William F. Buckley has died

First conservatism died. Now this.

Is there anybody now left on the right that isn’t an intellectual dwarf, a mendacious con-man a la Larry Kudlow, or plain nuts? The extinction of the last light on the darkling plain of Bush era conservatism is all the more sad in that the conservative juniors – all of them GOP bagboys, now – really, really despised the old man.

Among Buckley’s many sins: he gave us U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman.

I vaguely recall that Mike Harrington once dubbed Buckley “the genteel front-man for fascism in America” (or words to that effect), though Harrington later expressed some regret for the harsh characterization. Alas, Google fails to turn up a confirming cite for my hazy memory.

As I understood it, _God and Man at Yale_ was one long fantasy about converting one’s enemies via a elite universities and one long lament about how as things presently stood, elite universities were converting students to the wrong (godless socialist) side.

Buckley was undeniably smarter than many contemporary conservatives, but he did *not* take a laid-back view that some people are conservative and some liberal and that’s that. He could have advocated conservatives setting up their own universities (like Patrick Henry), but instead wanted to capture the (lapsed, in his view) ones already going and harness them to the ends of his side.

Hugh Kenner was a very good friend of Buckley’s. That surprised me, but made reading Kenner more interesting. Kenner was also a very early tech geek — he was mostly deaf and tinkered with various electronic ways of compensating for that.

I was never a Bill Buckley person; I started my political journey (though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time) away from the lock-step Republicanism of my parents in the early 80s, and my thinker of choice was George Will. I read everything I could get my hands on by the guy. One birthday, though, I received as a gift one of Buckley’s essay collections–Right Reason, if I recall correctly. I found it light, filled with deft, insouciant swings between harsh invective and complete flights of fancy: none of the moral rigor and demanding prose I found in Will’s essays. “Ah, this man lives for boating jaunts and ski trips,” I thought, and I couldn’t take him much seriously after that.

It was only years later, and long after I realized that I’d only stayed “conservative” in my own peculiar, heavily philosophical way, that I came to appreciate Buckley. Will, in the meantime, had let his partisan mentality become ever more sharp and clear, obscuring many if not all of his moral and theoretical chops along the way; but Buckley, despite having done as much as any one American probably ever has to shape actual electoral politics in this country, never wrote or even seemed to think like a party man. He was a Tocqueville, an aristocrat born into the wrong age, a man with great passions (admittedly, sometimes dispicable ones) who apparently never lost the ability to laugh at his passions. He’s someone I wish I could have met and known. No doubt he would have thought me insane, but I bet we could have a grand time arguing all the same. RIP.

That scraping sound is the Gates of Hell opening. The devil claims his own.

I love seeing 12 and 13 back to back….my god, what banal class fantasies! the notion that the correct metaphor for politics is cricket, rather than a street fight…the American political sphere could be healed, sans doute, if only wine appreciation courses were made more widely available to the junior punditry…

Emerson gets it. Buckley was the original post-war mass-cult political schtick, the first Jonah Goldberg, a piece of marketing completely unaware of being a fraud, ammunition for the right-wing multitudes who were far too stupid and mediocre to understand The Wasteland.

The right will undoubtedly canonize him next to to Eliot in his literary importance.

One hopes that his funeral ends with a reading of Psalms in the original Latin by Brent Bozell.

He died at his desk; we may never know if it was Jonah Goldberg’s book that did him in.

Like John Emerson, I find the Buckley-Kenner friendship interesting, not least because they’re polar opposites as prose stylists. That is, Kenner could damn well write.

(I’m at a remove from that strand of American politics and history, but The Pound Era was a revelation as a young EngLit student.)

Buckley was the original post-war mass-cult political schtick, the first Jonah Goldberg, a piece of marketing completely unaware of being a fraud, ammunition for the right-wing multitudes who were far too stupid and mediocre to understand The Wasteland.

I disagree. The man could think his own evil thoughts and was not a slave to any noise machine.

