Natural Gas Guru: Charlie Rose: "From Christopher Buckley, on Charlie Rose a year ago, describing his dad William F. Buckley:
[Christopher] 'I found this quote by Carlyle: 'Let me have my own way exactly in everything and a sunnier and more pleasant creature does not exist.''"
Showing posts with label William F. Buckley Jr.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William F. Buckley Jr.. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Sam Tenenhaus on Bill Moyers Friday Night
(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel
This interview Friday night caught my eye and now my imagination. When I review the transcript below I notice that it keys more of my "labels" than any other blog I've done.
Tenanhaus pops up -- I knew someone would -- as an apologist for the evil William F. Buckley and thereby sets a new world-view of Buckley. I assume Tenanhaus's book does also.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL, Sam Tanenhaus. SAM TANENHAUS: Oh my pleasure to be here, Bill. BILL MOYERS: So, if you're right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television? SAM TANENHAUS: I'm afraid they're radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time -- this is what my book describes narratively -- between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We're seeing the revanchist side. BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?
SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that's based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that's been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for 'revenge.' It's a politics of vengeance. And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we're seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We're seeing it now-- they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.
BILL MOYERS: What gives them their certainty? You know, your hero of the 18th Century, Burke, Edmund Burke, warned against extremism and dogmatic orthodoxy.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, it's a very deep strain in our politics, Bill. Some of our great historians like Richard Hofstadter and Garry Wills have written about this. If you go back to the foundations of our Republic, first of all, we have two documents, "creedal documents" they're sometimes called, more or less at war with one another. The Declaration of Independence says one thing and the Constitution says another.
BILL MOYERS: The Declaration says--
SAM TANENHAUS: …says that we will be an egalitarian society in which all rights will be available to one and all, and the Constitution creates a complex political system that stops that change from happening. So, there's a clash right at the beginning. Now, what we've seen is that certain groups among us-- and sometimes it's been the left-- have been able to dominate the conversation and transform politics into a kind of theater. And that's what we're seeing now.
BILL MOYERS: When you see these people in the theater of television, you call them the insurrectionists, in your book, what do you think motivates them?
SAM TANENHAUS: One of the interesting developments in our politics, in just the past few months, although you could see signs of it earlier, is the emergence of the demographic we always overlook in our youth obsessed culture: the elderly. That was the group that did not support Barack Obama. They voted for John McCain. It was also the group that rose up and defied George W. Bush, when he wanted to add private Social Scurity accounts. It was a similar kind of protest.
BILL MOYERS: There's a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they're against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don't want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying "Don't touch my Medicare." You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.
SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it's very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. "Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won't take my Medicare away. Don't know Medicare is a government program?" That's not really what's going on, I think. I think there's something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we've become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, "We all expect too much from government." We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life". So, when people say, "Don't take my Medicare away," what they really mean is, "We're entirely dependent on this government and we're afraid they'll take one thing away that we've gotten used to and replace it with something that won't be so good. And there's nothing we can do about it. We're powerless before the very guardian that protects us."
BILL MOYERS: So, how do you see this contradiction playing out in the health care debate? Where what's the dominant force that's going to prevail here at the end? Is it going to be, "We want reform and we want the government involved?" Or are we going to privatize it the way people on the conservative side want to do? The insurance companies, the drug companies, all of that?
SAM TANENHAUS: I think what we'll see is a kind of incremental reform. Look, we know that health care has become the third rail of American politics, going back to Theodore Roosevelt. The greatest retail politician in modern history, Bill Clinton, could not sell it. But here's another thing to think about. In the book I discuss one of the most interesting political theories of the modern era, Samuel Lubell's theory of the solar system of politics. And what he says is what we think of as an equally balanced, two-party system, is really a rotating one-party system. Either the Republicans or Democrats have ruled since the Civil War for periods of some 30-36 years. And in those periods, all the great debates have occurred within a single party. So, if you go back to the 1980s, which some would say was the peak of the modern conservative period, the fight's about how to end the Cold War, how to unleash market forces-- were really Republican issues. Today, when we look at the great questions -- how to stimulate the economy, how to provide and expand and improve a sustainable health care system, the fight is taking place among Democrats. So, in a sense what Republicans have done is to put themselves on the sidelines. They've vacated the field and left it to the other party, the Democratic Party, to resolve these issues among themselves. That's one reason I think conservatism is in trouble.
BILL MOYERS: You write in here that they're not simply in retreat, they're outmoded. They don't act like it, you know?
SAM TANENHAUS: They do and they don't. What I also say in the book is that the voices are louder than ever. And I wrote that back in March. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats, "The Democrat Socialist Party." This started from the beginning. So, the noise is there. William Buckley has a wonderful expression. He says, "The pyrotechnicians and noise-makers have always been there on the right." I think we're hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.
BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that the news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Why are those organs of information and/or propaganda so powerful?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, there's been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time. The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The great, brilliant thinker, James Burnham. A less known but equally brilliant figure, Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers. And they were essentially philosophical in their outlook. Now, there are conservative intellectuals, but we don't think of them as conservative anymore-- Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukayama, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, the great Columbia professor, Mark Lilla-- they've all left the movement. And so, it's become dominated instead by very monotonic, theatrically impressive voices and faces.
BILL MOYERS: Well, what does it say that a tradition that begins with Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the years, the decades, to William Buckley, and now the icon is Rush Limbaugh?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in my interpretation it means that it's ideologically depleted. That what we're seeing now and hearing are the noise-makers in Buckley's phrase. There's a very important incident described in this book that occurred in 1965, when the John Birch Society, an organization these new Americanist groups resemble -- the ones who are marching in Washington and holding tea parties. Essentially, very extremist revanchist groups that view politics in a conspiratorial way. And the John Birch Society during the peak of the Cold War struggle was convinced, and you're well aware of this, that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, who reported to his brother Milton, and 80 percent of the government was dominated by Communists. Communists were in charge of American education, American health care. They were fluoridating the water to weaken our brains. All of this happened. And at first, Buckley and his fellow intellectuals at NATIONAL REVIEW indulged this. They said, "You know what? Their arguments are absurd, but they believe in the right things. They're anti-communists. And they're helping our movement." Cause many of them helped Barry Goldwater get nominated in 1964. And then in 1965, Buckley said, "Enough." Buckley himself had matured politically. He'd run for Mayor of New York. He'd seen how politics really worked. And he said, "We can't allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe." So, he turned over his own magazine to a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its "drivel" were circulated in advance to three of the great conservative Republicans of the day, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, from your home state of Texas, and Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line. And that's what we may not see if we don't have that kind of leadership on the right now.
BILL MOYERS: To what extent is race an irritant here? Because, you know, I was in that era of the '60s, I was deeply troubled as we moved on to try to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by William Buckley's seeming embrace of white supremacy. It seemed to me to taint-- to leave something in the DNA of the modern conservative movement that is still there.
SAM TANENHAUS: It is. And one of the few regrets Bill Buckley ever expressed was that his magazine had not supported the Civil Rights Act--
BILL MOYERS: Really?
SAM TANENHAUS: …but you may remember that in the late '70s, he supported a national holiday for Martin Luther King-- BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I remember that. SAM TANENHAUS: …where someone like John McCain did not. I once heard Buckley give a lecture -- brilliant lecture in New York City -- about the late '90s in which he talked about the importance of religion in American civil life. And it was Martin Luther King who was the object.
BILL MOYERS: What changed him? I mean, because he was writing in the National Review about, endorsing the White Supremacy scheme of the country at that time.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, he actually did that, Bill, a little bit earlier.
BILL MOYERS: '50s?
