spirits” that one must infer to have consisted of the imported French brandy that had long been a staple potation among the gentry and nobility]). The proposed act, a veritable archetype of the whirlwind of legislation for decriminalizing or legalizing historically “controlled substances” that has swept through the Occident over the past thirty years, was intended to replace an existing law proscribing the sale and consumption of domestically distilled spirits outright. This law had proved so unpopular that it had effectively become a dead letter. You see, the prosecution of the illegal gin-retailers had required the presentation of the sworn testimony of informers in court and in their presence, and whenever word had gotten round that a trial of one of these gin-hawkers was about to take place, a mob of angry poor gin-drinkers would swarm the venue and set the defendant free as he was being led into the courtroom. The judges had eventually gotten so tired of these intimidating and disorderly mini-riots that they refused to hear any cases initiated by the informers, and complementarily, the occupation of gin-narc had eventually become so notorious among the vulgar that nobody would practice it. The bill for a new law stipulated the purchase of licenses for the retailing of the spirits, and the granting of the licenses was to be left entirely to the discretion of the judges. It also just so happened to stipulate that all the revenue from the licensing fees was to be applied to the hiring of mercenary troops to participate in the hawkish new cabinet’s Continental military schemes. And so the opponents of the bill naturally argued that just as under the existing law the judges felt pressured by the rabble to turn a blind eye to gin-hawking, they would now feel pressured by the ministry to grant licenses for gin-hawking with a super-liberal hand. To this (at least to my mind) altogether commonsensical argument, John Carteret, by then back in the cabinet as Secretary of State and therefore effectively in monarchical charge of foreign policy (Walpole’s successor as First Commissioner of the Treasury, and hence the nominal Prime Minister, Spencer Compton, being according to Williams a “nonentity” who deferred to Carteret in all matters), and therefore directly interested in seeing the bill pass, presented an ingenious counter-argument. If, he said, the judges would be bound to feel beholden to the ministry, they would be bound to feel even more beholden to a body of persons with far more clout than any governmental cabinet—viz., the Anglican clergy,

by whose whose counsels [the judges’ conduct] is to be regulated, and by whose admonitions it ought to be reformed; admonitions which cannot be supposed to be without force from men to whom the great province of preaching virtue and truth is committed, and whose profession is so much reverenced, that reputation and infamy are generally in their power. Should the justices, my lords, abuse their authority, either for the increase of the revenue, or any other purpose, what could they expect but to be marked out on the next day of publick worship for reproach and derision? What could they hope but that their crimes should be displayed in the most odious view to their neighbours, their children, and their dependents; and that all those from whom nature or interest teaches them to desire friendship, reverence, or esteem, will be taught to consider them as the slaves of power and the agents of villainy, as the propagators of debauchery, and the enemies of mankind?

In short, according to Carteret, from the pulpit the clergy wielded a degree of “soft power” that was much more influential on the judges’ rulings than any parliamentary act despite not being backed by the officially more forceful power of the law. And the same argument, mutatis mutandis, may be plausibly tendered regarding the various media organizations involved in controversies such as the one over Hunter Biden’s laptop: an argument that they form a part of our own unwritten constitution, of which the FBI is not necessarily a more powerful constituent despite operating (at least nominally) under the auspices of our written constitution; hence, if a critical mass of these organizations declare themselves opposed to any fiat or opinion emanating from the executive branch of the federal government, they can ensure that that fiat or opinion will not be heeded by a substantial proportion of the American public. I own that the meta-argument that I have just tendered bears a striking resemblance to the “new right’s” foremost theoretician Curtis Yarvin’s most celebrated and notorious assertions about what he has semi-felicitously christened “the Cathedral” (I say “semi-felicitously” because a cathedral is after all but a local branch of the Catholic Church, and Yarvin envisages the christened entity as a geographically dispersed entity like the Church en bloc, and further envisages it as