On John Emerson and on the other dregs of the smarmy sway-doe Jacobin rabble at Crooked Timber:
Tu quoque! (WFB, RIP)

I think it was about Buckley that Galbraith commented that he was one of his most valued friends, because on any issue on which Buckley had an opinion, he could adopt the opposite position without further thought.

Hugh Kenner was a very good friend of Buckley’s. That surprised me

Kenner’s conservatism would be evident even if he weren’t such a Pound/Eliot groupie.

The references to the Kenner-Buckley friendship reminded me that, thanks to Prof. Kenner, WFB was the commencement speaker when I graduated from Johns Hopkins. The only thing I remember about Buckley’s speech is that he told a somewhat amusing joke to which the punchline was “shithead”.

I’ve always thought of him as someone who provided a veneer of class for tacky people with unpleasant attitudes. A bit like Hugh Hefner as a marketer of a cultural trend to people who needed training wheels.

Well put. Let’s see where that takes us.

William Buckley:Rush Limbaugh::Hugh Hefner:Larry Flynt

Discuss.

(Personally, I prefer both my white supremacists and my pornographers straight-up, rather than covered with a veneer of cheesy faux-civility.)

My father was an extreme right-winger with many repugnant beliefs; particularly when it comes to race. Still, he was my father, and a damned good father at that. It never bothered him that 3 of his 4 sons grew up to be hard-left; he was grateful we thought for ourselves, examined the world around us and reached our own conclusions and acted upon them. As such, I can appreciate how someone who had a personal relationship with Buckley can remember him fondly.
But please, don’t move from that to a plea that the rest of us follow suit. Buckley added a graceful and elegant veneer note to truly repugnant ideas – racism, homophobia, militarism. If he was your friend or a family member I certainly understand your sense of loss at his death. But for the rest of us, he bequeathed a country where the latest debate is on just how much torture is ok.
Good riddance ye evil scumbag.

Here is a link to the Vidal-Buckley dustup:
http://www.kronykronicle.com/1968/BV4.html

Classy, that Buckley.

Kenner’s conservatism would be evident even if he weren’t such a Pound/Eliot groupie.

Quite true, but at the time I discovered his criticism, I neither lived in the US, nor cared much about that particular strand of American politics. Oh, days.

My guess is that those interested in high Modernism will be reading Kenner for many years to come; I’ve no idea what Buckley’s legacy will be, beyond ‘Now listen, you queer’.

I found it:
://www.washington-report.org/archives/Jan_Feb_2000/0002100.html

In his book The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick, a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian at the University of Chicago, writes that the attempt by the German Nazis and their European sympathizers to exterminate the Jews of Europe during World War II was originally seen as part of a larger catastrophe, a war that took some 30 million lives. Only much later did the murder of 6 million Jews become a separate event, unique in its horror. Today it is a symbol of Jewish persecution and a sacrosanct subject to all Jews and almost all Americans.
……….

Until the 1960s neither the Holocaust nor Israel were prominent issues. During the 1950s Germany was a Cold War ally and no one wanted to be reminded of its past crimes. An Israel full of impoverished immigrants held little attraction for most American Jews except as an object of charity.

Even the Israelis’ spectacular kidnapping in 1962 of Adolf Eichmann, a chief perpetrator of Hitler’s “final solution,” was widely criticized. William Buckley’s National Review, today an ardent supporter of Israel, deplored Eichmann’s capture as part of “an attempt to cast suspicion on Germany” and charged that his trial would promote “bitterness, mistrust, the advancement of communist aims.” But it was Eichmann’s trial, at which a succession of death camp survivors gave their heart-rending evidence, that highlighted for the world the attempted liquidation of the Jews as a separate and distinct crime, of a different order from other Nazi crimes. During Eichmann’s trial the word Holocaust first began finding its way into general usage.

Harold, you have to put the HTML on and off on each para separately.