SAM TANENHAUS: '50s. He did more of it. In the early '60s, even a great thinker and writer like Garry Wills, who was still a part of the "National Review," though he supported the civil rights movement, thought it might weaken the institutional structures of society, if it became too fervent a protest. Now, what the Republican Party did was to make a very shrewd political calculation. A kind of Faustian bargain with the South. That the southern whites who resisted civil rights legislation-- Aand as you know, Lyndon Johnson knew, when he signed those bills into law, he might lose the solid south as it had been called, the Democrats might lose them for a generation or more. And yes, the Republicans moved right in, and they did it on the basis of a state's rights argument. Now, however convincing or unconvincing that was, it's important to acknowledge that Republicans never-- conservatives, I should say, northern Republicans are different-- but conservatives within the Republican Party, because the two were once not, you know, identical-- thought that a hierarchical society and a kind of racial difference-- a sense of racial difference, established institutionally, was not so bad a thing. They were wrong. They were dead wrong. But that sense of animus is absolutely strong today. Look who some of the great protestors are against Barack Obama. Three of them come from South Carolina, the state that led the secession. Joe Wilson and Senator DeMint, Mark Sanford who got in trouble. These are South Carolinians. And there's no question that that side of the insurrectionist South remains in our politics.
BILL MOYERS: When you heard Joe Wilson shout out, "You lie," and you saw who it was, did you think "the voice of conservatism today"?
SAM TANENHAUS: No. I thought "This man needs to read his Edmund Burke." Edmund Burke gave us the phrase "civil society." Now, people can be confused about that. It doesn't mean we have to be nice to each other all the time. Bill Buckley was not nice to his political opponents. What it means is one has to recognize that we're all part of what should be our harmonious culture, and that we respect the political institutions that bind it together. Edmund Burke, a very interesting passage in his great book, the "Reflections on the Revolution in France," uses the words "government" and "society" almost interchangeably. He sees each reinforcing the other. It is our institutional patrimony. When someone in the floor of Congress dishonors, disrespects, the office of the President, he's actually striking-- however briefly, however slightingly-- a blow against the institutions that our society is founded on. And I think Edmund Burke might have some trouble with that.
BILL MOYERS: There's long been a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this coalition that we call "conservative." I mean, you had the Edmund Burke kind of conservatism that yearns for a sacred, ordered society, bound by tradition, that protects both rich and poor, against what one of my friends calls the "Libertarian, robber baron, capitalist, cowboy America." I mean, that marriage was doomed to fail, right?
SAM TANENHAUS: It was. First of all, this is absolutely right, in the terms of a classical conservatism. And here is the figure I emphasize in my book is Benjamin Disraeli. What he feared-- the revolution of his time, this is the French Revolution that concerned Edmund Burke-- half a century later what concerned Disraeli and other conservatives was the Industrial Revolution. That Dickens wrote his novels about-- that children, the very poor becoming virtual slaves in work houses, that the search for money, for capital, for capital accumulation, seemed to drown out all other values. That's what modern conservatism is partly anchored in. So, how do we get this contradiction?
BILL MOYERS: Why isn't it standing up against turbo-capitalism?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, one reason is that America very early on in its history reached a kind of pact, in the Jacksonian era, between the government on the one hand and private capital on the other. That the government would actually subsidize capitalism in America. That's what the Right doesn't often acknowledge. A lot of what we think of as the unleashed, unfettered market is, in fact, a government supported market. Some will remember the famous debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, and Dick Cheney said that his company, Halliburton, had made millions of dollars without any help from the government. It all came from the government! They were defense contracts! So, what's happened is the American ethos, which is a different thing from our political order-- that's the rugged individualism, the cowboy, the frontiersman, the robber baron, the great explorer, the conqueror of the continent. For that aspect of our myth, the market has been the engine of it. So, what brought them together, is what we've seen in the right is what I call a politics of organized cultural enmity. Everybody--
BILL MOYERS: Accusatory protest, you call it.
SAM TANENHAUS: Accusatory protest. With liberals as the enemy. So, if you are a free-marketeer, or you're an evangelical, or a social conservative, or even an authoritarian conservative, you can all agree about one thing: you hate the liberals that are out to destroy us. And that's a very useful form of political organization. I'm not sure it contributes much to our government and society, but it's politically useful, and we're seeing it again today.
BILL MOYERS: It wasn't long ago that Karl Rove was saying this coalition was going to deliver a new Republican majority. What happened? It finally came apart. Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, I believe it had come apart earlier than that. I really think Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 sealed the end of serious conservative counterrevolution. We forget that election. It seems like an anomaly, but consider, Bill Clinton won more electoral votes than Barack Obama, despite the presence of one of the most successful third party candidates, H. Ross Perot, another Texan, in American history. But that's not the most important fact. The most important fact is that George H. W. Bush got less of the popular vote in 1992 than Herbert Hoover got in 1932. That was really the end. But what happened was the right was so institutionally successful that it controlled many of the levers, as you say. So, what happened in the year 2000? Well, the conservatives on the Supreme Court stopped the democratic process, put their guy into office. Then September 11th came. And the right got its full first blank slate. They could do really whatever they wanted. And what we saw were those eight years. And that is the end of ideological conservatism as a vital formative and contributive aspect of our politics.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Because it failed so badly. It wasn't conservative. It was radical. It's interesting. Many on the right say, "George Bush betrayed us." They weren't saying that in 2002 and 2003. He was seen as someone who would complete the Reagan revolution. I think a lot of it was Iraq. Now, I quote in the book a remarkably prescient thing. The very young, almost painfully, 31-year-old, Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1835, he said you cannot export democracy, even then, to lands ruled by despotic priests. And he happened to mean Catholic, not Islamic priests. But he said you actually have to have a civil society established in advance. He said that's why the United States had become a great republic so shortly after the Revolution. We had the law of English custom here. You see? So, we were prepared to become a democracy. There were conservatives who tried to make that argument before the war in Iraq. Francis Fukayama was one, Fareed Zakaria was another-- they're both well outside that movement. There were people in the Bush Administration who tried to argue this -- they were marginalized or stripped of power. What America saw was an ideological revanchism with all the knobs turned to the highest volume. The imperial presidency of a Dick Cheney and all the rest. And we saw where we got.
BILL MOYERS: Here's another puzzle. Back to what we were talking about earlier. You say in "The Death of Conservatism" that, "Even as the financial collapse drove us to the brink, conservatives remained strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land." And the paradox is, it seems to me, they are driving the conversation that you say they don't hear.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, they have many mouths, Bill, but they don't have many ears. The great political philosopher, Hannah Arendt once said, in one of her great essays on Socrates, whom she wrote about a lot -- that the sign of a true statesmen, maybe particularly in a democracy, is the capacity to listen. And that doesn't simply mean to politely grow mute while your adversary talks. It means, in fact, to try to inhabit the thoughts and ideas of the other side. Barack Obama is perhaps a genius at this. For anyone who has not heard the audio version of "Dreams from My Father," it's a revelation. He does all the voices. He does the white Kansas voices, he does the Kenyan voices. He has an extraordinary ear. There's an auditory side to politics. And that capacity to listen is what enables you to absorb the arguments made by the other side and to have a kind of debate with yourself. That's the way our deliberative process is supposed to work. Right now, at a time of confusion and uncertainty, the ideological right is very good at shouting at us, and rallying the troops. But, you know, one of the real contributions conservatism made in its peak years, the 1950s and '60s, I think as an intellectual movement, is that it repudiated the politics of public demonstration. It was the left that was marching in the streets, and carrying guns, and threatening to take the society down, or calling President Johnson a murderer. Remember it was William Buckley, who said, "We're calling this man a murderer in the name of humanity?" It was the conservatives who used political institutions, political campaigns, who rallied behind traditional candidates produced by the party apparatus. They revitalized the traditions and the instruments and vehicles of our democracy. But now we've reached a point, quite like one Richard Hofstadter described some 40 years ago, where ideologues don't trust politicians anymore. Remember during the big march in Washington, many of the protestors or demonstrators insisted they were not demonstrating just against Barack Obama, but against all the politicians-- that's why some Republicans wouldn't support it. They don't believe in politics as the medium whereby our society negotiates its issues.
