Bill Buckley
Bill Buckley died Wednesday at 82 at his home in Connecticut. He was the most influential public intellectual of his generation in this country, maybe the world.
More than anyone, even Goldwater or Reagan, he was the father of modern conservatism, which was as much an intellectual as a political movement from 1955, when he founded the National Review, to 2000 when, under Bush and DeLay, the movement foundered in a sea of law breaking, war mongering and greed.
I got to know Buckley a little in the 1990s, debating him on his show, Firing Line. The show, the longest running with a single host in TV history, was civil, substantive and high minded; in short, the opposite of everything political talk shows have since become.
Off camera he was witty and articulate and also gracious and warm. A couple of years after the show went off the air I was running for Governor of Connecticut and bumped into him. He put his hand gently on my arm and said, softly, "I will vote against you with the deepest affection."
Buckley evolved over time from one who insisted the constitution forbade us from ending segregation, to one who supported civil rights laws and a national holiday for Martin Luther King.
But the underlying tenets of his thought, grounded in his Roman Catholicism and equally fervent beliefs in free republics and free markets, remained consistent.
It didn't always keep him close to the leaders of his party or of the movement he had led. On the National Review website, Buckley identified himself as a "libertarian conservative," a designation that separated him, ever so slightly, from the excesses of his crowd.
He saw Viet Nam as a mistake and parted company with Bush over Iraq. He sailed to international waters to try marijuana before calling for legalization. His lovely book Nearer My God reveals a real spirituality, as opposed to the hateful, hypocritical swill peddled as religion by his party. Sam Tanenhaus, author of a much anticipated biography, says Buckley couldn't bear Ann Coulter.
I first met Buckley a decade before our Firing Line encounters at a reception for an ailing Mike Harrington, socialist and author of 'The Other America.' Harrington truly regarded Buckley as a friend. So did John Kenneth Galbraith. So did most liberals Buckley knew.
Buckley loved debate. Unlike today's cowardly conservatives, he debated the best minds he could entice on to a stage. He never used his opponents as props or punch lines for fixed fights. He liked them. Loving his own ideas, not just hating theirs, left room for liking them.
What a long sad fall from Bill Buckley to Bill O' Reilly. I'm not part of the crowd that says if we can just get along everything will be alright. But I am part of the crowd that thinks learning to get along better will help.
To get out of Iraq or into a new health care system will require some hard fighting, but also some hard thinking and most of all reasoned arguments to persuade, if not the opposition, certainly the public.
If you want to see how far we are from having that kind of debate, watch an old episode of Firing Line and then watch a random hour of live cable television. That's how far.
Bill Buckley raised an army against a liberal establishment. Like Barry Goldwater, he often dissented in later years from a conservative establishment he helped create.
The political debate Buckley launched is over, many of its old categories defunct. To shape a new debate we'll need at least a few people with the intellect, humanity, civility and great good humor of Bill Buckley. I hope we find them.
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Today, the world is a poorer place.
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It's a poorer place because the Buckleys of the United States of America triumphed via smoke and mirrors. Buckley's legacy is a disgraceful one.
This a great loss to humor, decenccy and the market of political ideas. You don't have to adhere to a person's political views to respect them and I respected Mr. Buckley a great deal. He represented a breed of conservative that is sadly almost extinct. He was a gentleman, a scholar and one whose passion for life was unsurpassed. He will be greatly missed by this liberal and true Republicans out there would do well to reflect on both the man and his message if they wish to become relevant in future generations. God speed Mr. Buckley.
"Decency?" As in suggesting tatooing AIDS patients? Stunning.
Buckley was always fun to listen to.
I have had many arguments with Far Right Wing Conservatives and when you bring up some Buckley quotes - they label them as "Liberal" - and when you mention those quotes from from Buckley - well usually they don't know who he is (which tells us all a lot about those people) and then if they do know who Buckley is or once you tell them who he is - they sort of start getting frothy in the mouth and stuff and you can see the synapses mis-firing as they can't seem to come to gripes that they really aren't good old-fashioned Conservatives like they claim - they really are far right wing NeoCons usually.
oh fer god's sake! just because Buckley didn't get up to the crap the current crop of republicans get up to doesn't mean he wasn't a scoundrel. the moment i heard Buckley died i knew there would be a glowing eulogy offered by a liberal on Huffpo. when will you people get it? conservatives are the enemy and should be characterized exactly as the demons they are each and every time one of them either mouths or drops off. stop playing nice with republicans. they won't reciprocate.
Referring to people whose opinions are different as "demons" doesn't do much to improve things.
