Bad American

These are, of course, people who don’t even know the real history of their country, let alone received a classic liberal arts education. Mention ‘Augustinian’ to any of these new right troglodytes and you’d probably get a blank stare. Buckley could go on long dissertations on the influence of St. Augustine on traditional and modern Catholicism and how that religious tradition formed the basis of much of modern law.

This bunch thinks Ronald Reagan was an example of superior intellect and haven’t the faintest idea what Barry Goldwater actually landed up believing. Nor do they really want to know.For this generation of conservatives has no time for the drawing room debate style of a William F. Buckley. Unfortunately, what has arisen in this country is a generation of conservative street fighters who haven’t the faintest conception of winning an argument on merits, yet they are quick to label liberals ‘emotional!’The problem is that Buckley’s generation was raised in a far more thoughtful and contemplative era where television and the mass media hadn’t yet coarsened public debate or turned it into a commodity to be marketed for television.Buckley saw what was happening to conservatism and, especially, at his gift to conservatism The National Review, now run by the insufferable Jonah Goldberg. Yet his criticism was muted.

Buckley understood that the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq was not good for this country from an economic, political or social perspective. His bastard stepchildren, brought up in a coarser age where might makes absolute right, no longer have the intellectual background to make such distinctions. They simply react as a Pavlovian dog: war = good, debate = weakness, loyalty = Godliness.

It did seem that Buckley, later in life, was too much a gentleman to bring the Neanderthals to heel. It must have killed him though, as Sam Tanenhaus is writing, to see the Ann Coulters of the world drape the conservative mantle over their bloodstained fingers.

Perhaps he felt that his passing would mark the end of intellectual conservatism and that, as the old soldier in the Tin Pan Alley tune, he would just fade away. I don’t know. I wished he would have made a stronger condemnation of what the Limbaughs of the world had done to his movement. Perhaps Tanenhaus’ biography will be his final testament.

I’ve thought a lot about Bill Buckley today and I do sadly mourn the kind of debate one could have in America where you could vehemently disagree with someone else while remaining civil and part the best of friends.

Not any more.

Sadly, through the years I have seen conservatives, coming out of business schools, lacking the well-rounded educational credentials, who see the world as anything other than a giant game in which the winners get rich and the losers go home. In fact, many of these people have taken a perverse pride in their evasion of any university core curriculum in which they might have been exposed to the humanities. They wear their ignorance like a badge of honor and ridicule those who have honed their rhetorical skills in actual rhetoric classes.

Not being able to debate on merits or with intellectual skill, the modern conservative has resorted to the tactics of the playground bully and simply believes that shouting your opponent down (ala Bill O’Reilly) is a substitute for victory.

And television, run for the benefit of the business school class, is the perfect medium for this political kabuki theater, as is radio. Their intellectual patron saint, Reagan, made it all possibly by putting a knife into the back of the fairness doctrine and the great progressive sell-out, Bill Clinton, finished the job by allowing the concentration of media ownership in the 1990s.

So what is a liberal to do? You can play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules with conservatives in public media debates and get shouted down or you can drop the civility and fight fire with fire. America, to a certain extent and with the exception of a bright shining moment in the mid 20th century, has generally viewed politics as a blood sport. And so it is again.

After years of seeing progressive viewpoints get shouted down, I am of the opinion that in the present state of discourse in America, what we need are more street fighting liberals and that is one of the main purposes of this blog.

Unfortunately, playing nice in America will get you placed face down in the dirt. And there is too much at state for this nation and the world to play nice. I hate it, but liberals can no longer go into a gunfight armed with a fork. We are no longer facing the Ivy League educated Bill Buckleys of the world, who have exited the stage, but the O’Reillys, Hannities and Coulters who whip up the same kind of mindless hate that fascists have conjured up for centuries.

So I do mourn the passing of William F. Buckley whose magazine I used to enthusiastically read and who, as a gentlemen of his time and his education would always end his letters “cordially.”