BILL MOYERS: What do they believe in?
SAM TANENHAUS: They believe in a kind of revolution, a cultural revolution. They think the system can be-- what some would say hijacked. They would say maneuvered, controlled, that they can get their hands back on the levers. An important thing about the right in America is it always considers itself a minority position and an embattled position. No matter how many of the branches of government they dominate. So, what they believe in is, as Willmoore Kendall, this early philosopher said, is a politics of battle lines, of war.
BILL MOYERS: So, here, at this very critical moment, when so much is hanging in the balance, what is the paradox of conservatism as you see it?
SAM TANENHAUS: The paradox of conservatism is that it gives the signs, the overt signs of energy and vitality, but the rigor mortis I described is still there. As a philosophy, as a system of government, as a way all of us can learn from, as a means of evaluating ourselves, our social responsibilities, our personal obligations and responsibilities. It has, right now, nothing to offer.
BILL MOYERS: Now, they disagree with you. They think you have issued a call for unilateral disarmament on their part-- that brass knuckles and sharp elbows are part of fighting for what you believe in, and therefore, you're calling for a unilateral disarmament.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, that's what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style, is when it's always living on the verge of apocalypse. That defeat is staring you in the face, and the only victories are total victories. Because even the slightest victory, if it's not complete, means the other side may come back and get you again. This is not serious responsible argument. Much of my book is actually about the failures of liberalism in that noontime period of the 1960s. And many of the conservatives simply ignore that part of the argument.
BILL MOYERS: How to explain this long fascination you've had with conservative ideas, and the conservative movement. Why this fascination?
BILL MOYERS: Well, I think it has been the dominant philosophy, political philosophy in our culture, in America, for some half-century. What particularly drew me first to Chambers and then Buckley is the idea that these were serious intellectuals, who were also men of action. Conservatives have kind of supplied us in their best periods-- the days when NATIONAL REVIEW and COMMENTARY and THE PUBLIC INTEREST were tremendously vital publications, self-examining, developing new vocabularies and idioms, teaching us all how to think about politics and culture in a different way, with a different set of tools. They were contributing so enormously to who we were as Americans. And yet, many liberals were not paying attention. Many liberals today don't know that a great thinker like Garry Wills was a product of the conservative movement. It's astonishing to them to learn it. They just assume, because they agree with him now, he was always a liberal. In fact, he remains a kind of conservative. This is the richness in the philosophy that attracted me, and that I wanted to learn more about, to educate myself.
BILL MOYERS: The book is THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM. Sam Tanenhaus, I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for joining me.
SAM TANENHAUS: Oh, it's my great pleasure to be here.
This interview Friday night caught my eye and now my imagination. When I review the transcript below I notice that it keys more of my "labels" than any other blog I've done.
Tenanhaus pops up -- I knew someone would -- as an apologist for the evil William F. Buckley and thereby sets a new world-view of Buckley. I assume Tenanhaus's book does also.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL, Sam Tanenhaus. SAM TANENHAUS: Oh my pleasure to be here, Bill. BILL MOYERS: So, if you're right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television? SAM TANENHAUS: I'm afraid they're radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time -- this is what my book describes narratively -- between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We're seeing the revanchist side. BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?
SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that's based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that's been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for 'revenge.' It's a politics of vengeance. And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we're seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We're seeing it now-- they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.
BILL MOYERS: What gives them their certainty? You know, your hero of the 18th Century, Burke, Edmund Burke, warned against extremism and dogmatic orthodoxy.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, it's a very deep strain in our politics, Bill. Some of our great historians like Richard Hofstadter and Garry Wills have written about this. If you go back to the foundations of our Republic, first of all, we have two documents, "creedal documents" they're sometimes called, more or less at war with one another. The Declaration of Independence says one thing and the Constitution says another.
BILL MOYERS: The Declaration says--
SAM TANENHAUS: …says that we will be an egalitarian society in which all rights will be available to one and all, and the Constitution creates a complex political system that stops that change from happening. So, there's a clash right at the beginning. Now, what we've seen is that certain groups among us-- and sometimes it's been the left-- have been able to dominate the conversation and transform politics into a kind of theater. And that's what we're seeing now.
BILL MOYERS: When you see these people in the theater of television, you call them the insurrectionists, in your book, what do you think motivates them?
SAM TANENHAUS: One of the interesting developments in our politics, in just the past few months, although you could see signs of it earlier, is the emergence of the demographic we always overlook in our youth obsessed culture: the elderly. That was the group that did not support Barack Obama. They voted for John McCain. It was also the group that rose up and defied George W. Bush, when he wanted to add private Social Scurity accounts. It was a similar kind of protest.
BILL MOYERS: There's a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they're against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don't want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying "Don't touch my Medicare." You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.
SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it's very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. "Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won't take my Medicare away. Don't know Medicare is a government program?" That's not really what's going on, I think. I think there's something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we've become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, "We all expect too much from government." We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life". So, when people say, "Don't take my Medicare away," what they really mean is, "We're entirely dependent on this government and we're afraid they'll take one thing away that we've gotten used to and replace it with something that won't be so good. And there's nothing we can do about it. We're powerless before the very guardian that protects us."
BILL MOYERS: So, how do you see this contradiction playing out in the health care debate? Where what's the dominant force that's going to prevail here at the end? Is it going to be, "We want reform and we want the government involved?" Or are we going to privatize it the way people on the conservative side want to do? The insurance companies, the drug companies, all of that?
SAM TANENHAUS: I think what we'll see is a kind of incremental reform. Look, we know that health care has become the third rail of American politics, going back to Theodore Roosevelt. The greatest retail politician in modern history, Bill Clinton, could not sell it. But here's another thing to think about. In the book I discuss one of the most interesting political theories of the modern era, Samuel Lubell's theory of the solar system of politics. And what he says is what we think of as an equally balanced, two-party system, is really a rotating one-party system. Either the Republicans or Democrats have ruled since the Civil War for periods of some 30-36 years. And in those periods, all the great debates have occurred within a single party. So, if you go back to the 1980s, which some would say was the peak of the modern conservative period, the fight's about how to end the Cold War, how to unleash market forces-- were really Republican issues. Today, when we look at the great questions -- how to stimulate the economy, how to provide and expand and improve a sustainable health care system, the fight is taking place among Democrats. So, in a sense what Republicans have done is to put themselves on the sidelines. They've vacated the field and left it to the other party, the Democratic Party, to resolve these issues among themselves. That's one reason I think conservatism is in trouble.
BILL MOYERS: You write in here that they're not simply in retreat, they're outmoded. They don't act like it, you know?
SAM TANENHAUS: They do and they don't. What I also say in the book is that the voices are louder than ever. And I wrote that back in March. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats, "The Democrat Socialist Party." This started from the beginning. So, the noise is there. William Buckley has a wonderful expression. He says, "The pyrotechnicians and noise-makers have always been there on the right." I think we're hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.
BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that the news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Why are those organs of information and/or propaganda so powerful?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, there's been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time. The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The great, brilliant thinker, James Burnham. A less known but equally brilliant figure, Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers. And they were essentially philosophical in their outlook. Now, there are conservative intellectuals, but we don't think of them as conservative anymore-- Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukayama, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, the great Columbia professor, Mark Lilla-- they've all left the movement. And so, it's become dominated instead by very monotonic, theatrically impressive voices and faces.