Brett Bellmore: “Unless you fed the guy spiked punch, why in God’s name WOULDN’T you be demeaning towards somebody who showed up soused for a TV interview?”
Maybe because it was wildly known at that point (and it is hard to believe Buckley didn’t know this) that Kerouac was an out of control alcoholic. If you invite an alcoholic on your show, don’t be surprised when an alcoholic arrives.

I have an enormous amount of respect for Rick Perlstein, but my “different perspective” comes from the fact that William F. Buckley was never my friend. For me, he was simply a public figure who deliberately and successfully made my world a worse place.

Perlstein’s piece is interesting as social anecdote, and the evident fact that our premier left-wing historian of the modern Right had such access to one of its elders is a thoroughly good thing.

Brett Bellomre, the point I’m trying to make (and I apologize for not having been clearer in my last comment) is this: Buckley invited a man in the process of drinking himself to death on his show and then showered him with contempt for being drunk. Now, whatever else that might have been I will argue that it was a classless thing to do. Kerouac was sick – alcoholism is a disease – and far past the point where he could control himself. To attack such a person is the equivalent of Rush Limbaugh’s sickening pantomime of Michael J. Foxes’ Parkinson’s tremors. I might be wrong about this, but it is very, very hard to believe Buckley didn’t know what condition Kerouac was in at that point.
And it is just such episodes that make be feel the bile rising in my throat every time I read someone praising Buckley and his “principles” and genteel manner. He may have hidden his cut-throat approach beneath some old school manners, but he was a real SOB and he helped lay the groundwork for the moralistic, torture-loving bastards running the country today. Every word I’ve read today on left-wing blogs (James Wolcott for chrissake!) gently praising his “manners” and “principles” makes me wish the writers could have been on the receiving end of those principled manners just once. My hunch is we wouldn’t be reading so many hand-wringing farewells.
That he wasn’t as obvious in his pathology as Coulter or Limbaugh doesn’t make him a decent man.

Kerouac himself seemed to revere Buckley. They met each other long before Firing Line – they met when they were kids at Horace Mann. Kerouac made it pretty well known to his friends in the early sixties how much he admired Buckley’s politics.

The best thing about that show was Kerouac’s explanation that the Vietnamese had lured us into Vietnam so they could steal our jeeps.

Buckley had plenty of shitty views, but one of his views, that he promoted when he ran for mayor of New York, would have made this a much more liberal country – the view that marijuana and narcotics should be decriminalized. If this had become policy, the South wouldn’t have gone through the gleeful process of denying African American ex-cons – many having been in jail with drug convictions – voting rights. Gore would certainly and indisputably have swept Florida.

Interesting to think about…

Bruce, as opposed to those who were for it? What candidates and judges were they? And how quickly were they tossed out of the Democratic party?

I think people here are being too harsh on Buckley — and I write as someone who has written my share of articles criticizing National Review style conservatism. The fact is that Buckley came from a very hard right family background: his father was an isolationist, his siblings once burned a cross at Jewish resort, and a frequent family guest was the Old Right anti-Semite Albert Jay Nock. This was what Buckley inherited and it was evident in the early National Review (which publshed people like Revilo Oliver, later a sage of the Neo-Nazi movement). But Buckley also had a capacity to evolve: as Garry Wills (not at all a conventional conservative) said in an interview with Travis Smiley, Buckley “de-kooked” the conserative movement. First he kicked the anti-Semites out of National Review, then he gradually (and perhaps all too slowly) accepted the civil rights movement.

In his personal life, Buckley was a very kind and generous man, not just in terms of often lending money to friends in need but also giving of his time and energy.

Garry Wills talks about some of this in an interview he did with Travis Smiley, which cn be found here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tavis-smiley/my-conversation-with-garr_b_88813.html

About Buckley and Kenner: I touched on this in an obituary I wrote when Kenner died:
http://www.slate.com/id/2091796/

Kenner had the thankless task of being poetry editor of National Review. He did a great job, getting poems by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, etc. This confused the hell out of NR’s readership, which was also annoyed by the fact that Williams had been a communist fellow traveler. Kenner’s verdict: “National Review has some of the dumbest readers in the world.”

