The Imagined Thoughts of Randolph Churchill

John Derbyshire reprints this wonderful essay by Winston Churchill, written in 1947, where he recounts a fictional conversation with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who had been dead over 50 years by that point.

If you ever doubted that political views have changed a lot in the last 200 years, this essay does a great job of imagining how a Tory in the 1890s would view the history of Europe in the 20th century.

To pick a line that is straight out of Mencius Moldbug, how's this from Churchill:

'War?' he said, sitting up with a startled air. 'War, do you say? Has there been a war?'

'We have had nothing else but wars since democracy took charge.'

'You mean real wars, not just frontier expeditions? Wars where tends of thousands of men lose their lives?'

'Yes, indeed, Papa,' I said. 'That's what has happened all the time. Wars and rumours of war ever since you died.'

Indeed.

Read it all here.