BILL MOYERS: Well, what does it say that a tradition that begins with Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the years, the decades, to William Buckley, and now the icon is Rush Limbaugh?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in my interpretation it means that it's ideologically depleted. That what we're seeing now and hearing are the noise-makers in Buckley's phrase. There's a very important incident described in this book that occurred in 1965, when the John Birch Society, an organization these new Americanist groups resemble -- the ones who are marching in Washington and holding tea parties. Essentially, very extremist revanchist groups that view politics in a conspiratorial way. And the John Birch Society during the peak of the Cold War struggle was convinced, and you're well aware of this, that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, who reported to his brother Milton, and 80 percent of the government was dominated by Communists. Communists were in charge of American education, American health care. They were fluoridating the water to weaken our brains. All of this happened. And at first, Buckley and his fellow intellectuals at NATIONAL REVIEW indulged this. They said, "You know what? Their arguments are absurd, but they believe in the right things. They're anti-communists. And they're helping our movement." Cause many of them helped Barry Goldwater get nominated in 1964. And then in 1965, Buckley said, "Enough." Buckley himself had matured politically. He'd run for Mayor of New York. He'd seen how politics really worked. And he said, "We can't allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe." So, he turned over his own magazine to a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its "drivel" were circulated in advance to three of the great conservative Republicans of the day, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, from your home state of Texas, and Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line. And that's what we may not see if we don't have that kind of leadership on the right now.
BILL MOYERS: To what extent is race an irritant here? Because, you know, I was in that era of the '60s, I was deeply troubled as we moved on to try to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by William Buckley's seeming embrace of white supremacy. It seemed to me to taint-- to leave something in the DNA of the modern conservative movement that is still there.
SAM TANENHAUS: It is. And one of the few regrets Bill Buckley ever expressed was that his magazine had not supported the Civil Rights Act--
BILL MOYERS: Really?
SAM TANENHAUS: …but you may remember that in the late '70s, he supported a national holiday for Martin Luther King-- BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I remember that. SAM TANENHAUS: …where someone like John McCain did not. I once heard Buckley give a lecture -- brilliant lecture in New York City -- about the late '90s in which he talked about the importance of religion in American civil life. And it was Martin Luther King who was the object.
BILL MOYERS: What changed him? I mean, because he was writing in the National Review about, endorsing the White Supremacy scheme of the country at that time.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, he actually did that, Bill, a little bit earlier.
BILL MOYERS: '50s?
SAM TANENHAUS: '50s. He did more of it. In the early '60s, even a great thinker and writer like Garry Wills, who was still a part of the "National Review," though he supported the civil rights movement, thought it might weaken the institutional structures of society, if it became too fervent a protest. Now, what the Republican Party did was to make a very shrewd political calculation. A kind of Faustian bargain with the South. That the southern whites who resisted civil rights legislation-- Aand as you know, Lyndon Johnson knew, when he signed those bills into law, he might lose the solid south as it had been called, the Democrats might lose them for a generation or more. And yes, the Republicans moved right in, and they did it on the basis of a state's rights argument. Now, however convincing or unconvincing that was, it's important to acknowledge that Republicans never-- conservatives, I should say, northern Republicans are different-- but conservatives within the Republican Party, because the two were once not, you know, identical-- thought that a hierarchical society and a kind of racial difference-- a sense of racial difference, established institutionally, was not so bad a thing. They were wrong. They were dead wrong. But that sense of animus is absolutely strong today. Look who some of the great protestors are against Barack Obama. Three of them come from South Carolina, the state that led the secession. Joe Wilson and Senator DeMint, Mark Sanford who got in trouble. These are South Carolinians. And there's no question that that side of the insurrectionist South remains in our politics.
BILL MOYERS: When you heard Joe Wilson shout out, "You lie," and you saw who it was, did you think "the voice of conservatism today"?
SAM TANENHAUS: No. I thought "This man needs to read his Edmund Burke." Edmund Burke gave us the phrase "civil society." Now, people can be confused about that. It doesn't mean we have to be nice to each other all the time. Bill Buckley was not nice to his political opponents. What it means is one has to recognize that we're all part of what should be our harmonious culture, and that we respect the political institutions that bind it together. Edmund Burke, a very interesting passage in his great book, the "Reflections on the Revolution in France," uses the words "government" and "society" almost interchangeably. He sees each reinforcing the other. It is our institutional patrimony. When someone in the floor of Congress dishonors, disrespects, the office of the President, he's actually striking-- however briefly, however slightingly-- a blow against the institutions that our society is founded on. And I think Edmund Burke might have some trouble with that.
BILL MOYERS: There's long been a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this coalition that we call "conservative." I mean, you had the Edmund Burke kind of conservatism that yearns for a sacred, ordered society, bound by tradition, that protects both rich and poor, against what one of my friends calls the "Libertarian, robber baron, capitalist, cowboy America." I mean, that marriage was doomed to fail, right?
SAM TANENHAUS: It was. First of all, this is absolutely right, in the terms of a classical conservatism. And here is the figure I emphasize in my book is Benjamin Disraeli. What he feared-- the revolution of his time, this is the French Revolution that concerned Edmund Burke-- half a century later what concerned Disraeli and other conservatives was the Industrial Revolution. That Dickens wrote his novels about-- that children, the very poor becoming virtual slaves in work houses, that the search for money, for capital, for capital accumulation, seemed to drown out all other values. That's what modern conservatism is partly anchored in. So, how do we get this contradiction?
BILL MOYERS: Why isn't it standing up against turbo-capitalism?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, one reason is that America very early on in its history reached a kind of pact, in the Jacksonian era, between the government on the one hand and private capital on the other. That the government would actually subsidize capitalism in America. That's what the Right doesn't often acknowledge. A lot of what we think of as the unleashed, unfettered market is, in fact, a government supported market. Some will remember the famous debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, and Dick Cheney said that his company, Halliburton, had made millions of dollars without any help from the government. It all came from the government! They were defense contracts! So, what's happened is the American ethos, which is a different thing from our political order-- that's the rugged individualism, the cowboy, the frontiersman, the robber baron, the great explorer, the conqueror of the continent. For that aspect of our myth, the market has been the engine of it. So, what brought them together, is what we've seen in the right is what I call a politics of organized cultural enmity. Everybody--
BILL MOYERS: Accusatory protest, you call it.
SAM TANENHAUS: Accusatory protest. With liberals as the enemy. So, if you are a free-marketeer, or you're an evangelical, or a social conservative, or even an authoritarian conservative, you can all agree about one thing: you hate the liberals that are out to destroy us. And that's a very useful form of political organization. I'm not sure it contributes much to our government and society, but it's politically useful, and we're seeing it again today.
BILL MOYERS: It wasn't long ago that Karl Rove was saying this coalition was going to deliver a new Republican majority. What happened? It finally came apart. Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, I believe it had come apart earlier than that. I really think Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 sealed the end of serious conservative counterrevolution. We forget that election. It seems like an anomaly, but consider, Bill Clinton won more electoral votes than Barack Obama, despite the presence of one of the most successful third party candidates, H. Ross Perot, another Texan, in American history. But that's not the most important fact. The most important fact is that George H. W. Bush got less of the popular vote in 1992 than Herbert Hoover got in 1932. That was really the end. But what happened was the right was so institutionally successful that it controlled many of the levers, as you say. So, what happened in the year 2000? Well, the conservatives on the Supreme Court stopped the democratic process, put their guy into office. Then September 11th came. And the right got its full first blank slate. They could do really whatever they wanted. And what we saw were those eight years. And that is the end of ideological conservatism as a vital formative and contributive aspect of our politics.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Because it failed so badly. It wasn't conservative. It was radical. It's interesting. Many on the right say, "George Bush betrayed us." They weren't saying that in 2002 and 2003. He was seen as someone who would complete the Reagan revolution. I think a lot of it was Iraq. Now, I quote in the book a remarkably prescient thing. The very young, almost painfully, 31-year-old, Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1835, he said you cannot export democracy, even then, to lands ruled by despotic priests. And he happened to mean Catholic, not Islamic priests. But he said you actually have to have a civil society established in advance. He said that's why the United States had become a great republic so shortly after the Revolution. We had the law of English custom here. You see? So, we were prepared to become a democracy. There were conservatives who tried to make that argument before the war in Iraq. Francis Fukayama was one, Fareed Zakaria was another-- they're both well outside that movement. There were people in the Bush Administration who tried to argue this -- they were marginalized or stripped of power. What America saw was an ideological revanchism with all the knobs turned to the highest volume. The imperial presidency of a Dick Cheney and all the rest. And we saw where we got.
