Buckley

I was sick yesterday so didn't have an opportunity to note William F Buckley's passing. John Nichols has some thoughts here, but I was really moved by Rick Perlstein's tribute:

William F. Buckley was my friend.

I'm hard on conservatives. I get harder on them just about every day. I call them "con men." I do so without apology. And I cannot deny that William F. Buckley said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting as well. I've written about some of them. But this is not the time to go into all that. My friend just passed away at the age of 82. He was a good and decent man. He knew exactly what my politics were about--he knew I was an implacable ideological adversary--yet he offered his friendship to me nonetheless. He did the honor of respecting his ideological adversaries, without covering up the adversarial nature of the relationship in false bonhommie. A remarkable quality, all too rare in an era of the false fetishization of "post-partisanship" and Broderism and go-along-to-get-along. He was friends with those he fought. He fought with friends. These are the highest civic ideals to which an American patriot can aspire.

How should we treat our political enemies? It's a moral conundrum, one that weaves its way into every waking second of life in a place like DC. You know someone's ideas are wrong-headed, or ignorant, or event shot-through with true ugliness, but you also recognize that your opponents are human beings, capable of acting decently, of being good. I'm working on a piece right now that is, in some senses, about the possibility of there even being a "good faith conservatism." I'm skeptical, but also aware that the place in which ideology overwhelms basic empathy is a dangerous one.

Comments (8)

1. snopes.com:

   '...The mundane explanation is that J Street was likely omitted simply because the letters I and J were often indistinguishable from each other (especially when handwritten), and in 18th century English they were still largely interchangeable. (The 1740 "New General English Dictionary" published in London had a single section for I and J, and the standard identification Thomas Jefferson used on his personal possessions was "T.I.") Having both an "I" and a "J" street would have been redundant at best and confusing at worst...'

   Posted by HonestLiberal at 02/28/2008 @ 10:50am

2. Mr Hayes, the problem comes from a rejection of the idea that somebody can have a different opinion...and not be the embodiment of pure evil.

   Not sure what "ugliness" you want to attribute to Mr Buckley...but I've seen it where if you express doubts about a Federally-run health care system, you "want poor people to die from no health care"...or conversely, if you think the war in Iraq is a failure, you "want the terrorists to destroy America"....or if you think the Drug War is wasteful and useless, you "want kids to shoot up heroin in junior high school"

   (BTW, all of the above legitimate opinions....are aligned with William F. Buckley)

   Posted by Mask at 02/28/2008 @ 11:05am

3. "capable of acting decently"

   Quite.

   For many years WFBuckley not only supported segregation, but touted the superiority of the white race.

   It was only AFTER the Freedom Riders & Dr. MLKing made racism unfashionable -- much in the way the Shoah made anti-semitism unfashionable, by their public suffering -- that WFBuckley & his magazine changed their tune.

   Nothing before that -- slavery, lynching, Jim Crow humiliations & deprivations -- dented his or his magazine's open racism.

   Posted by sloper at 02/28/2008 @ 11:25am

4. Posted by SLOPER 02/28/2008 @ 11:25am

   The question is whether racism defined Buckley, and the fact that he and his magazine were capable of changing their tune - when many still have not - indicates it wasn't a central feature of his thought.

   By all means, hold people accountable, but let's also be careful not to reduce all their ideas to their worst ideas.

   Posted by srjenkins at 02/28/2008 @ 11:40am

5. "The question is whether racism defined Buckley, and the fact that he and his magazine were capable of changing their tune - when many still have not - indicates it wasn't a central feature of his thought."

   No, it does not indicate any such thing. It only indicates that he was embarrassed into dropping racial superiority as a public stance. Neither WFBuckley nor his magazine ever turned around and supported civil rights.

   Moreover class superiority always remained central to his thought & public performance.

   Posted by sloper at 02/28/2008 @ 12:01pm

6. Posted by SLOPER 02/28/2008 @ 12:01pm |

   SLOPER, Robert Byrd (D-WV) was an actual member of the Ku Klux Klan and upto as late as a 1999 interview was un-apologetically using the "N-word" as a reference to "low class" people....

   yet when he opposed Bush on the war in Iraq or on Constitutionality, he's hailed as the "Dean of the US Senate" and a progressive fighter--

   BLOG | Posted 03/02/2005 @ 3:44pm "I Am Free--To Think--To Speak" by Katrina vanden Heuval

   BLOG | Posted 05/10/2006 @ 2:53pm Byrd Is Soaring by John Nichols

   BLOG | Posted 02/16/2006 @ 6:38pm Lonely Defenders of Civil Liberties by John Nichols

   Posted by Mask at 02/28/2008 @ 12:14pm

7. Buckley inherited progressive views on race?

   Rubbish. he was a seg, for many years. He had little choice by the time we voted MLK Day, years after the assassination, if he still wanted a TV audience..

   Strenuoulsy debated Wallace?

   Nonsense.

   Wallace performed a great hearted act of repentance, no such behavior from Buckley, merely a shifting to the socially more acceptable.

   As for Buckley's performance in the late 60s, vide his gay-bashing of Gore Vidal,his endless fanfare for the Vietnam war, and his gross misrepresentation of his own military service.

   Buckley was a very clever & entertaining performer. He was no deep thinker. And he beat the drum for class superiority unceasingly. Without a trust fund, however, to buy & build his platform, he would have been a minor player.

   Posted by sloper at 02/28/2008 @ 3:41pm

8. He was no deep thinker.----Posted by SLOPER 02/28/2008 @ 3:41pm

   Okay, SLOPER...name a conservative you regard as a deep thinker?

   (Here's where you can joke or not "There ARE none!"...and prove that it's all about the ideology to you, not an honest assessment of the man...as John Nichols and others here have given)

   Posted by Mask at 02/28/2008 @ 4:18pm