After I wrote my Kenner obit I got an email from Buckley saying how much he liked it. Perhaps that inclines me to want to remember Buckley’s personal gracefulness.

I get harder on them just about every day.

This I do not want to hear about.

If I’m not mistaken, weren’t there some indications that he had become dismayed with the turn conservatism had taken? Of course, it wasn’t really a turn, more of a flowering of something you just knew from it’s appearance was going to smell rank and attract vermin.

Nevertheless. As others have noted, he doesn’t seem to be nearly as smart as he thought he was, nor did he really work all that hard; I get the impression he gradually bought into his own hype (not a good trait in an Ad man), and was unpleasantly surprised at what Bush wrought.

Adding on…

Brad DeLong does us all a good service with his unearthing of – not nuggets, but buried garbage from WFB’s career. He shows that the roots of the modern conservative movement were rotten.

Joel, I was just commenting on something related over at Making Light: What I see again and again in movements that start off with suave people and end up with vulgarians is that the suave ones insist there must have been some way to keep spewing their hate and bile in classy ways. No. That’s not repentence, that’s trying to save face, and it’s part of the problem.

Lenin from the tomb gives us a nice quote from this man:

“The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” —William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/02/buckley.html

“Instead we got 30 years of clash and war until the architects of the isolation got bored with it and decided to boldly transgress the norms they’d used to destroy the careers and lives of rivals.”

Yup, it’s always our fault when communist dictators do vicious, stupid things. Because the alternative is recognizing that vicious, stupid things are just what communist dictators WANT to do, (Because they’re dictators, natch.) which is way to close to recognizing that communism, itself, which can’t be implemented voluntarily on any scale larger than a euchre club, might itself be vicious and stupid.

Surely no matter what our politics are, we all have at least some fond memories of the man who was William F. Buckley. I’ll never forget that time in 2008 when he died.

In response to #57, Bruce Baugh: While I disgree strongly with the almost every political stance Buckley took, I don’t think he can be compared to a Nazi concentration camp guard. I don’t think Buckley killed anyone. And it has to be said that many of the most terrible things he supported had broad political support within the context of American democracy. Robert Kennedy worked for Joseph McCarthy and many other Democrats supported McCarthyism. (Indeed, the best scholarly literarture on McCarthyism argues that it wasn’t created by the Wisconsin senator and his friends alone but grew out of both the old right and Cold War Liberalism — Harry Truman laid for the groundwork for McCarthyism with the National Security state he created.) The same is true of racism — it wouldn’t have lasted so long if it didn’t have the support of a majority of white Americans. Buckley’s evolution on this point mirrors what happened to millions of whites in the 1950s and 1960s. So I think it’s wrong to see Buckley as a uniquely evil devil figure.

Buckley’s evolution on this point mirrors what happened to millions of whites in the 1950s and 1960s. So I think it’s wrong to see Buckley as a uniquely evil devil figure.

Really? You’re honestly suggesting that a person who uses his considerable influence in the public sphere to actively propagate the belief that blacks are inferior, and provides (pseudo-)intellectual underpinning for that belief, is morally indistinguishable from any old random schmuck who thinks that blacks are inferior? David Duke is just another racist, no more, no less?

Really?

“Uniquely evil devil figure” may be a bit much. But “Hell, most white Americans were racist then” doesn’t do much to exculpate someone who spent his entire life marketing himself as a Deep Thinker and Superior Intellect.

Jeet, I did say that I was using the concentration camp guard as an extreme case to illustrate the principle. The principle is: you can be a fine person to some individuals and even whole groups and still be a monstrous servant of evil with regard to the whole.