BILL MOYERS: Here's another puzzle. Back to what we were talking about earlier. You say in "The Death of Conservatism" that, "Even as the financial collapse drove us to the brink, conservatives remained strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land." And the paradox is, it seems to me, they are driving the conversation that you say they don't hear.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, they have many mouths, Bill, but they don't have many ears. The great political philosopher, Hannah Arendt once said, in one of her great essays on Socrates, whom she wrote about a lot -- that the sign of a true statesmen, maybe particularly in a democracy, is the capacity to listen. And that doesn't simply mean to politely grow mute while your adversary talks. It means, in fact, to try to inhabit the thoughts and ideas of the other side. Barack Obama is perhaps a genius at this. For anyone who has not heard the audio version of "Dreams from My Father," it's a revelation. He does all the voices. He does the white Kansas voices, he does the Kenyan voices. He has an extraordinary ear. There's an auditory side to politics. And that capacity to listen is what enables you to absorb the arguments made by the other side and to have a kind of debate with yourself. That's the way our deliberative process is supposed to work. Right now, at a time of confusion and uncertainty, the ideological right is very good at shouting at us, and rallying the troops. But, you know, one of the real contributions conservatism made in its peak years, the 1950s and '60s, I think as an intellectual movement, is that it repudiated the politics of public demonstration. It was the left that was marching in the streets, and carrying guns, and threatening to take the society down, or calling President Johnson a murderer. Remember it was William Buckley, who said, "We're calling this man a murderer in the name of humanity?" It was the conservatives who used political institutions, political campaigns, who rallied behind traditional candidates produced by the party apparatus. They revitalized the traditions and the instruments and vehicles of our democracy. But now we've reached a point, quite like one Richard Hofstadter described some 40 years ago, where ideologues don't trust politicians anymore. Remember during the big march in Washington, many of the protestors or demonstrators insisted they were not demonstrating just against Barack Obama, but against all the politicians-- that's why some Republicans wouldn't support it. They don't believe in politics as the medium whereby our society negotiates its issues.
BILL MOYERS: What do they believe in?
SAM TANENHAUS: They believe in a kind of revolution, a cultural revolution. They think the system can be-- what some would say hijacked. They would say maneuvered, controlled, that they can get their hands back on the levers. An important thing about the right in America is it always considers itself a minority position and an embattled position. No matter how many of the branches of government they dominate. So, what they believe in is, as Willmoore Kendall, this early philosopher said, is a politics of battle lines, of war.
BILL MOYERS: So, here, at this very critical moment, when so much is hanging in the balance, what is the paradox of conservatism as you see it?
SAM TANENHAUS: The paradox of conservatism is that it gives the signs, the overt signs of energy and vitality, but the rigor mortis I described is still there. As a philosophy, as a system of government, as a way all of us can learn from, as a means of evaluating ourselves, our social responsibilities, our personal obligations and responsibilities. It has, right now, nothing to offer.
BILL MOYERS: Now, they disagree with you. They think you have issued a call for unilateral disarmament on their part-- that brass knuckles and sharp elbows are part of fighting for what you believe in, and therefore, you're calling for a unilateral disarmament.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, that's what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style, is when it's always living on the verge of apocalypse. That defeat is staring you in the face, and the only victories are total victories. Because even the slightest victory, if it's not complete, means the other side may come back and get you again. This is not serious responsible argument. Much of my book is actually about the failures of liberalism in that noontime period of the 1960s. And many of the conservatives simply ignore that part of the argument.
BILL MOYERS: How to explain this long fascination you've had with conservative ideas, and the conservative movement. Why this fascination?
BILL MOYERS: Well, I think it has been the dominant philosophy, political philosophy in our culture, in America, for some half-century. What particularly drew me first to Chambers and then Buckley is the idea that these were serious intellectuals, who were also men of action. Conservatives have kind of supplied us in their best periods-- the days when NATIONAL REVIEW and COMMENTARY and THE PUBLIC INTEREST were tremendously vital publications, self-examining, developing new vocabularies and idioms, teaching us all how to think about politics and culture in a different way, with a different set of tools. They were contributing so enormously to who we were as Americans. And yet, many liberals were not paying attention. Many liberals today don't know that a great thinker like Garry Wills was a product of the conservative movement. It's astonishing to them to learn it. They just assume, because they agree with him now, he was always a liberal. In fact, he remains a kind of conservative. This is the richness in the philosophy that attracted me, and that I wanted to learn more about, to educate myself.
BILL MOYERS: The book is THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM. Sam Tanenhaus, I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for joining me.
SAM TANENHAUS: Oh, it's my great pleasure to be here.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
More on "Mum" and "Pup"
After telling people about the interview of Christopher Buckley with Charlie Rose last week, I went back to my blog on this topic (when William F. Buckley died). I now see that there is a wonderful slide show with Christopher's voice-over added:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/magazine/26buckley-t.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/magazine/26buckley-t.html?hp
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Carlyle
From Christopher Buckley, on Charlie Rose earlier this week, talking about his dad William F.:
"I found this quote by Carlyle: 'Let me have my own way exactly in everything and a sunnier and more pleasant creature does not exist.'"
"I found this quote by Carlyle: 'Let me have my own way exactly in everything and a sunnier and more pleasant creature does not exist.'"
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Milton Friedman Discussion
A reprise of his life and influence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/weekinreview/13goodman.html?scp=19&sq=&st=nyt
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/weekinreview/13goodman.html?scp=19&sq=&st=nyt
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Yale Daily News Obituary on William F. Buckley, Jr.
Buckley was Editor of the Yale Daily News. So this is worth reading (I haven't read it fully.)
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/23790
Saturday, March 15, 2008
William F. Buckley, Jr. -- It Gets Even Better
March 14, 2008, 7:39 pm
Uncommoner Than Thou: Buckley, Part Two
(This is the second of a two-part column. Read part one.)
William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.
Example: Dick Clurman of Time magazine, an affable gent, was a guest on the Buckley yacht in the Caribbean. After dinner, Bill B., leafing through a TV log, announced that “The Wizard of Oz” would be starting in half an hour — in English, broadcast from Puerto Rico. Clurman was delighted and confessed to never having seen it.
At the appointed time the set was switched on, but to everyone’s chagrin it seemed the movie had already been on for a good half hour. Bill had read the starting time wrong. Clurman’s disappointment was visible.
“Let’s see if my name cuts any ice down here,” his host said. The incredulous Clurman later described how his friend grabbed the phone, rang up the station in Puerto Rico, managed to get through to the engineer, explained his guest’s disappointment, and asked if it would be too much trouble to start the movie over!
In disbelief, Clurman saw the screen go blank, followed by a frantic display of jumbling and flashing. And then — the opening credits and the comforting strains of “Over the Rainbow.” The movie began anew. Clurman declared that never until then had he known the full meaning of “chutzpah.”
I think Bill decided to let a year go by, giving Clurman time to regale all his friends and acquaintances with the tale of the Oz miracle. It was then, still reluctantly, that the magician revealed his secret. The movie had not been broadcast at all that night — except on Bill’s tape deck, which he had secretly manipulated with his unseen left arm while “talking on the phone” using the other.
He was full of surprises. Once on my show we were talking about Muhammad Ali, and Bill revealed that he himself was taking boxing lessons.. The audience gasped.
“Expecting trouble?” I asked.
“No,” he intoned. “But I’m ready.”
**********
Buckley enjoyed tossing literary references into the conversation; a habit not always guaranteed to make friends. Once, in answer to something I said, he injected, “As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue.”
A fine and witty remark to be sure, but one you wouldn’t be wise to depend on as your opening gag in your nightclub act. And one I would guess he knew it might take the rest of us a moment to fully “get.” If then.
