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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
No matter what anyone thinks of his politics, I hope that we can at least respect his family and his life during this time of grief that they are experiencing.
On a more cynical note, though, I wonder how long it will take McCain to claim that he is a card-carrying member of the "Buckley Revolution," the way the Republican candidates did with Reagan.
I don't agree with all his opinions, but the ones that I've read were generally stated with honesty, an approach that is entirely extinct among today's so-called conservatives.
This one part of the obit I hope is prescient:
Buckley biggest achievement was revitalizing conservatism at a time when it had been marginalized in the United States for decades, since conservatives had opposed Roosevelt's New Deal and advocated isolationism before the U.S. entry into World War II.
If conservatives were marginalized for being on the wrong side regarding the New Deal and WW2, I sure hope they're marginalized for being on the wrong side of Iraq, the Constitution, and the general approach to terrorism.
In response to Holly Golightly's prediction that McCain will claim membership of Buckley's Revolution, Buckley's dead corpse is currently being cleaned up and dressed nicely, to appear as a campaign prop for the next 2 news cycles. Cue in 5-4-3...
This is going off on a tangent, but I'm glad you mentioned that conservatives were isolationist before World War II, and in fact they adamantly opposed involved any US involvement until Pearl Harbor. By contrast, it was the left that kept saying fascism and nazism were major threats that needed to be actively opposed. This is not only forgotten generally, but the opposite is assumed as those against bombing someone at every opportunity are denounced as the sort of people who would have said D-Day was too hard and given up. Buckley knew better, but his ideological heirs don't, and actively misinform the public in their pro-war propaganda.
With Buckley gone, I sense that sort of moderating influence (for what it was worth) on American conservatism is now gone. Or there was at least the pretense of intellectual gravitas in his influence. I recall that The National Review did have the good sense to fire Ann Coulter, although I don't actually know if that was Buckley's work or someone else's.
At any rate, he's gone now, and it will be interesting to see whether the Right gets even crazier than it is now, or whether it will awaken before it goes much further down the road to self-destruction.
Buckley was an odd duck--a devout Catholic who rejected much of what Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II had to say. A fanatical defender of liberty who had little time for freedom of expression or the rights of the accused. He said one thing that always impressed me. When asked why so many well educated people like scientists and academics were liberal, he said that it was not in spite of their intelligence, but because of it. As smart people, they thought that problems were solvable. The genius of conservatives, however, he thought, was that they understood that most people were not that bright and all suffered from Original Sin, and therefore all those brilliant people with their clever ideas for social betterment were flying in the face of human nature and bound to fail. I don't necessarily agree, but it provides food for thought.
He also wrote two of the most disgusting columns I've ever read. One called for the forcible branding or tattooing of people with AIDS. The other was a dance of the grave of assassinated Swedish Prime Minister Palme, a man whose deep commitment to socialism and opposition to the Vietnam War earned Buckley's savage contempt--he was positively gleeful when he got murdered.
I rarely agreed with much that Buckley had to say, though I always respected the manner in which he said it. His articulate appeals on the part of the right are probably one of the things that kept me from developing into a full blown leftist moonbat, allowing me to see that there were good points to be made on all sides. His arguments were better structured and more closely related to reality than just about any of his ilk. Who knows what kind of frothing irrational beast The National Review will become without him around?
When I heard Buckley died, I thought of that TNR article from last year about the National Review Cruise, where crazed right wing lunatics spend thousands of dollars to hang out with the lunatics they read in the National Review. Buckley was the one who was pointing out how crazy guys like Podhoretz sound, yet the audience was cheering on Norm while calling Buckley old and senile.
I would say that it is sad that Buckley is the sane one in this movement, but then I remember he built the movement. Perhaps there is some justice in that he lived long enough to see the beginning of the end of his brand of conservatism, as it turned into little more than rampant paranoia, anti-intellectualism, warmongering, and the raw lust of power for power's sake.
RIP.
Oddly, Buckley's demise is very symbolic of the plight of today's reactionary movement. Buckley was always an intellectual, and while he paved the way for the think-tank and right-wing foundation reactionaries that intellectually buttressed the modern GOP, the Intellectual Right seem to be more marginalized by the anti-intellectual Right majority, like princesses captive in their ivory towers, surrounded by the mongrel hordes they've roused.
The Right today has grown toxic in its hostility to science, education, intellectualism. The roots of that animosity go deep, but Buckley was increasingly an anachronism, given where the dominant power of the GOP resides today. If not for their saturation in the mainstream gliberal media, the think-tankers of the reactionary movement would have no reliable soapbox. They still get called in as policy experts, but within the GOP, it almost seems like the Right's a headless monster, animated by the ideas of Buckley and his peers, but having slipped loose of its bonds long ago, careening heedlessly (and headlessly) toward a future it cannot comprehend.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
