Annoyed at a bunch o' liberal blatherings today

[elfs]

William F. Buckley died today. I, for one, have strongly mixed feelings about Buckley. His classism was, well, first-class, and his attitude towards those with whom he disagreed was always devestatingly polite and politely devastating. Buckley meant what he said more than most, and said what he meant better than anyone.

But Buckley was not a racist, and he has not been one for damn near the past forty years. When Lisa Schiffrin opened her big fat mouth on National Review's The Corner (Buckley founded the magazine National Review in 1956) to portray Obama as the product of a Jewish-Black Communist Conspiracy (I'm not kidding about this, really), Belle (whose blog that link goes to, where she quotes Schiffrin's whole damn missive), wrote, "It's music to WFB's ears. His trembling hand hoists a generous 7:30am brandy and milk to you, Lisa!" My reaction was that Belle was being damnably unfair.

Buckley denounced racism and repudiated his own in the mid-1960s. He became disgusted at the terroist tactics used by Southern whites. More importantly, his Catholicsm and his brilliance led him to understand that the bigotry with which he had been raised had no rational basis or moral standing. He reached out to Black intellectuals and found them worthy of his time and attention. You might find that arrogant, but it was a remarkable and remarkably decent act for a man who mas born racist and classist, and at a time when he, personally, had no reason to do so. He lost a lot of allies who took a decade to catch up with him. His position on race became a firm and liberated race-blindedness: there should not be a group identity, nor official recognition of a group, based upon the color of his skin. He came to support the civil rights act of 1964, and oppose affirmative action and school busing. In a perfect world, his position would have made sense. At the time, the right hated him for giving up his racism; the left have always hated him for his refusal to tolerate less than ideal moral conditions.

I can think of no better obituary for Buckley than the "white culture" rag American Renaissance's article, The Decline Of National Review, in which the writer bitterly complains that "National Review was once a voice for whites." But not anymore.

Buckley's once said that if he were a black man living in South Africa, he'd probably have joined the ANC. Last year his critics dismissed him as "senile" for his statement that invading Iraq was "a ghastly mistake." The man did keep his own opinions, and learn from his mistakes.

Buckley did come to view the people around him as admirable for their minds, not for the color of their skin. He wanted de facto race-blindness, not merely the hodge-podge de jure system we have in place today. Even more to the point, he believed that the price of not hiring the merited for irrational reasons was a drag on corporate economies, and they'd come around eventually without creating deep-seated resentment. (This has actually worked for gays and lesbians; Buckley was right in that respect.)

For that, he was pilloried on all sides. The magazine he hasn't helmed for eleven years, and the website he never had any direct responsibity over, have drifted further and futher into moonbat insanity. Jonah Goldberg (Buckley's hand-picked successor as Editor at Large) is making a laughingstock of himself by claiming that Mussolini was a "librul," and was labeled a facist after the fact by "libruls" who want to dismiss him; Victor Davis Hanson has descended into shrill martial madness, his mind a replay of 300 every night; Ramesh Ponnoru makes the case that the only way the Islamic Teruhrists will stop hatin' on America is if we become more like them and kill all the libruls; D'Souza is a weird Intelligent Design advocate; and you've met Ms. Schiffrin.

But Buckley was a different kind of man, manufactured from a different time and space. He was not "warm and fuzzy." He was hard, he wanted to stand up and be counted. He wanted you to stand up and be counted, too, and he had the decency to cease caring about your melanin production and your epicanthic fold. In death, you could at least give him his fair due on that account.

Comments

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

The responses are a good example of an attitude problem that I refer to as essentialism: public people are supposed to be exclusively and permanently one thing. Someone can't be right about some things and wrong about others--the wrongness means the right doesn't count and the person is bad. Changing one's mind makes one suspect to both the From camp and To camp, never mind that it could be prompted by receiving new information. It's really not a useful contribution to culture or politics.

We miss you Bill, and always shall.

[pandakahn.livejournal.com]

I became a Liberal because of Mr. Buckley. I became a Liberal and later on a Progressive because of the beliefs that were espoused and delineated by Mr. Buckley during the course of my life.