But that’s not what bothered me about it. A little voice in me whispered, “Is that Oscar Wilde?” In one of those bizarre coincidences life tickles us with, a French friend had given me, two days before, a volume of famous “Citations” (see tahss ee own) by French wits. Try real hard to believe that among the half dozen she had checkmarked as favorites was that one. Yes. The alleged Wilde.
What fun to catch my learned guest on this. But because he was who he was, I figured he must be right and the moment passed. And because he was who he was, it was mildly heartbreaking.
Weeks pass. And he is back. All fear of him is gone. Try not to form your entire opinion of me by what I did:
Bill, I said, I notice that on your show you hold yourself to a high level of accuracy. And that you don’t shrink from holding your guests to it. I like to do the same here. (He is too smart not to sense something. And what I did next is inexcusable.)
Last time you were here, Bill, you said, “L’ hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend a la vertu.” I forget how it goes in English. (Can you see why I was sometimes beaten up on the playground?)
Well, you get the idea. I told him that it was in fact, “not Oscar Wilde, who was of course Irish, but Francois de la Rochefoucauld, who, as far as we know, was French. And I just couldn’t let you go around embarrassing yourself like that again. As a friend.” (Audience chortles, then claps.)
Bill’s expression was beyond description. There was fire. Ice. And a trace of amusement.
DC: What are you thinking, Bill?
WFB (after a well-timed pause): Of a variety of ways to express my profound gratitude.
(Everyone has a laugh.)
**********
A writer friend reminds me that, over the years, many a journalist’s day was made by receiving one of the short personal notes Buckley used to send when they’d written something he liked. These cherished tidbits were only a line or two long, but imbued with the full Buckley flavor.
Language was his medium and he loved to make it roll around and do tricks. I just now unearthed a copy of one of his books he had inscribed to me. He was a fan of all wordplay and had admired an unforgivable pun I had made about French painters. He wrote:
To Richard, in deepest gratitude for “More in Seurat than in Ingres.” May I use it?
With affection,
Bill
The adjective “fabulous,” through overuse, has become cheap currency. But it applies to him. In the sense of “fabled.” He was a character in the true sense of that word. And not of our time. He was like a creation out of 19th — or even 18th — century literature, rather than the predictable and dreary sort of folk you get these days. Not one of whom would have the class to reply to an irate letter-writer demanding that he cancel her subscription to his magazine: “Cancel your own damn subscription.”
If I were composing a Top 10 list of things that will never be said, I submit as number one: “Hey, I just met someone exactly like William F. Buckley.”
**********
Postscript: Bill would have loved this. Remember the stories the other week about how badly our ignorant American high school students had done on a general knowledge test? Failing to identify Hitler correctly, or to know when the Civil War was? Well, irony of ironies, the test itself contains an error.
One of its multiple-choice “correct” answers is wrong.
What would our friend have done with this? He would convince us that we are all too soft from being handed things too easily, and that what would be best for all concerned would be to let the reader diligently discover the error himself, rather than to get the answer by spoon, so to speak.
So, in memory of Bill, until next time . . . .
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1.March 15th,
2008
12:14 am The anecdote about the Wizard of Oz is wickedly hilarious.
The reason I like this blog is that you know the newsmakers, and you can talk about them freely. I’ve gotten a much better picture of the type of person William Buckley is here on this blog than all of the eulogies I’ve read of him, combined. And the same goes for your entries Bobby Fischer and Norman Mailer, as well.
Keep up the good work. I love reading your blog. I hope to read much more from you.
— Posted by Bart
2.March 15th,
2008
1:03 am Boy, that was quick, Cavett! Now, how about letting this Part 2 one on WFB be a precident for beginning another piece right away! Like I said before, how about one or two on Arthur Godfrey — surely as interesting a character as WFB! I’ll stand by to correct you — if necessary! Like, do you know the “real” Julius LaRosa story?
— Posted by Peter Kelley
3.March 15th,
2008
1:35 am It is wonderfully charming (and even funny) to read all of these tales (from Mr. Cavett and others) about how William Buckley had such a great command of the English language. He did, and no one can take that away from him. He must have been a wonderful person to have as a friend.
But I also saw him use his intellect to put people down in petty and cruel ways by talking over their heads and using fancy words – instead of addressing the issues. It’s that I’ll remember most about him.
— Posted by Michael Conley
4.March 15th,
2008
1:40 am Hmm.. When I read the lead-in for this, I saw ‘fabulous’ applied to Bill Buckley. I wondered: is Dick Cavett insinuating that Buckley made stuff up? That would certainly be spicy, and a play on words worthy of Buckley himself. No such luck…
— Posted by p mac
5.March 15th,
2008
3:14 am Dick…..he was so good I could almost forget I detested his politics…..eh?
— Posted by sturgeone
6.March 15th,
2008
3:44 am Buckley would’ve fit well in the company of G.K. Chesterton. I’ve often wondered ~ was WFB born multi-syllablic or did he come down with it at some point later on?
— Posted by Roy Truitt
7.March 15th,
2008
4:21 am I just watched the 1960s debate between Buckley and Noam Chomsky on youtube, and my modest opinion of WFB was reaffirmed. He may have been eloquent, witty, and a good friend, but he was also unable to deal with intellectual equals like Chomsky, thus interrupting constantly. In that respect he was the forerunner of all the current right-wing talk hosts. He always seemed arrogant to me.
— Posted by Greg Tamblyn
8.March 15th,
2008
5:16 am Mr. Cavett,
When you write you would never meet anyone like WFB, I’m wondering if there are, floating in the mediocre-sea we call the media, someone already working WFB’s beat. Not as a conservative per se, but as a pundit, thinker or personality. Is there such a person doing something novel on Fox? Will Bill O’Reilly warrant such tributes? Rush Limbaugh? Will Ann Coulter get this kind of high-end ink? Is there anyone out there who can bluff and bob and weave so well these days? Steven Colbert? I may not have liked WFB’s politics but I certainly love the theater involved in a long-distance rewind of OZ. Now we’re all about YouTube and downloading Ashley Alexandra Dupre.
Bravo for the fable.
Best,
Matthew Rose / http://homepage.mac.com/mistahcoughdrop/
— Posted by MATTHEW ROSE
9.March 15th,
2008
5:20 am Buckley was the consummate snob, influencd no one except several
hundred rich, close buddies, and
will fade quickly from the public
conciousness.Hopefully.
— Posted by richard slimowitz
10.March 15th,
2008
5:45 am ‘More in Seurat than in Ingres.’
It still hasn’t sunk in. Help!
— Posted by Bob Wilcox
11.March 15th,
2008
6:49 am Mr. Buckley hid a sadistic Darwinist social philosophy behind pretty words, a dubious gift. No doubt he had other gifts, but if a sordid philosophy creates pain for innocent people, it’s impossible to like such a fellow.
— Posted by sufi
12.March 15th,
2008
7:33 am The leisure class has truly lost one of its most rewarding characters. Of course, we feel for his family, as would any decent person. Decent people also recognized the immediate need long ago for the national need for laws dealing with the national waste called hatred on account of race. The people who didn’t had a moral and ethical blind spot the size of the grand canyon, which still was not large enough to contain the blind spot of William Buckley. Before we enjoy too much celebrating the articulateness of the most extraordinarily precise morally blind character of his generation, perhaps the rejoicers should celebrate the anniversary of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Laws, and . . . maybe you get the point. Selective memory is a wonderful thing. Put into perspective, the man’s individual kindnesses were blessings to those he helped. His professional attitudes led an army that trampled on people as they were struggling to be part of the nation. All in all, he would have been a wonderfully entertaining leader of the confederacy during the civil war.