And the fact is that on every moral challenge facing America as a whole since the ’50s, Buckley was consistently worse at responding it to it than the public at large. He was right about standing athwart history and yelling stop – he did so in the service of sexism, racism, homophobia, war, the betrayal of constitutional principles to preserve privilege, and on and on, while the public at large learned and reached accommodations with changing insights.

SamChevre at 73 wrote: “Just like I’m quite sure that Uncle Kvetch thinks that TRBC’s (Jerry Falwell’s church) current culture is inferior,…”
There is a pronounced difference between the two. Race is something you are born with, have no control over, and – the Bell Curve notwithstanding – is totally lacking in inferior or superior genetic traits. Racism is wrong because it has no basis in fact. What church you belong to is a wholly different animal. You choose to belong to a church based upon your view of their works and credo. Thus, there is no contradiction in decrying racism while criticizing the culture of a particular church.

I’m sure all of the liberals professing shock over Buckley’s retrograde opinions 50 years ago are equally interested in the retrograde opinions dug up by Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism (such as pro-eugenics progressives, pro-Mussolini sentiment in the New Deal, etc.). Right?

The, um, functional difference there is that racism remains part and parcel of the Republican party strategy, whereas, however imperfectly, the Democrats have taken the opposite path. States’ rights anyone?

I think Republicans just may have renounced segregation since the 1950s, just as Planned Parenthood isn’t trying to pursue eugenics any more (at least not expressly).

Righteous Bubba: Don’t bother arguing with anyone taking Jonah Goldberg seriously.

I understand that functional’s a nitwit – witness the latest goalpost movement from racism to segregation – but it’s fun to take a poke now and then.

#81: I think Republicans just may have renounced segregation since the 1950s

Except, of course, for the recently-resigned Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott, whom the party returned to the Senate Republican leadership after the fuss over his praise of Strom Thurmond had died down a bit.

I understand that functional’s a nitwit – witness the latest goalpost movement from racism to segregation – but it’s fun to take a poke now and then.

No, silly, that was just moving the goalpost back to its original spot. (You did notice that Buckley’s 1957 quote was about segregation?)

80: It’s not that I take Jonah Goldberg’s book all that seriously, but even the most hostile liberals (i.e., Tomasky) admit that he provides lots and lots of very damning quotations from liberals back in the day.

So if you are able to figure out that the liberal movement has changed in the past several decades, there’s no excuse for being too stupid to figure out that conservatives (including Buckley himself) changed quite a bit over the past several decades as well. After all, we went from a conservative movement in 1957 that praised segregation to a Bush administration that defended affirmative action before the Supreme Court. (The real problems with the conservative movement today are not racism, but: 1) valuing security over liberty; 2) incompetence; and 3) messianic foreign policy.)

Bzzt, wrong, you just lost your license to read. Tomasky’s only point is that the bad quotes from liberals are just old news, that everyone knows about those quotes already, etc. He doesn’t deny that liberals said some really bad stuff back in the day.

Quote from Tomasky:

[Goldberg] shows that many American progressives in the 1920s, and even into the 1930s, expressed admiration for aspects of Italian or German society–Lincoln Steffens, or Rexford G. Tugwell. (He also makes it clear with thirty-two citations of this magazine that he considers it something like the historic house organ of liberal fascism.)

* * *

But very little of the story he tells is news to students of history. We had already heard that Steffens said of the Soviet Union, “I have been over into the future, and it works,” so it is not exactly a shock to read that he had kind words for a similarly regimented society. We similarly understand that the Wilson administration did indeed shut down The Masses and fan racism and xenophobia and round up radicals, and no liberal today thinks of these moves as things to be proud of or to duplicate. We are also acutely aware that some New Dealers were fans of the totalitarian Soviet Union.

Get the point now? So forget about Goldberg, just focus on the bad stuff that Tomasky admits here. Some New Dealers were fans of the totalitarian Soviet Union. Does that make it problematic when today’s liberals or “progressives” praise the New Deal? Sure it does — if you’re going to play the same game of perpetual-guilt-over-things-said-many-decades-ago.

