Champagne Days Are Here Again - A Newport Wedding And The Celebration Of White Privilege

Much has been made recently of 'white privilege' although no one on the Left can define it.  Something about racism, Jim Crow, and faux credentials of worth, but little more.

The idea is stuck in antebellum times when grandees ruled great Delta plantations, and slaves worked the cotton fields.  The grandee was king, overlord, entrepreneur, and cavalier, heir to English royalty, bestowed with its manners, grace, and leisure; and that 'privilege' was passed on to generations of Southerners and  Northerners alike. 

These grandees did indeed come by their vast territories and wealth thanks to inheritance, legacy, birth and breeding; but they were no different than their ancestors, the dukes and earls of England, or their forbears the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons, and native tribal chieftains.  

‘Privilege' was a given, the perks of the ruling class, but noblesse oblige was an ancillary rule in the aristocratic classes of Europe and its colonies.  Giving was a function of getting.  Ruling was a matter of consideration, discipline, and will. 

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette went too far in their assumption of absolute power authority, and for their arrogance were beheaded.  Privilege has its honor and its dishonor. 

The European race from which the first settlers from England came was not unique in its mastery of human affairs - the great Jewish, Greek, Mesopotamian, Persian, Mongol, and Roman empires ruled vast territories with a 'privileged' group at the top.  Such social hierarchies are part and parcel of the human settlements.  Even the most primitive Amazonian tribes have chieftains, lieutenants, priests, and acolytes. 

The Founding Fathers of America were cast in this aristocratic, well-bred, highly civilized European mold.  They had and enjoyed the privilege of position - Jefferson's home, Monticello, was worthy of the finest English manors, and those of Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and Franklin were no different.  They like Jefferson were unashamed, in fact proud of their heritage, its cultural superiority, and had no doubt about their suitability for leadership of the new nation. 

 

The Southern plantation owners were no different.  They were the founding fathers of the Cavalier South, a culture with as great and long a storied history as their counterparts in the north; and they took this heritage and responsibility seriously.  

They ruled objectively over the 'the peculiar' institution of  slavery'.  Slaves represented both labor and capital and thus had to be doubly cared for.  There was no economic gain or benefit in maltreatment or abuse.

As well as entrepreneurial overseers of vast acres of bottom land, these grandees were caretakers of the rich cavalier tradition, one of gentility, manners, and good taste. 

Slavery has existed since the first human settlements when Neanderthals and their Paleolithic human descendants made slaves out of their defeated enemies and bartered, traded, and sold them as economic property.  The slaveowners of the American South were no different, acting out a historical prerogative. Examined through a modern lens they are considered guilty of moral failure, but history is much kinder.

In short, the grandees of the South and the Boston, Philadelphia, and New York aristocrats of the North were continuing the extension of colonial culture. European civilization was the heart and soul of America, its foundational structure, responsible both for its stability and its growth. 

Today this storied history is being derogated and dismissed by progressives.  Colonialism ipso facto is oppressive and racist, and no Versailles, Westminster, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Leonardo can possibly make up for its hatred and arrogant assumption of righteousness. 

Until the election of the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, a man who unashamedly recognizes European culture for what it has been - the fount of art, science, literature, philosophy, and social progress - this meme continued. He recognized the inescapable influence of world culture, and honored it. 

 

The dynasties of China and the shogunates of Japan have been as influential in contributing to the extension of civilizational values to the rest of the world.  Confucian values of temperance, discipline, honor, respect, and fidelity have been at the very heart of all civilized governance. 

Our American culture is a product, then, of Greece and Rome, medieval and Renaissance Europe, the Enlightenment, and the Confucian cultures of the East.  

There are no Africans on a list of historical heroes, no Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Caesar Augustus, Henry VIII or the Sun King.

Quincy Davenport was to marry Elizabeth Harper Lancaster in a union of two of the most prominent Boston families in American history.  John Davenport, original member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founder of New Haven, and instrumental in the founding of Yale University, was Quincy's forbear; and the Lancasters had been prominent land developers in Tidewater Virginia owning vast territories in the Northern Neck. 

The wedding was featured in every important New England newspaper, and would be attended by the best families of the region and by the President himself.  'Champagne days are here again', he said to the press before boarding Air Force One, 'and we should be proud'. 

The Left howled with outrage. This wedding symbolized the very thing they had been fighting against for years - white privilege - and here the leader of the nation was glorifying it, raising it to the ethos of the land. 

The wedding was magnificent in only the way an old New England aristocratic, white Anglo-Saxon marriage could be.  There were no ice sculptures, no glitzy, sequined barnstormers, no tarted up matrons, no excess, no plastic, no jazz.  Only oak, teak, and mahogany, polished silver, Spode, and Baccarat, high fashion, elegance, sophistication, manners, and yes, privilege...simply oozing with it. 

'A dying breed...a welcomed swan song...the end of a malignant era...the final gasp of an era...' were the editorial comments from the Left; but Americans even those of modest means and aspirations, applauded.  The wedding symbolized the end of 'diversity', the glorification of color, the affirmative assumption of black 'essentiality', the generational importance of 'inclusivity'.  It was a reversion to white supremacy, privilege, oppression, and racism. 

'Bullshit', said the President. 'Nothing of the kind'.  The marriage of young descendants of two of America's premier families, a union of importance and note, not privilege was to be honored.  'We are back', concluded the President, leaving interpretation to his critics. 

We hope that the Davenport-Lancasters will lead a happy, productive life, and that their children and grandchildren will prosper.  They should, after all, as legatees of a storied European-American aristocratic tradition.