— Posted by Hobbes
13.March 15th,
2008
8:39 am A few years ago, while driveing down the road in Bay City, Michigan,I listened to the radio. I was tuned to a famous radio personality of the time. This man was famous for narrateing the funeral prossession of a president and fireing one of his singers on his television program. On this day, the radio personality, let`s call him A.G.,introduced a new comedian to his radio public. This comedian was an ex-writer for the Tonight Show and was now strikeing out on his own as a standup. A.G. took great pleasure in saying that this comic was honeing his skills at the Hungry Eye. I been a fan of yours ever since.
— Posted by Lawrence Perry
14.March 15th,
2008
8:44 am Despite the great songwriter Lloyd Cole having written — in his 1988 song, SPEEDBOAT — that “wits, they come three to a pound,” I for one am always willing to pay top dollar for the type of self-amusement that you ascribe to Buckley, and the combative and instructional wordplay that you highlight, Mr. Cavett.
For more of the same, i.e., instances where power is measured by verbal prowess, I recommend the wonderful 1996 film set in 18th century France, RIDICULE, directed by Patrice Leconte.
A gem.
— Posted by Mark Cougar Rosenblatt
15.March 15th,
2008
8:46 am You wrote, “If I were composing a Top 10 list of things that will never be said, I submit as number one: Hey, I just met someone exactly like William F. Buckley.”
Dick (or is it Richard?) I sure hope you’re right!
— Posted by Ron Lewis
16.March 15th,
2008
8:46 am Buckley may have thought we are all too soft from being handed things too easily and that we should all discover and work for things on our own, but where did Buckley get the substantial wealth required to begin his own magazine? It is easier to be an armchair quarterback and speak about earning things when one is cushioned from all economic worry. Perhaps his political views would have been modified, if he realized intimately that some people may stuggle and struggle without showing much gain. Clearly his acceptance of others with different views and willinginess to embrace all as friends from the entire political spectrum is very refreshing.
— Posted by Marvin Meadors
17.March 15th,
2008
9:53 am I give up. I went to Common Core, took the test, checked the answers. Apparently I got one wrong?? Which of the quiz answers do you quibble with?
— Posted by geo
18.March 15th,
2008
10:12 am It always hurts to have to explain a bon mot, but here goes:
Hamlet: What, look’d he frowningly?
Horatio: A countenance more in sorrow than in anger.
— Posted by andrew Shalat
19.March 15th,
2008
10:20 am Bob Wilcox:
“More in sorrow than in anger” is what’s got you confused…
— Posted by K
20.March 15th,
2008
10:22 am Well, if there were another person just like WFB it’s too bad they’re not running the NR. A worthy opponent has sunk to the level of charicature and self-inflated soap box.
— Posted by Doug l
21.March 15th,
2008
10:25 am Like Bob Wilcox, in post number 10 above, I had trouble with
“More in Seurat than in Ingres” until I recalled the line from Hamlet:
“More in sorrow than in anger.” (Pardon their French.)
— Posted by Steve Samuels
22.March 15th,
2008
10:38 am There are undoubtedly countless numbers amongst the literati who are educated beyond their intelligence, WFB, assuredly did not fall into that category!
— Posted by Warren Hughes
23.March 15th,
2008
10:55 am To Bob Wilson:
“more in sorrow than in anger” is from Hamlet. The French pronunciation of Seurat and Ingres are close (enough) to sorrow and anger.
I love these reminiscences and the focus on language, but I have to agree with the “consummate snob” comment. . . . .
— Posted by Czar
24.March 15th,
2008
11:12 am For those that asked…
More in Seurat (pronounced sur-rah; sounds like sorrow) than in Ingres (pronounced ang-res; sounds like anger)
I think that Dick had a problem with Jamestown being described as the first ‘permanent’ settlement when in fact it failed. I could be wrong on that one…
cheers
— Posted by Stephen Cassidy
25.March 15th,
2008
11:13 am William F. Buckley was an unrepentant racist hiding his views behind a facade of intellectual pretension. His passing will not be mourned.
— Posted by jk8790
26.March 15th,
2008
11:13 am Nonpareil, raconteur…different costume, but underneath, the same as the Limbaughs and the Coulters he spawned. We won’t be telling funny stories about their charm and thank you notes after they’re gone. Sorry, I don’t mourn Bill Buckley.
— Posted by DFC
27.March 15th,
2008
11:22 am Someone and I can’t recall who once said of Buckley that he was a learned and erudite man who knew everything except what it is like to have been born without the silver spoon, and of that he was glaringly ignorant.
— Posted by moon
28.March 15th,
2008
11:26 am For those who struggled with
“To Richard, in deepest gratitude for “More in Seurat than in Ingres.” May I use it?
With affection,
Bill”
as I did: More in sorrow than in anger.
— Posted by Anonymous
29.March 15th,
2008
11:32 am Like everyone else I am charmed and impressed by these anecdotes of his erudition.
Did anyone else witness the aggressive ignorance of Buckley when he interviewed Derrida?
— Posted by Bernard harte
30.March 15th,
2008
11:36 am More in sorrow…
Ouch! But thanks to all who helped.
I haven’t found the error in the multiple choice questions, except that it might be ‘the freedom of speech and religion’ which is in the first amendment to the constitution (and thus part of it). That would be splitting hairs (I suppose you could argue that the Bill of Rights is not a real law, but just a common name for the first 10 amendments to the constitution).
— Posted by bob Wilcox
31.March 15th,
2008
11:37 am I don’t care how nice William F. Buckley was to his friends. I don’t care that he was witty and erudite. I don’t even care that he was a cultured man who spoke several languages, played the harpsichord, and loved Bach. None of that really matters except to those who knew him personally. What does matter is that, with few exceptions, he was on the wrong side of every important issue facing post-World War II America. And it matters a great deal that he spawned the movement that has resulted in the disasters that the current occupant of the White House has unleashed upon the country and the world.
A man who never worked a day in his life out of necessity, William F. Buckley could be counted on to oppose the efforts of men and women who actually work for a living to obtain a bigger slice of the pie for themselves. He was always, however, eloquent in defense of the prerogatives of those who, like himself, were born into unearned wealth and privilege.
Likewise, Buckley was a consistent opponent of the struggles of non-wealthy minorities (blacks, Latinos, women, gays, you name it) to claim for themselves the rights that he took for granted for himself. The National Review, the magazine that he founded and funded, might as well have been a Klan publication, just disguised with better grammar and an impressive vocabulary, when it dealt with most minority issues.
He was an apologist for McCarthyism and his first book was an attack on the very idea of intellectual and academic freedom in universities. He suggested that people with AIDS be tattooed. He called a debating opponent (Gore Vidal) a “queer” on national television. The list goes on and on. He reserved his compassion for those who didn’t need it and his scorn for the unfortunate. That he did so behind a façade of wit and charm makes it worse, in my opinion.
— Posted by MTS
32.March 15th,
2008
11:43 am I have learned more about WFB from the comments than from Cavett’s piece.
— Posted by John Podsiadlo
33.March 15th,
2008
11:44 am More in Thoreau than in Ingres would have been better understood by lispers, but alas Thoreau was not a painter.
— Posted by Joel Wapnick
34.March 15th,
2008
11:46 am Reflecting upon the snottiness that William F. Buckley wallowed in from time to time–it makes
my number one wish (as I rub the lamp) to be the
making of dueling fashionable again and that dear
Billy would be held accountable at dawn!
— Posted by Michael M. Macara
35.March 15th,
2008
11:55 am Jamestown did not fail. The capital of the colony was there until 1692, when it was moved to higher ground. James City shire, which included Jamestown, persists. The colony, originally centered there, is now Virginia. This is as permanent as the questioned intended that to mean. Salem was founded 1626, Providence 1636, Philadelphia per se even later. So was one of the other answers wrong, Mr. Cavett ?
— Posted by geo
36.March 15th,
2008
11:57 am OK, I give up. Where’s the mistake in the quiz?