But again, if you can figure out that the liberal movement has changed, then you might also be able to figure out that conservatives aren’t the same as they were in the 1950s either.

Functional, you appear to have missed what you quoted:

But very little of the story he tells is news to students of history.

This, it seems to me, is somewhat opposed to even the most hostile liberals (i.e., Tomasky) admit that he provides lots and lots of very damning quotations from liberals back in the day.

Um, no. Tomasky was saying that “students of history” will already know about all the damning quotations that Goldberg provides. He certainly wasn’t saying that the quotations never happened.

Again, if you (like Tomasky or any number of other liberals) want to dismiss out of hand any consideration of what liberals did or said several decades ago, then it’s a bit silly to rush out upon Buckley’s death to do a fainting act over something that his magazine printed in 1957.

No idea what that’s supposed to mean, except that you can’t figure out how to defend your original claim regarding Tomasky’s piece (which most certainly does admit that Goldberg provides “very damning quotations from liberals back in the day”)

I meant “it” to refer to the current culture of TRBC. Whether a majority agrees with that culture or not, you think it would be good for that culture to not influence the law.

Yes, I do. On the other hand, I don’t think that there’s anything about the “culture” of TRBC that would merit its members being treated as second-class citizens. But that’s precisely what Buckley was arguing for in the 50s, with respect to African-Americans.

So I fail to see the relevance of the analogy, and I remain deeply confused by what you’re getting at here.

Buckley from 2005 talking about how great his 20-year-old AIDS tattoo idea was:

http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/wfb200502191155.asp

Functional’s got a point. A racist quote from the 1950s is not a great catch.

It’s not surprising, but it’s meaningful.

Not having your votes count, on the issues you think are critical, because the elite think they’re the wrong views (based in your messed-up culture), isn’t being treated as a second-class citizen?

No, sorry, still not getting it. Was the argument you’re attributing to me (which I haven’t actually made, but never mind that) that people like Falwell should be disenfranchised? If not, where the hell are you getting the idea that I don’t think their votes should “count”? I implied no such thing.

Once more, very carefully this time: In the 50s, Buckley and his magazine were arguing for the rights of Southern states to treat African-Americans as second-class citizens under the law. In their view, it was perfectly reasonable that black citizens not be entitled to the same rights and privileges as white citizens, because their “inferior culture” made them unworthy of those rights and privileges.

I would never assert anything remotely resembling this for the members of Jerry Falwell’s church.* They are entitled to their beliefs and to the free expression of those beliefs, however odious I may find them. You’re barking up the wrong tree here, and while I thought you might have something meaningful to say, it’s looking more and more like a case of “I’m rubber, you’re glue,” and it’s getting pretty damn tiresome.

*And of course, to compound the irony, lots of people in Falwell’s church would argue that people like me should be treated like second-class citizens, because of my sexual and romantic proclivities. I, on the other hand, have no interest whatsoever in their sexual and romantic proclivities, nor would it occur to me to pass judgment on them. But I realize that you and Functional are now deeply dug into this “For every example of intolerance from the right there must be an equal and opposite one from the left–and if there isn’t, we’ll make one up”, so I’ll leave you to it. Bon appétit.

Assuming some objective, platonic realm of Justice holds, WFB’s probably on his merry way to the Malebolge. Assuming that an objective, platonic realm of Justice does not hold, the discriminating consumer could appreciate WFB’s rather Humean wit, while taking issue with his bad taste in regards to the ‘Nam affair.

And I think I’m being unclear, not stupid.

There are two ways votes can “not count.” One–the simple one–is that you don’t get to vote. The other–the common one–is that the issues you care about are decided by someone you don’t get to vote for, and the people you do get to vote for are powerless to do anything about it. On the three current issues that are a really big deal to conservative Baptists, your position is that whatever they want, and whoever they vote for, they should not be able to get what they want. (Prayer in schools, a ban on abortion, and legal prohibitions on homosexual activity.)

