I have would like the so-called conservatives to answer one question: what are you conserving?
When I was young, I watched William F. Buckley's Firing Line on PBS. He was not a whiny complainer of unearned privilege demanding a return to an age when only being a white man sufficed for self-esteem. Yet, he never convinced me to be a conservative, only to improve my vocabulary.
What’s Left of William F. Buckley Jr. - by Brian Stewart is a review from The Bulwark of a new Buckley biography. I think our modern so-called conservatives detest history, but there is a good one here about the conservative movement and its creator.
There is also this:
For Buckley, the historical responsibility of conservatives was altogether clear: to offer a spirited defense of America, of its beliefs and rights and institutions. This raison d’être eventually left Buckley out of harmony with the conservative mainstream. With the ascendancy of an expressly anti-liberal and anti-intellectual right, Buckley’s mature and metropolitan one-nation conservatism seems to have outlived him by only a few years, which subverts the notion of a “revolution” that “changed America” proposed in Tanenhaus’s subtitle. In reality, the contemporary right has reverted to many of its old and dismal habits, exuding intellectual frivolity and endorsing a callous red-hatted populism in all of its folly and fury. The right today has joined the age-old assault upon America, deprecating its system, impugning its honor, and abandoning its unique place among the nations of the Earth.
The right has now grown untethered from a traditional emphasis on moderation and prudence. Mainstream conservatives have been seduced by a shallow partisanship that has made them receptive to illiberal ideas and corrupt tribunes. They have lost the ability to discern sound conservative principle from grotesque contrarianism. Most alarmingly, they have lost the power to recognize, much less to ostracize, demagogues of all stripes. If Buckley’s task was to reconcile the best of the American tradition with modernity, the new right is stuck with the paradox of holding a philosophy—or at least the patina of a philosophy—of “conserving” and an actual order it does not want to conserve.
Give me the Declaration of Independence, and Lincoln, and FDR; give me MLK, Jr, Eugene Debs, and Walt Whitman; and, if that makes me a conservative, then so be it. Take away white privilege, misogyny, and the worship of the rich; and if that makes me a liberal, then so be it.
Today, the group counselor stated he still had not made up his mind about my politics. Obviously, he does not read this blog.
Literary Hub published an essay about a book I read decades ago by my favorite American historian, Peter Balakian's What a 1964 Book About American Anti-Intellectualism Can Teach Us About the Trump Era. The following feels related to the Buckley biography review:
Trump’s weaponization of anti-Semitism and DEI panic to justify massive federal budget cuts do not mask his real goal: the destruction of knowledge producing institutions, critical thinking, free intellectual inquiry which are threats to his authoritarian efforts to destroy the rule of law and the Constitution. It is unprecedented. In his first months, President Trump’s assaults on universities, especially Harvard and Columbia, the Smithsonian museums, Library of Congress, NEA and NEH, Kennedy Center; the termination of the Department of Education, efforts to censor the press, media, and law firms; censoring facts about American history from slavery to climate science from the web sites of the EPA, NEA, NIH, Smithsonian, and banning books at the US military academy libraries make it clear that what Hofstadter saw as a malignant manifestation of embittered scapegoat hunting populist strains in our culture has now emerged with unprecedented political ferocity. This President’s disdain for critical thinking is tied to an ideological agenda.
We have descended into a new chapter of anti-intellectualism. McCarthyism was a short-lived phenomenon propelled by an alcoholic Republican Senator who died young during a sordid career. Richard Nixon, who was hostile to liberal culture, would have liked to go after higher education was wise enough to tell his conservative Republican colleagues when they advocated cutting huge amounts of federal funding to universities that “we’d be cutting off our nose to spite our face.”
Hofstadter would have recognized Trump’s brand of businessman anti-intellectualism. From gold toilet seats to gold airplanes, Trump is the monetized man exploiting his power as president to make billions—even issuing meme coins of himself and his wife and promoting monetizing crypto currency programs to enrich himself; he posts on social media “it’s a great time to get rich,” or “it’s a great time to invest.” It has been documented that his private business practices have defrauded banks, contractors, and customers. His claims that elite universities are full of lunatics, radicals and Marxists, anti-Semites and racists are not only ludicrous lies, but propaganda designed to alienate a segment of the nation from higher education and distract Americans from the deep sources of Anti-Semitism and racism ensconced in the MAGA movement.
I really do suggest reading Hofstader. He may not have the heft in academia he once enjoyed, he has a sense of the country's greatness - and weaknesses:
The American university is the envy of the world—drawing students from every continent—for the intense faculty mentoring that fosters young adults into professional and civic life. The twenty-first century American university is one of the great achievements of modern civilization and the destruction of the relationship between higher education, the federal government, and the business community would set America back to a parochial era that we left a long time ago.
A liberal democracy depends on its intellectual and cultural producers to pursue their work with both freedom and support from the wider society and the federal government—if these are destroyed, we will slide into an authoritarianism that will smash 250 years of great building. Reading Hofstadter now will give Americans a long view of how vital intellectuals have been to our nation from the great minds of the Founding Fathers to today’s intellectual work-force from Cambridge to San Diego, from Seattle to Miami. His book reifies what Americans need to know in order to resist this irrational paroxysm of anti-intellectualism so we can emerge—as Hofstader did from the McCarthyist 50s—into a new age of moral and cultural growth that followed that period, and I believe will follow this one.
Nick Bowlin's Easy to Exploit (The Drift) points out something ignored or elided in the Buckley book review, the current conservatives pursuit of power of the sake of power, not for any ideals.
The market is constantly widening the gap between economic winners and losers in America, thanks in large part to the policy consensus embraced by both parties. As Hochschild’s research shows, the punishment many rural Americans have received has fueled reactionary hatred and resentment that spoils potential economic alliances. The mistake — and it’s a common one — is to take electoral results as definitive, to regard rural people as possessing fixed, unchanging political attitudes. Their attitudes, like political attitudes everywhere, are products of history, shaped by the distinctive structural forces of the places where they live. Many references to the urban-rural divide are attempts, at times imprecise, to have a conversation about the rift between places that attract capital, talent, and investment, and those where resources are removed, where investments dry up, and where populations dwindle. This is the divide that matters.
Who benefits from these divides other than political leaders using them to retain power. Why do conservatives put up with this?
Plenty of space below in the comments section for your responses, conservatives.
sch 7/10