— Posted by ex-Khobar Andy
37.March 15th,
2008
11:58 am The first time I ever saw Mr. Buckley was in the late 70’s and on his TV show. I was in my early 20’s at the time and my first thought, equally admiring and suspicious, was “This is the American prince!” Watching him was deeply and terribly affirming of the sense I’d always had that the powerful elite of our country held me and my loved ones in utter contempt. Contempt for our ignorance, contempt for our poverty, both of which, according to their view, we roundly deserved, having brought them on ourselves through poor breeding, indolence, and the stubborn refusal to recognize our betters.
Thanks so much to Greg Tamblyn for mentioning the youtube videos of debates with Noam Chomsky. I can’t wait to see them. My own favorites were a discussion with the Dalai Lama and a debate with John Kenneth Galbraith.
The Dalai Lama had with him an interpreter. At one point in the discussion, Mr. Buckley protests that the interpreter “is speaking English!” “Yes,” replies the Dalai Lama “but much simpler.”
As for the debate with Mr. Galbraith, I remember that on the subject of trickle down theory, Mr. Galbraith invoked his grandfather and said that if you feed enough oats to the donkeys even the birds will get some. Now, I much admire Mr. Galbraith and it might be that I actually heard him say that in some other context and have only retroactively juxtaposed it with Mr. Buckley. But, if so, I think it is a very apt juxtaposition and one that highlights a truly noble use of wit.
— Posted by Pallas Stanford
38.March 15th,
2008
12:06 pm My only encounter with WFB occurred perhaps 35 years ago, when he was guest speaker at a dinner hosted by a professional society. The person who introduced Buckley was an older man whom some knew to have a terminal illness that may have affected his cognition. He spoke at great length and with many attempts at wit and erudition that fell flat before an audience that wanted only to hear the headliner speak. When Buckley finally was allowed to rise, he avoided the obvious remarks one could make about speakers who drone on far too long, instead offered brief thanks for a kind introduction, then launched into his prepared remarks.
Though I now despise the politics WFB espoused, I will always remember the humanity and compassion of a brilliant duelist who could demolish any opponent but knew when to hold his fire.
— Posted by James Morrison
39.March 15th,
2008
12:13 pm I was trying to formulate my netagive thoughts about WFB but MTS has just said it much better than I could. He has charmingly assured that the resources and assets of the United States would end up in the hands of a very few. The rest of us don’t really appreciate the charm.
— Posted by Gene Matthews
40.March 15th,
2008
12:17 pm A wizzard with words, but a very poor communicator.
— Posted by John Cornell
41.March 15th,
2008
12:21 pm My one contact with Buckley was over 25 years ago. I was appalled to read in his column published in the Albuquerque Journal his statement that Mexico had supported Nazi Germany in WWII. I sent a letter to him via the newspaper (this was in those bygone days before email) and a few weeks later I was surprised to receive a letter from him, actually admitting he had erred. Buckley’s defense was that when he was in Mexico during the 1940s, he remembered hearing pro-Nazi sentiments from the people he socialized with. And without checking the facts, wrote that calumny in his column. For the record, as I told him, Mexico declared war on the Axis in 1942 after a couple of its merchant ships were torpedoed by German submarines. It was an ally of the US and contributed a volunteer fighter squadron that saw action in the Pacific with US forces. I thought this was important to clarify because Mexico, then as now, was not generally portrayed sympathetically or accurately in the American media. I was amused by Buckley’s response and could only conclude that he palled around with a bunch of Nazis during his student days in Mexico City.
— Posted by Carl Mora
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About Dick Cavett
The host of “The Dick Cavett Show” — which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1975 and on public television from 1977 to 1982 — Dick Cavett is also the coauthor of two books, “Cavett” (1974) and “Eye on Cavett” (1983). He has appeared on Broadway in “Otherwise Engaged” “Into the Woods” and as narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” and has made guest appearances in movies and on TV shows including “Forrest Gump” and “The Simpsons.” Mr. Cavett lives in New York City and Montauk, N.Y.
Monthly Archives Select Month March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 Popular Tags
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March 14
41 commentsUncommoner Than Thou: Buckley, Part Two
A very different story about how William F. Buckley ruled the airwaves.
March 7
226 commentsA Most Uncommon Man
A friendship begins with some on-the-air viciousness.
February 29
325 commentsThe Night of My Nights, No Longer
The Academy Awards ceremonies are almost unrelievedly bad–it’s amazing to recall that, once, you actually wished the broadcast lasted longer.
February 22
78 commentsBobby and You
More on Bobby Fischer, including responses to readers.
February 8
270 commentsWas It Only a Game?
It was a very different Bobby Fischer who appeared on Dick Cavett’s show years ago.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Thursday, March 6, 2008
William F. Burkley, Jr.
From the Australian article posted earlier:
March 04, 2008
THE Bush administration has been skittled and the theo-cons and neo-cons who have dominated US politics are going down like ninepins. Do not send to know for whom the bell tolls. The deaths of Paddy McGuinness [known in Australia, presumably]and William F. Buckley Jr mark the end of the conservative surge.
While joining with Paul Keating [same comment] and Bob Carr [same] in believing Paddy's importance as a thinker was grossly overrated by his mourners - that he was more ranter than writer - I acknowledge the primacy of Buckley. He wrote very well indeed and from time to time was right as well as Right.
For example, we had long agreed that the so-called war on drugs was a greater catastrophe than the prohibition of liquor. A decade ago his National Review ran a cover story titled "The war on drugs is lost", and Buckley called for drugs to be decriminalised. Sadly, no one listened. And Buckley was a sceptic on Iraq.
I look back at Buckley's brand of conservatism as a golden age. He refused to open the National Review's pages to loonies such as the John Birch Society, whereas Paddy's Quadrant showed less quality control. And the stridency of conservative commentary in Australia would have made the fastidious Buckley wince. Even when Gore Vidal called him a fascist in a celebrated television brawl, Buckley's riposte that Vidal was a queer was delivered quite politely. Gore notwithstanding, Buckley enjoyed long-term friendships with such ideological opponents as Norman Mailer and John Kenneth Galbraith. (That sort of thing didn't happen here during the decade of right-wing triumphalism. No lions lying down with lambs. No Bolts lying down with Mannes, let alone Keatings with Albrechtsens.)
Monday, March 3, 2008
Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. -- From Australia
Read this. I tend to agree, as any reader of my Blog would surmise.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23313399-7583,00.html
Bill Kristol on William F. Buckley, Jr.
Here Kristol describes Bill's last night. Very nice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/opinion/03kristol.html?hp#
Friday, February 29, 2008
David Brooks on William F. Buckley, Jr.
One more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/opinion/29brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin#
What a gentle, good man, Buckley. Brooks too.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Blog on William F. Buckley, Jr.
Worth reading. A loveable man...
Click on Title above, or:
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/qa-with-sam-tanenhaus-on-william-f-buckley/?scp=2-b&sq=buckley&st=nyt
I'm creating a new Label for him. He's that important.
Charlie Rose Last Night on Wm F. Buckley, Jr.
It brought tears to my eyes. Torward the end of Buckley's life he was a defeated man. The whole hour was devoted to clips over the years on the Charlie Rose show. In one of the later interviews Charlie gently but firmly flat-out contradicted him over his rationale for the Bush War in Iraq, without Buckley putting up a fight.
The tears come at the end. You could tell that Charlie loved Bill. Bill had been an early booster of Charlie when the latter was an unknown, new to New York.
At Bill's wife's funeral Charlie was the last to file by Bill in the first row of the church. Bill looked up and saw him. And Bill then began to cry.
Listen to the last eulogy by Charlie. It will bring tears.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
William F. Buckley is Dead
Bill was one of my early heroes when I was at Yale. I came to believe he was one of the most dangerous men of our time. His demeanor in interviews the last couple of years indicated to me that he himself shuddered at what his ideas led to the last 7 years.
He toyed with words, concepts, and us.
The NYT prepared obituary is on line immediately.
Click on the Title above, or...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/business/media/27cnd-buckley.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
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