comporting itself like a many thousand-headed pope), by which he means the agents of the so-called Deep State acting in hand-in-glove and lockstep conjunction with “progressive”-minded organs of journalism like the New York Times. But my view of the matter differs slightly but significantly from Yarvin’s inasmuch as I would lump such right-wing media organizations as Fox News and the Daily Wire in with the New York Times. And of course Yarvin would argue that these organizations are not really all that conservative and therefore ultimately function as mere “controlled opposition” to the Deep State’s best-laid bad plans, and that may very well ultimately be true, but the fact remains that they at least intermittently “push back against” the Deep State and its mediatic collaborators’ most daring political sallies and therefore at least intermittently function as impediments to the imposition of a nationwide “progressive” consensus. On occasion their “pushback” has even taken the form of extra-journalistic interventions that have blocked exertions of State power in other domains than that of free expression, exertions thereof that were far more readily construable as tyrannical in a Johnsonian sense because they impinged more palpably on Americans’ ability to “live life as they pleased.” I am thinking here in particular of Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire’s appearance, during the long period of lingering “Blue-State” hysteria about COVID, at meetings of a local school-board in Virginia to protest the board’s imposition of mask-wearing on pupils, and its concurrent obdurate adherence to a “trans-friendly” bathroom policy even in the wake of a self-identified male “trans” student’s assault on a female student; and of that same organization’s successful lawsuit against the Biden administration’s executive order excluding non-takers of the COVID vaccine from employment by medium and large-sized businesses. It perhaps does not quite go without saying that in asserting that the “Cathedral” is more politically capacious than Yarvin claims it is, I am not maintaining that we have nothing to worry about—that unduly aggressive exertions of “hard” or “soft” power from one side of the political divide will be automatically checked by comparably aggressive resistance from the other. We Anglophones of the 2020s evidently (in the old-school eighteenth-century sense) live in more genuinely politically fraught circumstances than those of late eighteenth-century Britain, circumstances in which “hard” and “soft” power are exerted with sufficient force and frequency to at least make it worthwhile occasionally entertaining a resort to nature’s remedy, and despite a few troubling tyrannesque gestures by the second Trump administration and its allies at the state level—notably certain attempts to criminalize criticism of the Israeli government as “antisemitic hate speech”—one cannot but concede to Yarvin that the preponderance of such exertion has at least lately emanated from the left. All the same, I am not even slightly inclined to retract my above-tendered assertion that Anglophone metapolitical discourse prevailingly remains as theatrical as it was two hundred-and-fifty years ago, and Yarvin’s presentation of the entirety of Anglophone political history since the late seventeenth century as a vast left-wing conspiracy is a case in point of illustration of this perduring theatricality. To be sure, it seems to me that our political circumstances are much more fraught not only than they were 250 years but even than they were a dozen-and-a-half years ago, when I penned my above-mentioned original apologia for Johnsonian Toryism. In that essay, I argued that while it was perfectly acceptable from a Johnsonian point of view to object to the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay on constitutional grounds—to argue that such detentions violated the ancient constitutional principle of habeas corpus—it was not good Johnsonian practice to adduce as further grounds for one’s protest the assertion that these detentions could serve as a precedent for locking away demographically typical American citizens without due process. Such an assertion, I then argued, counted as cant in the Johnsonian sense because the so-called war on terror was self-evidently targeted like a laser at foreigners of a very specific ethno-religious stripe. The past decade has of course shewn that the US federal government is only too willing to spy on and lock up demographically typical Americans in the name of combating terrorism. So the Gitmo detentions turned out to establish a precedent for repressive political conduct after all. But even though that conduct has been exerted mainly by the two Democratic presidential administrations that have been in place since, it cannot correctly be termed a component of a left-wing conspiracy because the precedent itself was set by a Republican administration, that