For much of Downton Abbey, viewers are treated with glorious eye candy of British aristocratic life in a mighty estate, robust at first but fading as the seasons progress. What we are not given is a rationale behind the whole cultural structure of the house and the social order surrounding it. This is particularly important for American audiences who know none of this from modern experience.
Over time, particularly after the Great War brought Labor governments to power, some of the workers in the house get restless in “service” and seek out new professions and political systems. Viewers are hard-pressed to disagree with them, even if our sense of nostalgia and affection for the Crawley family elicits a protective sense.
It’s not until the sixth season, episode four, when we get the full theory behind the structures as they exist at Downton. The Dowager Countess is being pushed to turn over control of their own private hospital to a municipal government. Of course all the ‘progressives’ in the family and estate support this move but she is intransigent. Control must remain with the family, she insists.
The supposition is that this is all about her pride, control, and irrational attachment to tradition above good sense and modern sensibilities.
Finally, in the course of a conversation in the library, she lays out her thinking. In a short soliloquy, she summarises 800 years of British history in a paragraph, and elucidates the understanding of such great thinkers as Bertrand de Jouvenel and Lord Acton. It’s the kind of history that is routinely denied to students and has been for decades. It’s a good lesson in political science too.
“For years I’ve watched governments take control of our lives,” she says, “and their argument is always the same: fewer costs and greater efficiency. But the result is the same too: less control by the people and more controlled by the state, until the individual’s own wishes count for nothing. That is what I consider my duty to resist.”
“By wielding your unelected power?” asks Lady Rosamund Payneswick, the daughter of the Dowager Countess.
Ignoring the swipe, the Dowager answers: “See, the point of a so-called great family is to protect our freedoms. That is why the Barons made King John sign the Magna Carta.”
Surprised, her distant cousin Isobel responds: “I do see that your argument was more honorable than I’d appreciated.”
And her daughter-in-law Cora, an American who doesn’t understand what’s at stake, answers too: “Mama, we’re not living in 1215. The strengths of great families like ours is going. That’s just a fact.”
The Dowager continues: “Your great-grandchildren won’t thank you when the state is all-powerful because we didn’t fight.”
Now we know why she cares so much about this one seemingly small issue. For her entire life, she has seen the state on the march, most especially during the Great War, and then the pressure of the state mounted against all the old estates, as they fall in status and wealth year after year, as if by some inexorable force of history.
The Dowager, on the other hand, sees not some Hegelian wave at work but a very visible hand, that of the state itself. In other words, she sees what nearly everyone else has missed. And whether she is right or wrong on the particular matter of this one hospital (and later history proves her correct), the larger point is precisely right.
As the great fortunes of the nobility declined – the very structures that had not only carved out the rights of the people against the rulers and protected them for 800 years – the state was on the rise, threatening not only the nobles but the people too.
Incidentally, this history of freedom is not entirely alien to the American experience either. New history likes to point out with great ire that the prime movers of rebels against the crown in 1776 were larger landowners and businessmen along with their families. They were the Founding families and the main influencers behind the Revolution, which Edmund Burke famously defended on grounds that it was not a real revolution but a revolt with a conservative intent. By this he meant that the colonies were merely asserting rights forged in British political experience (which is to say, they were not Jacobins).
And there is a point to that. The rights-based fervor that birthed the War of Independence gradually mutated into a Constitutional Convention 13 years later. The Articles of Confederation had no central government but the Constitution did. And the main controlling factions of the new government were indeed the landed families of the New World. The Bill of Rights, a thoroughly radical codification of the rights of the people and lower governments – was tacked on by the ‘Anti-Federalists’– again, a landed aristocracy – as a condition of ratification.
The issue of slavery in the colonies massively complicated the picture, of course, and became the main line of attack on the American system of federalism itself. The landed gentry of the South in particular always had grave doubts about Jefferson’s claims of universal and inviolable rights, fearing that eventually their ownership claims over human persons would be challenged, which indeed they were and less than a century after the Constitution was ratified.
That aside, it remains true that the birth of American liberty rested with the U.S. version of the nobles, but also backed by the people at large. So the Dowager’s history of British rights is not entirely inconsistent with the American story at least until recently.
This has also been the prism with which to understand the broad outlines of the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in both the U.K. and the U.S. The ‘Right’ in a popular sense has represented mostly the established business interests (including the good parts and bad parts such as the munitions manufacturers) and tended to be the faction that defended the rights of commerce. The ‘Left’ has pushed the interests of labor unions, social welfare, and minority populations, all of which happened also to be aligned with the interests of the state.