I'm not sure which "us people" you're referring to, but that fact that I disagreed with almost every opinion Buckley expressed does not mean that I can't appreciate an intelligent person expressing those opinions in a rational manner - we have enough low-rent commentary pandering to the lowest common denominator. Buckley was intelligent and it showed in his speech. And by speaking as he did, he paid viewers the compliment of assuming that they were intelligent enough to understand him when he spoke.
It seems a little mean-spirited to me to snipe about his accent or his penchant for using multi-syllabic words, not to mention totally irrelevant. After all, if all you want out of life is someone with a down-home accent and a third grade vocabulary, you could just sit around and listen to our current president.
My introduction to politics, (and perhaps more importantly philosophy) was Firing Line. Specifically, it was a couple of debates with William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal.
I had no idea what they were talking about because I was only twelve or thirteen years-old, but it was obvious that this was something grown-ups did, and that it was something like a fight. The problem was keeping score.
I almost understood what Vidal was saying, but Buckley seemed to be winning, somehow. Mostly it was his eyes, and a smile that lived on one side of his face.
It was devastating.
I remember trying to do it in front of my mirror, and got pretty good at raising one eyebrow, but somehow the smile never worked. I tried resting my head in one hand and raising one finger alongside my cheek thinking maybe it was a trick, but I never could make it work. The punch never landed.
Many years, and fewer hair-cuts into the future, I lost touch with Mr. Buckley but found that I could still almost understand what Vidal was talking about. Without knowing why, I knew that he was my champion, but never was entertained by his speaking, even when I completely agreed with him.
It was as if the artwork had fallen out of the frame, and all that was exposed was the wall behind it.
Today, I can only recreate the beauty by recording Brooks and Shields on my Tivo, and then saving it for Sunday when I read my new hero, Frank Rich, followed quickly by the breath taking Peggy Noonan.
I was dissapointed to find that the comments section was shut down, yesterday when Mr. Buckley died (even though I agree with the decision to do that) mostly because I wanted to say, that even though I never understood Bill Buckley, I loved him, and I feel I owe him a great debt.
May he rest in a place where all arguments are civil, and meaningfull.
(Obama/McKaskill in '08)
The Buckley/Gore Vidal battles were classic blowouts between two the best political minds of the age. I seem to remember Vidal usually gave as good as he got.
The way I remember it, Vidal destroyed Buckley, who seemed intellectual until he was in the presence of Vidal, when he looked like a callow chump. I would like to see the tapes of those old shows again. They were certainly worth watching.
He was terrific, and Firing Line was a great show. I disagreed with almost all of his views, yet I respected his civility and his intellectual acumen. He was the first brainy person I ever saw on TV, and we need more like him.
Being brainy and having decency and compassion for your fellow human being are two different things. These conservatives couldn't care less for the unfortunate in our society. He probably changed his mind after a visit from a dead relative to be sent to hell (even though I don't believe there is a hell).
I would like to have heard Buckley debate Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Soreano, Barbara Ehrenreich, or anyone else who wouldn't have been content to trade quips or share collegiate wit. Had any one of them driven Buckley to deal with his fundamental assumptions about the inequities of the world and governments' role in perpetuating them, I would have been rapt.
(Thank You, anotherbozo, for this post....)
This post brings up an important point, I always respected Buckley, and found him an enthralling speaker, however no matter how eloquently he presents his case, much of what he stood for were policies that would make education not available for all, and only the educated should be able to vote. At the core this respected ( by me ) individual was so wrong for we the people.
Maybe he was better than Bill O'Reilly on the surface, but his policies lead to the same end result.
And what about O'Reilly, is he going to get away with this lynching comment? My latest cartoon is about this topic.
www.whatno
I could never get beyond his pretentious New England "accent". For me that always makes anyone sound disingenuous. But people bought into it and for most Republicans of Buckley's generation it only fed the Blue Blood worship.
That was why he fooled so many people. Buckley's "butter-do
So many people on HuffPo say Buckley must have been appalled by the modern-day conservative commentators. Yes, just like Dr. Frankenstein was appalled when he couldn't control the monster he created.
George Will is just a guy with a bad attitude. You can almost see him writing his columns with a thesaurus at his elbow. Will, like Buckley, is intellectually dishonest in that he pretends to consider things at a profound depth, yet anxiously avoids examining his own assumptions. It is those assumptions about the conservative's right to his property and perquisites which lead inevitably to an ideology based on corruption.
I am old enough to remember Gore Vidal and Buckley debate when they were both in their prime. It was a pleasure to listen to them. You are correct that Buckley was a much different and much better conservative than we have today.