of George W. Bush. And by a similar token, I cannot in all Johnsonian-Toryish candor regard my lackadaisical attitude to the Gitmo detentions as contemptibly naive because at the time there was no way of knowing that they would serve as such a precedent and indeed no good reason for supposing that they would because there was no good reason for assuming that President Obama would be reelected and that if he were he would find it both politically expedient and politically tenable to target demographically typical Americans as potential terrorists, and indeed from a Johnsonian-Toryish point of view not even “the benefit of hindsight” gives us legitimate cause to assume that either event was inevitable. From a Johnsonian-Toryish point of view, just as Henry VIII’s son and successor Edward VI might very well have survived to his majority and thereby enjoyed an opportunity of being just as domineering towards the Commons as his father and thereby prevented that body from developing into a check on the crown, so Obama might very well have been succeeded by a Republican president who would have kept the war on terror squarely focused on Middle-Easterners and northern Subcontinentals, or in his second term he might very well have found Congress more receptive to his policies (because, for example, the Democrats might very well have become the majority party in the House), and thereupon felt less stroppily disposed towards the Republicans’ voting base, etc. In the light of this confusing political-cum-metapolitical state of affairs, a state of affairs for which the middle-aged and elderly Samuel Johnson’s own time fails to provide us with many obvious antecedents, the best that a Johnsonian Tory can do is vigilantly await the unmistakable prompting of human nature while avoiding getting drawn into the drama of discourse, which means taking care neither to adduce nor heed any arguments grounded in teleological “narratives,” “narratives” centering on the purpose this or that institution or practice was originally meant to serve rather than on the purpose it has come to serve in the here and now.

A bit of dot-connecting and tidying-up is in order before I “land the plane” that is this essay:

1) The reader may have noticed, perhaps to his annoyance at the awkward wordiness of this policy, that in considering the applicability of my cherished political-cum-metapolitical philosophy to present-day phenomena and situations I have consistently employed expressions like “from the point of view of Johnsonian Toryism” and sedulously avoided expressions like “from Johnson’s point of view.” This is because from the point of view of Johnsonian Toryism, the question of what Johnson himself would do were he in our shoes (which he would have found decidedly odd-fitting less on account of their replacement of buckles with laces than on account of their division into left foot and right foot-fitters [for from one of the notes in his edition of Shakespeare we have learned that that division postdates his time]) is not only unethical but nonsensical. For Johnsonian Toryism is first and foremost a philosophy that directs itself towards and concerns itself with the human individual as embedded in a specific historical moment and system of life. It more than figuratively cannot conceive of what it would be wise or virtuous or expedient for a person of undetermined historical situation to do in any undetermined situation. One may safely assume that Johnson would not approve of many of the most cherished institutions of present-day American life because he did not even approve of many of the most cherished institutions of colonial American life of two hundred-and-fifty years ago. Indeed, he thought the entire European colonial adventure in the Americas since Columbus’s discovery of them had been a colossal mistake (a fact that I own is always going to make him a tough sell even to anti-wokesters of the “classical-liberal” stripe). He didn’t even particularly like the American colonists as a sub-ethnos or quasi-Volk, as one learns from a certain table-tirade of April 15, 1778 in which he declared that he was “willing to love all mankind, except an American” and that he would “burn and destroy” the colonists qua passel of “Rascals—Robbers--Pirates.” At the same time, one may safely assume that he would approve of present-day Americans’ efforts to preserve their way of life because for all his disapproval of the colonization of the Americas and the colonists, in keeping with his belief that change was evil, he did not really believe the colonists should be exterminated, or even resettled. He thought, indeed, that they should be allowed to continue flourishing in the New World, provided that they contented themselves with the system of colonial life established and maintained by the British crown and did not seek to tamper with that system by demanding actual rather than virtual representation in Parliament.