So if we don’t agree to let Baptists to put us in jail for our sex lives, we are treating them as second-class citizens.

Samchevre, that is truly a thing of beauty.

On the three current issues that are a really big deal to conservative Baptists, your position is that whatever they want, and whoever they vote for, they should not be able to get what they want. (Prayer in schools, a ban on abortion, and legal prohibitions on homosexual activity.)

OK, got it. You are drawing a direct comparison between:

(1) My saying that the police should not have the right to break down my door in the middle of the night and arrest my partner and me, simply because we are engaged in activities that conservative Baptists find immoral; and

(2) the National Review of the 1950s saying that African-Americans are not deserving of equality under the law, because of the inferiority of their culture.

These are two sides of the same coin to you. In (1), I’m keeping the conservative Baptists down; in (2), Buckley is keeping African-Americans down. The right to dictate the sexual activities of consenting adults based on one’s personal beliefs, through force of law if necessary, is directly comparable to the fundamental human rights enshrined in the Constitution.

(One wonders why the Bill of Rights didn’t go all the way to 11–If the right to have consenting adults prosecuted for doing things I find icky isn’t a basic human right, what on earth is?)

I wish I could find a more charitable description for this argument than “stupid” (not to mention “grotesque”), but I’m coming up empty-handed. Sorry.

Somewhere in my argument, you got lost.

IFF you are arguing that the problem with Buckley was that he wasn’t democratic (which is all the quote in question says–it’s OK for whites to rule even where they aren’t the majority, because they are the current elite), you’re making a counter-productive argument.

I’m a mostly-libertarian; I argue that what rights are protected matters more than whether the majority vote wins.

Incidentally, my dad hated Buckley with a passion, as they sparred for a while in the NY Times editorial pages. I don’t think it’s very wise to beat up on any family when they go through a death, but at the same time anyone attempting to lionize Buckley now does indeed deserve a solid smacking.

Anyway the story of the exchange is here.

Well, Bob, again: all I’m saying is that a quote from the 50s is not a good catch, not convincing. I’m not defending the guy, I’m merely commenting on the method you use to denounce him, that’s all.

I hate American exceptionalism just as much as the next guy, but that’s a far cry from direct racism; American exceptionalism is pretty much the basis of the mainstream right-wing ideology today. Come to think of it, exceptionalism of the nation X is pretty much the basis of right-wing ideologies everywhere. Same goes for anti-communism, and I suspect the main reason is that communism is universal and international.

There’s nothing extraordinary here for a right-winger. And nobody in a right mind would dispute that Buckley was a right-winger. The question is: was he an exceptionally bad, unusually evil right-winger?

Well, apparently he was a personal friend of Rick Perlstein and Peter Mcwilliams (anarchist and a gay man with AIDS). Does it count for something? I don’t know, probably not much. Maybe just that he wasn’t too dogmatic; sounds like he was periodically testing and re-examining his right-wing convictions and every time deciding to stick with them. Is it virtuous? I guess not, just notable.