Those categories seemed mostly settled as we entered the 21st Century.
But it was at this point that a titanic shift began to take place, especially after 9-11. The interests of the “great families” and the state began to align across the board (and not just on matters of war and peace). These family fortunes were no longer attached to Old World ideals but to technologies of control.
The paradigmatic case is the Gates Foundation but the same holds true of Rockefeller, Koch, Johnson, Ford, and Bezos. As the main funders of the World Health Organisation and ‘scientific’ research grants, they are the main forces behind the newest and largest threats to the freedom of the individual. These foundations built from capitalist wealth, and now fully controlled by bureaucrats loyal to statist causes, are on the wrong side of the crucial debates of our time. They fight not for the emancipation of the people but rather more control.
With many sectors of the ‘Left’ naively signing up with the bio-medical state and the interests of the pharmaceutical giants, and the ‘Right’ triangulated into going along, where is the party to defend the freedom of the individual? It is being squeezed out in an attack from both ends of the mainstream political spectrum.
If the ‘great families’ have fundamentally shifted their loyalties and interests, in both the U.S. and the U.K., and the mainline churches can no longer be relied upon to defend basic freedoms, we can and should expect a major realignment to take place. Marginalised groups drawn from the older versions of both Right and Left will need to mount a major and effective effort to reassert all the rights forged and earned over many centuries.
These are completely new times and the Covid wars signal that turning point. Essentially, we need to revisit the Magna Carta itself to make it clear: government has definite limits to its power. And by ‘government’, we cannot just mean the state but also its aligned interests, which are many but include the largest players in media, tech, and corporate life.
The groups that want to normalise the lockdowns and mandates – thinking of the Covid Crisis Group – can count on the financial support of the ‘great’ families, and freely admit it. This is a problem completely unlike what freedom fighters have faced over the long course of modern history. It’s also why political alliances these days seem so fluid.
This is ultimately what is behind the great political debates of our time. We are trying to make sense of who stands for what in times when nothing is as it seems.
And there are some strange anomalies extant too. Elon Musk, for example, is among the richest Americans but seems to be a backer of free speech that the establishment hates. His social platform is the only one among the high-impact products that permits speech that contradicts regime priorities.
Meanwhile, his competitor in riches Jeff Bezos does not join him in this crusade.
So too when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – a scion of a ‘great family’ – has broken with his clan to support the rights of the individual and a restoration of the freedoms we took for granted in the 20th Century. His entry into the race for the Democratic nomination has disrupted our whole sense of where the ‘great families’ stand on fundamental questions.
The confusion even impacts political leaders like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Is Trump really a populist who is willing to stand up to the administrative state or is his appointed role to absorb the energies of the pro-freedom movement and once again turn them toward authoritarian ends, as he did with the lockdowns of 2020? And is Ron DeSantis a genuine champion of freedom who will fight lockdowns or is his appointed role to divide and weaken the Republican Party in advance of the nomination fight?
This is the current fight within the GOP. It is a fight over who is telling the truth.
The reason conspiracy theory has been unleashed as never before in our lifetimes is because nothing truly is what it seems to be. This traces to the reversal of alliances that have characterised the struggle for liberty over 800 years. We no longer have the barons and lords and we no longer have the great fortunes: they have thrown their lots in with the technocrats. Meanwhile, the supposed champions of the little guy are now fully aligned with the most powerful sectors of society, yielding a fake version of the Left.
Where does this leave us? We only have the intelligent bourgeoisie – products of the middle class that is currently under assault – that is well-read, clear-thinking, attached to alternative sources of news, and only now in our post-lockdown world has become aware of the existential nature of the struggle we face. And their rallying cry is the same which has inspired the freedom movements of the past: the rights of individuals and families over the hegemon.
If the Dowager Countess were around today, let there be no doubt as to where she would stand. She would stand with the freedom of the people against the controls of the state and its managers.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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The original story was that she described the AfD as a pile of shit.
Her clarification made it even worse, essentially describing a quarter of German voters as flies circling a pile of shit.
This was also widely shared and absorbed as such.
Forget the rest.
How to lose friends and alienate people. Call them flies on a pile of shit. Great work Marie-Agnes.
It’s hardly likely to persuade these ‘flies’ to vote for her. Such utter disdain for the voting public. They deserve to lose.
Communists always behave like this. The German government is essentially a closet communist cabal made up of ex east German commies and younger, new commies. Hitler was a socialist so Germany’s post war trajectory as a socialist hell hole is unsurprising to me. Since Bismarck started state pensions to buy off the socialists in the Parliament, Germany has slowly but certainly headed toward more and more Marxist madness.