2) From Johnsonian Toryism’s equable if grumpy acquiescence in ill-conceived innovations become established practice one ought not to infer that a Johnsonian Tory must bend the knee to every statute and ordinance that has become the law of the land (whether the land is a polity or a language or any other component of day-to-day life), for the absence of such an obligation is a corollary of Johnsonian Toryism’s softly “deontologized” conception of politics, constitutions, and so forth. A Johnsonian Tory is not required, for example, to champion a law that has only very recently passed into the law books, for the mere fact of its passage thereinto does not establish it as a component of the current system of life. The best present-day example of such a law-type is probably the one completely legalizing the use of super-hard drugs like heroin and fentanyl in certain US cities and states. I doubt that even a majority of the people who initiated such legislation and ushered it through the city councils and state legislatures thought that it was a good idea, and the truth is that the use of super-hard drugs is not considered normal even by the most “progressive” among us; it is not regarded by anyone—even the people who directly foster it--as part of our system of life. And so the Johnsonian Tory is well within his rights to raise a completely disrespectful ruckus about such laws, to fulminate against them in the news-papers and even to run for political office on a platform centered on their prospective repeal. To be sure, there are doubtless a few doctrinaire hedonists in the affected polities who have taken to using such drugs simply because it is now legal for them to do so, and there is always a chance, however slim, that their example will be followed by sufficiently large numbers that heroin and fentanyl use becomes a component of the American system of life of twenty or thirty years hence, such that the Johnsonian Tory of 2045 or 2055 may find himself having to argue against the recriminalization of such drugs (I am not trying to be cute or edgy but to limn accurately the conceivable future trajectory of this fallen world, in which the most intrinsically appalling horrors have a tendency to become humdrum quotidiana) on the grounds that insufficiently evident advantage would result from it.

3) From Johnsonian Toryism’s anti-teleologism one ought not to infer that the Johnsonian Tory has no regard for tradition; to the contrary, he has a greater regard for tradition than its anointed guardian, the Burkean conservative, from whom he differs merely in having a different conception of tradition. Tradition for the Johnsonian Tory is simply the aggregate of things and practices that came into being or use many lifetimes ago and have been fortunate enough to survive into the present. It was with such a notion of tradition in mind that Johnson defined a Tory as “one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state.” I own that it is not particularly easy to specify why such ancient things are due such adherence and that to declare that it is due to them as a matter of course is to invite an akimbo-armed charge of being a monster who would have defended the continuation of chattel slavery in the antebellum era and to risk being obliged to affirm that the Whigs and their successors the “progressives” have been on the side of the angels all along for the sake of avoiding consignment to the devils by one’s contemporaries. And indeed Johnson himself, had anyone thought to challenge him on it, might have conceded that his own position on this matter shewed that he was not a pure Tory, for he regarded slavery with abhorrence to the extent of querying “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps of liberty among the drivers of negroes?” in his notorious (at least chez all Burkean “conservatives”) defense of “taxation” of the American colonists “without representation,” Taxation No Tyranny, and (as mentioned above) toasting the next insurrection of negroes in the West Indies. But in the end, it seems to me, the Johnsonian Tory is within his rights to stand firm against such demurrals on the grounds that they are at best ill-considered, that several consecutive moments of reflection will persuade any reasonable person that slavery in its atrociousness is an atypical example of an ancient practice, that most anciently established things remain present in the present system of life for laudable reasons, that they have shewn themselves to work in all sorts of salutary ways; that oblivion is already conspiring fruitfully enough with transient expediency to introduce more change than can be good for any of us without our lending it a helping hand by chopping and changing old things out of mere “childish jealousy” of their antecedence of our personal or collective will. And speaking of collectivity, it seems to me that a more general circulation of Johnsonian Toryism’s attitude to old things will go a long way towards solving that question “Who are we?” that has been bedeviling every precinct of the Anglosphere—and every faction of its commentariat—since at least the dawn of the present century. For per Johnsonian Toryism this question is always furnishable with quite a simple and straightforward reply, viz. “We are the aggregate of people who care about the preservation of a particular old thing or set of old things.” Of course the precise constitution of that “we” will depend on which particular old