Abb1 at 118 says “Well, Bob, again: all I’m saying is that a quote from the 50s is not a good catch, not convincing. I’m not defending the guy, I’m merely commenting on the method you use to denounce him, that’s all…….There’s nothing extraordinary here for a right-winger. And nobody in a right mind would dispute that Buckley was a right-winger. The question is: was he an exceptionally bad, unusually evil right-winger?” Ok, I give. I have no clue what you want. It’s been pointed out by me and numerous others on this thread that Buckley’s timeline runs something like this: 1950’s/60’s – defends Jim Crow; late 60’s/70’s – rather timidly and half-heartedly backs away from his most strident racist writings long after others had overcome the damage he and his fellow-travelers had wrought and ended legal Jim Crow (being caught on the wrong side of history doesn’t make one a hero); 60’s – 2000’s – argues vehemently against equal rights for women, particularly but not exclusively the right to an abortion; 70’s – 2000’s – staunch supporter of the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government and the installation of August Pinochet – a brutal dictator; 1980’s/90’s – defended Apartheid til the bitter fucking end, dismissed Nelson Mandela as a murderous thug; 1990’s – used the Susan Smith case to reassure his wingnut followers he was still a card-carrying racist….
I could go on, but don’t really see much point. You’re like the evolution denying crowd always demanding one more transitional fossil. Look, if you were blinded by his patrician airs and manners and unable to see the racist, misogynistic, imperialist underpinnings of the man nothing I or anyone else can say here will change your mind. This man is as responsible for the Bush administration as Karl Rove. That Rove is a caricature of the slimy politico doesn’t make his ideas worse than Buckley’s. No “God and man at Yale”, no National Review, no groundwork for the movement conservatives to take over the Republican Party.
Have a nice day.

abb1 – anohter good read for why some of us shed no tears over the death of this bastard:
http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2008/02/socked-in-god-damned-face.html

He didn’t make racist and anti-Semitic remarks when he was 20, he made them when he was 35. He didn’t make them privately, he made them in print as policy recommendations. Such opinions may have gone unremarked in the 1920s and 30s, but Buckley made them well after they were no longer acceptable among decent people with any brain or conscience — in the late fifties and early sixties. It is incredibly ignorant to pretend otherwise.

The spectacle of people falling all over themselves to defend him is truly a sign of the degeneracy and cynicism of of our era.

The eulogists are sure silent on that score, aren’t they harold.

See Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life, Page 129-130 (available on google books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=7zpSvtOak7AC&dq=the+holocaust+in+american+life&pg=PP1&ots=MSIUCZo2oA&sig=2ZrDVY1RaTNZDeq92AwKALEtubU&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search?q=the+holocaust+in+American+life&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail#PPA130,M1

Why go so bombastic on the guy?

Yes, you’re right. But isn’t it an almost irresistible temptation, when he got away with so much unexceptional, run-of-the-mill right-wing swinishness just by flashing his toothy grin and glitzy vocabulary?

After it became unfashionable to say in print that the vengeful pro-Communist Jews were after their pound of flesh in pursuing Eichmann for his crimes, it was still ok to suggest tattooing AIDS sufferers.

What a card, that Buckley!

Why, just a few months ago mass-culture celebrity Bill O’Reilly was astounded to find out that people in Harlem use forks in restaurants, he defends “white, Christian, male power structure” (his words) – and you are trying to convince me that pretentious clown Buckley is evil incarnated? I guess I really am that obtuse; if you ask me – not even in the same league.

abb1: one last point on your bizarre insistence that fighting to keep blacks in their place was no big deal if it happened a long time ago. Here’s Bill Hicks on the Kennedy assassination: “People come up to me: ‘Bill, quit talking about Kennedy man . . . It was a long time ago . . .’ And I’m like alright, then don’t bring up Jesus to me. As long as we’re talking about shelf life here.” History is important and having been so wrong on so important an issue without ever truly apologizing for one’s wrongness (and Buckley at best issued a couple lukewarm “I may have chosen the wrong process” apologies over the years) does matter. Sorry if the shelf life is to long for you. Ask any African-American who lived through Jim Crow how ancient it all feels and I suspect you’ll get an education.

Oh, and also on the tattooed buttocks thing – yes it’s grotesque, absolutely terrible. That is until you recall what the most common wingnut attitude was (and probably still is): “good, I hope they all get infected and die.” Now you should realize that, while being grotesque, Buckley was, in fact, less bad than most. Maybe even much less bad.

When he “de-kooked” the conservative movement he merely made it more palatable to its enemies who have the privilege of sovereignly defining “kookery” and smearing all who dissent from that judgment. He banished Oliver and Rothbard as his presumptive heirs banish Ron Paul today. What an accomplishment.