I recall first listening to him as a child on PBS, I forget the program, but I was enthralled as only a child can be. Here, before all, for the world to see, was a true gentleman, intellectual and charismatic man who espoused a clear and understandable philosophy that challenged some of the greatest minds of the day and still could be clearly understood by some one who had not mastered some of the basics of coming adulthood.

Mr. Buckley's clear ideals of what it meant to be "Conservative" resounded in me and I embraced this idea and held it dear. As time went on and I grew I read more about politics and philosophy and found that I tended to agree more and more with Mr. Buckley. I also discovered that, in my world view, those that called themselves "Conservatives" were very often not only not conservative in their beliefs, they were putting forth ideas that went against the great truths of classical conservatism and what I had come to embrace as my own personal political philosophy.

By the time President Regan had completed his second term in office I had left any and all associations with those who claimed a conservative mind set. Those people who I had agreed with years before had changed what it meant to be a conservative to a theocratic and religious set of beliefs that would have used the federal government to intrude on the rights of the states and the individual, while insisting that certain groups be completely disenfranchised for personal beliefs and because of who they were.

I continued to read the National Review and gaze with awe upon the writing of a man who put so much into the political arena. If you were brilliant and stood in opposition you could be shown the greatest of respect by Mr. Buckley, while if you claimed a conservative heritage you had best tread lightly and with great though, lest a surgically placed word or phrase would show the world your arrogance, ignorance and ineptitude. Over the years I enjoyed his debates with opposition almost as much as his "correction" of those who claimed to speak for "Conservatives".

I stopped being a conservative because of Mr. Buckley when I realized that the belief he had so carefully shared with myself and others of my generation were not the same beliefs as those shouted down to us from on high by the new leaders of the new conservative movement. Neo-conservatives had taken ideas I cherished and held dear and turned them into a movement the existed, in my mind, only to create, embrace and hold onto power for it's own sake.

I honor Mr. Buckley and still hold so many of his ideals true. If I was a braver man, a greater man, I might have stayed and fought the good fight. I left the Republican party many years ago and have not looked back. Since my departure I have seen it slowly sink and turn and be twisted into something that looks less like a group of like minded individuals, and more like something that wallows in it's own filth. Don't misunderstand, my support of those across the isle is no greater, and in some cases lower. I did not join another party because of some of the writing of Mr. Buckley. As he so beautify said many years ago, I will not join you, but I will stand as the loyal opposition to you until you return to me.

We as a nation, desperate for sane, rational and mostly civil discourse shall miss Mr. Buckley as few others of this great nation have been missed for this past 100 years.

With all my heart, this I most deeply believe.


MPK

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

My dad watched William F. Buckley when I was a kid, during the 70's. The thing that struck me about the man, from what I recall, is that he always had a well thought-out reason for why he believe what he believed, based firmly on and rooted in the facts.

During my adulthood, I've often and repeatedly said, "Why can't we hear from members of the political right who have a brain in their head? Like William F. Buckley. Instead of the drooling idiots we hear from now exclusively."

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

A lot of people are saying Buckley renounced racism, most of them paraphrasing the National Post. I haven't found it easy to come up with a primary source. Do you have a link to the article in question? I'd like to see what Buckley himself had to say about his past after he changed his mind.

It would take a very substantial change of direction to convince me that he had genuinely overcome it rather than just ceasing to advocate for a position that was no longer socially acceptable. The infamous AmRen article suggests he wasn't quite as reformed as all that: see the paragraph beginning "Mr. Buckley softened his position ...".

[slfisher.livejournal.com]

Something that's been really helpful about moving to Idaho is learning that there's a lot of reasonable, classic conservative Republicans out there. I might disagree with them, but at least we can have a rational discussion about it.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

I disagreed with Buckley on many things, but his unfailing, almost relentless politeness and erudition demanded that you pay attention to him. He did not shirk from the inevitable conclusions of his philosophy.

One need only listen to Buckley for a few minutes to realize that the tracts issuing from the likes of Coulter, O'Reilly, D'Souza, Limbaugh, et al barely rise to the level of incoherent fulminations -- the shrieks of ill-bred, ill-mannered children vying for attention compared to the composed, considered, and ever confident Buckley.

I do not label myself as Conservative, but I believe Conservatives everywhere, and the whole body of political discourse, is diminished by his passing.