thing or set of old things is in point. For example, I am quite content to regard myself as a constituent of the “we” of “we Americans” chiefly because the United States has preserved a greater share of the old things of English (or British) civilization than have any of the other still-extant Anglophone polities—notably, the imperial system of measurements, the Fahrenheit temperature scale, and Protestant Christianity as a belief system grounded in the Bible and the writings of its most penetrating interpreters (as opposed to “the Liberal Democrat Party at worship” into which Anglican Protestantism has degenerated over the past century [pace my earlier stricture against pondering what Samuel Johnson would say or do today, I cannot resist wondering whether he, who likened a woman preacher to a dog walking on its hind legs, would regard the present Anglican Church’s retention of ‘the ancient apostolical’ hierarchy of bishops and archbishops under nominal subordination to the king as sufficiently redemptive of its numerous ghastly innovations to warrant his remaining a member of that church rather than defecting to Roman Catholicism or a conservative Evangelical denomination {although in truth, my wondering swiftly perishes in the light of his guarded admiration of Wesley and other leading Dissenters, his frank admission to Boswell that he would make a good Papist}]); and were these old English (or British) things now in better repair in the United Kingdom than in the United States, I would probably be captive to a powerful yen to cross the Pond and seek naturalization as a British subject (yes, yes, yes: I know Brits are now citizens rather than subjects, but it is hard to imagine their clinging to those other old things while renouncing the feudal grandeur of subjecthood in favor of dull republican citizenhood). Of course there are other Americans who regard themselves as Americans because they care about certain other old American things—notably the above-much-belittled fetishizers of the country’s written Constitution; or the valuers of the country as the habitation of the direct descendants of certain Britons who settled here three or four centuries ago. I on the other don’t care all that much about the Constitution or these ancient American families. To be sure, I like them, and I am glad they are still here, but I would not be vexed if they disappeared; nor would I believe myself a jot less American in their absence. For me the real “game changer” would probably be the supplanting of the greatest old thing of all, the English language, as the tongue most widely spoken here. I would derive scant consolation from the swearing in of Miles Standish’s great-great-great-great-great-great grandson as president under the forms of the Constitution if linguistic demographics obliged him to deliver his inaugural address in Spanish or Chinese. Indeed, it is not even inconceivable that in a post-Anglophone US I might develop a yen to emigrate to some polity in which English remained highly valued, and in so yearning I would of course be yearning to cease to be one of the “we” of “we Americans” and to become one of the “we” of, say, “we Indians”—for even now the “elites” of India are more careful and reverential in their use of English—more Johnsonian in their concern to preserve “the wells of English undefiled” rather than embrace every solecism, peasantism. and barbarism with gusto and condescendingly pooh-pooh every gesture of resistance to their willful linguistic slovenliness as “prescriptivism”–than their counterparts in the US and the UK. Needless to say, the task of synthesizing even a minuscule fraction of the myriad “we”s into a larger “we” capable of surviving as a polity, a nation, a “culture,” or what have you would be a job of work that even the most ambitious “dreamer” of schemes of political improvement might find too Heraclean to tackle. Fortunately, Johnsonian Toryism does not address itself to such dreamers; fortunately it addresses itself to reasonable, conscientious, and hard-working yet hard-bitten people obliged to “make provision for the day that is passing over them” as Johnson was throughout the long eight-year period of his compilation of the Dictionary. Consequently, any salutary political influence it is destined to exert will derive not from its “top-down” imposition by policymakers but rather from its gradual insinuation into the idea-scapes of such people, who on being brought by it to “clear their minds of cant” will cease wasting their non-provision-making hours championing and denouncing things old and new about which they don’t care a jot, things whose fortunes and misfortunes have never caused them to sleep an hour less or eat an ounce less meat merely for the sake of not letting down some cause or movement to which they have nailed themselves merely because a tiny planklet of its platform happens to be an old thing that they care about a great deal. Once the number of cant-purged ideascapes has reached a so-called critical mass, perhaps there will be a so-called preference cascade that will ultimately result in a purging of cant from the entire political and metapolitical landscape, such that the myriad “we’s” will be reduced to a mere umpteen “we’s” who, in felicitous contrast to their predecessors, will know exactly where they stand in relation to each other. But now I am starting to sound like a laughable cant-purveying dreamer myself, so I had best leave off here.

THE END