John Stuart Mill called the Conservative Party “the stupidest party,” Barton Swaim reminds us (“The Impossible Insurrection of Jan. 6,” op-ed, Nov. 20). Yet Lionel Trilling, also cited by Mr. Swaim, noted the political advantages of stupidity in his 1952 introduction to George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”:

“Orwell, it may be said, came to respect the old bourgeois virtues because they were stupid—that is, because they resisted the power of abstract ideas. . . . He did not in the least become what is called ‘anti-intellectual,’...

A statue of George Orwell outside BBC headquarters in London.

Photo: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News

John Stuart Mill called the Conservative Party “the stupidest party,” Barton Swaim reminds us (“The Impossible Insurrection of Jan. 6,” op-ed, Nov. 20). Yet Lionel Trilling, also cited by Mr. Swaim, noted the political advantages of stupidity in his 1952 introduction to George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”:

“Orwell, it may be said, came to respect the old bourgeois virtues because they were stupid—that is, because they resisted the power of abstract ideas. . . . He did not in the least become what is called ‘anti-intellectual,’ but he began to fear that the commitment to abstract ideas could be far more maleficent than the commitment to the gross materiality of property had ever been. The very stupidity of things has something human about it, something meliorative, something even liberating. Together with the stupidity of the old unthinking virtues it stands against the ultimate and absolute power which the unconditioned idea can develop.”

The stupid party, in the words of William F. Buckley, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

John A. Maher

Dorset, Vt.