WFB Would Be Proud
By Kathleen Parker
Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Barack Obama – followed by his abrupt departure from the back page of the magazine his father founded, National Review – has caused a ripple of contempt from the conservative right. Nay, make that a tsunami of hostility. An avalanche of venom. A cataclysm of … well, you get the idea. People are mad. Good riddance, they say, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out…
So why did he do it? Because he had to. It’s in his genes…
When WFB created the modern conservative movement, he didn’t call a neighborhood meeting and whisper, "Come along now." He stood athwart history and yelled, "Stop!" His son, though he customarily takes the more circuitous route to the revolution via satire, is now merely answering WFB’s original call to political activism. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, the younger Buckley said: "I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me."
In 1955, when WFB announced his new magazine and explained the reasons for it, he described conservatives as "non-licensed nonconformists":
"Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity."
Fast-forward half a century, and the old is the new. Radical conservatives are still having an interesting time of it, though these days they are being mutilated by fellow "conservatives." The well-fed Right now cultivates ignorance as a political strategy and humiliates itself when its brightest sons seek sanctuary in the solitude of personal honor.
The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing – the "kooks" the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right – have created a party no longer attentive to its principles. Instead, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in a blog post on thedailybeast.com explaining his departure from National Review, eight years of "conservatism" have brought us "a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance."
Republicans are not short on brainpower – or pride – but they have strayed off course. They do not, in fact, deserve to win this time, and someone had to remind them why. Christopher Buckley, ever the swashbuckling heir to his father’s defiant spirit, walked the plank so that the sinking mother ship might right itself. No doubt his seafaring father is cheering from heaven: "Ahoy there, Christo! Well done, my son."
Over the recent years, when I listen to Jerry Falwell, or James Dobson, or others on the Christian Right, in my mind, I argue with them as they talk – and my arguments are Biblical! When they rant about homosexuality, I say inside, "Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself" or "Judge not that Ye be not Judged." And when I listen to young Psychiatrists and Psychologists make fun of Sigmund Freud, the same thing happens inside. I taught a Freud Course a jillion times, and still stand in awe at his mastery of things mental – starting as he did, literally, from scratch. But the place where this kind of thing happens the most is when I listen to the people running our government who now call themselves Conservatives. When lunatics like Karl Rove, or Rush Limbaugh, or Ann Coulter, or Dick Cheney, or William Kristol start talking, I find myself recalling Barry Goldwater‘s Conscience of a Conservative, or those great dialogues of William F. Buckley, or yes, even the wild-eyed Ayn Rand.
I’ve always said that my personal idol was Rosa Parks. She revolutionized the whole world with a simple word, No!. And that’s what Jesus did. And that’s what Freud did. And that’s what Buckley did too ["He stood athwart history and yelled, Stop!"].
When Chris Buckley quit the National Review, I
wrote:
In the time it took me to write this post and format the article, the title went from Sorry Dad, I was Fired to Sorry Dad I was Sacked to Buckley Bows Out of National Review. I think his dad might have been proud. William F. Buckley was an ideological Conservative, not someone who borrowed the moniker to wrap around elitism, or racism, or xenophobia, or pugilism, or greed. In those days, we didn’t hate each other – we argued. I’ll have to admit that some of the things that have stuck with me over the years came from some of those arguments…
… back to Buckley, he’s a chip off the old block and isn’t going to have any trouble finding work. Maybe there will be a new Magazine for those "other Conservatives"…
One of the fun things about being old is that you get to look back at history, and particularly your own history. You can be proud of the the right things, and have enough distance to even look at the places where you were very wrong. William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Ayn Rand were important figures for me back a half a century ago when my mind was young and trying to get to know itself. For one thing they preached against excess, and rationalizations, and the inevitable problems of welfare states. But Karl Marx was an important thinker for me too. His ideas about the evils of Capitalism and its greed were important ideas for me. Still are. I never bought Communism, because it was there before me, and was nothing but a totalitarian wash-out. It’s a perspective, not a practical solution because it ignores the individual’s humanity. But that doesn’t mean Marx didn’t have something important to say.
I ended up living my life and voting as a "Liberal," though I don’t like the term [because it has become so caricatured in recent years]. That’s something I’m proud of. But what Chris Buckley reminds me of is that my objections to the Bush Administration, and the whole Nixon/Reagan/BushI/BushII Dynasty is that they aren’t my kind of Conservatives – the kind I came to respect back in my salad years. They use the words, but hide behind them. They never got the principles. I’m not even sure they read the books, because they’ve become the very thing these people fought against. They all cut taxes [on the rich, mostly] but then spent wildly and irresponsibly. What’s Conservative about that? They became pugalists, unilateral pugalists, more modeled on ancient Rome than anything civilized. And they opened the doors to levels of Capitalist corruption that are unequalled in our history – the worst aspect of freedom – while ignoring the best parts by spying on us and ignoring the humanity of the rest of the world [and a lot of us]. They perverted the words of their strong thinkers to rationalize petty power grabbing and greed.
So, good on Chris Buckley. He’s my kind of Conservative. And he sees in Barack Obama what I see – those same thoughtful qualities he saw in his father…
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.