I think one of the main reasons the AfD are becoming so popular is because people are completely fed up with the impact of uncontrolled immigration over the years. It’s the regular citizens who feel it and have to live with the effects, after all. Not the ‘elites’ who sit in their ivory towers and never have to experience every day life, rubbing shoulders with the imported riff raff or being victims of migrant crime. I think this article describes the above horrible woman well. These leftards will never acknowledge the evidence which contradicts their delusions;
”There is a camp of those who are clever and cosmopolitan, who to a certain extent embody the higher moral consciousness of society and formulate a socially palatable view on immigration. For example, it claims that only immigration will secure the prosperity of our nation, increase its benefits, ward off harm, and so on. All sorts of magical figures are used to prove all this clearly and objectively.
On the other side is the camp of the ignorant people who do not want to see this. Those who do not have this higher moral consciousness and who are therefore not so insightful in the eyes of the sanctimonious elite. Instead, they ignore the “facts”, oppose progress with hatred and agitation, and are therefore quite rightly politically excluded and marginalized. No one needs to deal with their arguments because they have none.
Beyond the dream world of the former camp, everyone knows what to make of their collective view. The medical assistant in the doctor’s surgery who settles the horrendous sums with the health insurance companies; the employee in the social welfare office who lets his gaze wander over the waiting area; the policeman on the street who tackles the devastation caused by immigration — they all know about the grotesque nonsense that Germany is profiting from immigration.
Pro-immigration advocates dismiss their anecdotal evidence as subjective impressions that are not corroborated by statistics. However, with the new study “Honorable State? Focus migration on the fiscal balance of immigration” by Bernd Raffelhüschen, this is now changing.”
https://rmx.news/economy/migration-does-not-create-prosperity-quite-the-opposite/
Well this is definitely a case of projection.
Is the pile she refers to the German State, its political class or what. Insulting people you want to support you instead of someone else is not a great plan.
Other German politicians have literally called AfD-voters Untermenschen (sub-humans, the supposed Nazi-term for those parts of the population which aren’t really worth having) in the past. Insofar the established German parties go, AfD-supporters have gone over to the dark side and are henceforth enemies to be fought tooth-and-nail. Statements like this are partially meant to emotionalize supporters of these parties in order to motivate them to go voting and partially supposed to prevent losing more of them to the AfD by stigmatizing those already lost in the strongest terms possibly. Lastly, this is also simply a call for vigilante violence against AfD politicians and supporters by the inofficial death squads of the political establishment (this is not a joke — incidences of serious violence against these keep occuring and the establishment politicians not so covertly calling for them know that this is happening and support it, sometimes even openly).
Getting the people to vote for her is possibly not the final solution she has in mind.
At a guess, and looking at the picture I presume she is of the alphabet persuasion.
An honest politician eh? At least she has come clean with her views on her constituents
Either that or she got the memo to come as ‘Geert Wilders’!
Rocking the vampire (Geert Wilders) look.
The FDP stands no chance of winning a mandate in a constituency. FDP-MPs are thus exclusively proportional representation list candidates.
In other words – also rans.
Not really. They usually have between 5% and 10% of the list votes, sometimes falling below 5% and disappearing for a while (parties which get less than 5% of the list vote are legally excluded from parliament) which means they often provide the missing percents to enable someone to form a coalition government. It’s just that they don’t have constituents, not even in the weak German sense. They have an anonymous crowd of supporters distributed all over Germany which often enables them to play a leading role.
Afterthought: This party PR system is really feudal. There’s a small set of political grandees which command huge numbers of individually anonymous and voiceless retainers and the number of retainers is used to rank the grandees who get to make all real political decisions.
These are the same sort of people who warn us that one of the biggest dangers facing us is societal polarisation.
Their lack of self awareness is both amusing and frightening. Frightening because this just isn’t going to end well. Not when it reaches this point.
Their favourite saying is hate won’t win!
The problem with this is that they mean We will castrate your mentally disturbed children. That you hate the idea won’t stop us.
Neo communist spouts insults because it had no solid arguments against AFD.
And the neo-comm is possibly an ex east German communist who pines for the old days, comrades. Wistfully remembering the surveillance, the cancellation and imprisonment of those who did not comply, the kids being brainwashed into dobbing in their parents, the crushing of dissent. Ah the glory days!
What she considers is a “small but important distinction” will be irrelevant to those who support the AfD. She’s just called them flies on a pile of shit.
I think she’s right about “The bigger the pile of shit, the more flies are on it! and she and her “free democratic ” party are the pile of odure that other parties are trying to get rid of.
Deplorables!