"What a long sad fall from Bill Buckley to Bill O' Reilly." Sad indeed, but it was inevitable once the country-club Republicans decided they had to rope in white Southern bigots and semi-literate rednecks in order to become a majority party. The only way you can get such people into the party is to throw them red meat, and the only way you can keep them in is by throwing more and more red meat. The party's descent into imbecility, however, has been surprisingly rapid.
It is so true. Instead of rational dialog the current party targets that segment of our population which has been called “authoritarian”. These people tend to follow a leader blindly and once convinced will become so fixed in their beliefs that all the facts in the world will not dissuade them.
It gives the Republicans a huge advantage in that facts become subjective. If something is repeated often enough then it becomes true.
The downside to targeting the blind followers is that the entire Party has to march in unison; the message has to be consistent, in order to work.
Now that the Party has it’s own 24 hour News Network, backed up by 24-hour right wing radio, it is possible to keep their followers sufficiently ignorant and easily whipped up through moral indignation.
Watch how the bubbleheads process information which doesn’t fit their beliefs … they simply discard it and move on, usually resorting to name calling worthy of eight year olds in a school yard.
This is not a party for mavericks; it is a party for parrots, and each is rewarded according to his loyalty.
Where the system falls apart is in the inherent incompetence of its participants.
When one tries to organize a country (Iraq) with frat boys whose only qualifications are their loyalty to the party, one gets, well Iraq. When one tries to run the Department of Justice with graduates from the Pat Robertson School of Law, one gets corruption and incompetence. When one tries to run FEMA with
Showhorse people, one gets Katrina.
In some ways, the Neocon assension brought it’s own cancer.
Were they competent, the Rebpulicans would have by now effected a single party system and a unitary executive. But it’s a catch 22: One can only expect a limited number of intelligent true believers, or those sufficiently cynical to disregard their loyalty to Country and blatantly mislead its’ people.
You are proving your own point. You are so blind by your righteousness and that the other side is totally wrong. Neither side is totally right & or totally wrong. This is where discussion comes into play. If you can make your point without name calling and honestly listen to the other side then you can have legitimate debate. Take Hannity and Combs for example. Hannity sits and calls people names and complains that somebody else is doing it. Combs on the other hand is so blind to his party that if the dems say the sky is red, he will not sit down and talk it out with you to see if it's actually blue. To me it make funny TV as you have two arrogant non listening people screaming at each other.
one of whom has re-made himself into a "liberal" in order to help facillitate the illusion that Fox is "balanced"
No, lastams has the better argument. Conservatism was in absolute control of the country for 7 years. What they did with their power constitutes a total refutation of their ideology. Why should anyone listen to Repig ideology with the specter of what their policies produce everywhere evident? Blindness is not being able to see when you've failed.
Despite a flair for style, notably in the use of language, Buckley was an ideologue captive to the hard right wing . He believed that the only legitimate purpose of government was for defense, thus he enabled unlimited Pentagon spending. He would take advantage of every government subsidy for the rich, but would happily crusade against government help for the poor. He maintained a Darwinist social philosophy that was cleverly obscured by his masterful use of words.
He defended Joe McCarthy and was Godfather to the so-called Neo- conservative movement. Having second thoughts about Iraq doesn't absolve him of the heartless consequences of his beliefs for so many others.
Before we get too carried away, let's recall that this is the man who called Gore Vidal a "queer" on network television and suggested that people with HIV be tattooed on their arms and buttocks.
...May those among us who have not " sinned " cast the first stone. Put your petty partisanship aside for minute will you.
I hate this new format. On topic, I have suggested that womanizers have warnings tattooed on their chests.
Every conservati
I guess this is pretty well known by now, except to the brainwashed clones who still swallow all the kool aide.
Olbermann listed some of Buckley's more egregiously offensive positions and Buckley definitely was more full of himself than rational in his heyday.
Olbermann should have given him a little more credit though, as in latter times he had a low opinion of Bush and opposed the Iraq war.
Like Goldwater he eventually espoused more rational positions on the issues. Whereas todays crowd of rightwing idealogues never change their mind or concede mistakes except long after the fact in a cowardly way.
I never cared much for Buckley either, krocklin, but like you I appreciate and acknowledge the fact that he continued to learn and wasn't afraid to change his mind when the facts warranted it. Too many people fail to realize that growing up is a lifelong process and with growth comes change. Change in thinking, change in direction, change in one's outlook. Buckley's intellectual level was a standard far too many of the current crop of repus will never attain.
he continued to learn.....
Where? How?
How sad that Buckley is gone. His urbane defense of conservative principles so differs from the screeching despotism that his movement has descended into. What clearly differentiates Buckley's "libertarian conservatism" from what passes as conservatism nowadays was his ability to argue coherently, and when he lost to do it with grace and style.
Brilliantly put.
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