Tag Archives: William F. Buckley

… but he won the war.

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Last Monday, January 20th, MLK Day in the U.S., the Trump Inauguration Day in the U.S., and Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year, worldwide, I’m guessing or, at least for those of us technically suffering through winter, hemispherically, I was finishing up Nicholas Buccola’s The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race In America.

A confluence of most incongruous events on the surface. A trick of the calendar, let’s assume, as opposed to some sign from above, Above, being wherever you may spiritually locate it. Although, I’d guess my choice of reading material some two or three weeks prior to the new/old presidency may have been somewhat influenced by the coming events.

Here’s the short version:

If William F. Buckley Jr. is seen as a godfather of modern conservatism, a pillar of the ideology born from a complete rejection of FDR’s New Deal, then what cannot be denied is the racism sitting deep in the conservative soul. It’s rife with it. It’s a core tenet.

Buckley, if he could be summoned from the depths of Hell to which he was surely hurled some nine months before America elected its first Black president, if a true Christian God actually exists, would still be denying that he and his ilk were racists. All in good time, he constantly chided desegregationists, in debates, TV appearances and on the pages of his National Review. When you’ve proven yourself up to the standards of Western civilization, as judged by your white superiors according to a theory of social hierarchy in which Buckley, funnily enough, had placed himself at the top of.

Buckley wasn’t fighting the expansion of the franchise to just Black voters, you see. Given his druthers, he’d restrict the right to vote to great swaths of the American public who were already allowed into polling booths. That’s not racism. That’s elitism. As the Founding Fathers intended.

Donald Trump and his ilk may not be up to the elite standards that Buckley envisioned. More to the Money Born than Manor Born. But make no mistake here. Donald Trump and is ilk are the bastard offspring of William F. Buckley Jr. His championing of ‘States’ Rights’, his Constitutional ‘originalism’, his ‘understanding but not condoning’ both official and unofficial use of violence in dealing with civil rights activists under the guise of maintaining ‘social order’, his contributions to the Southern Strategy that first swept Richard Nixon into the White House and cemented in place by every Republican politician since, all have contributed mightily to situation we find ourselves in currently.

There is a direct line from William F. Buckley Jr. to Elon Musk’s Sieg Heil on stage at the Capital One arena last Monday night.

Buckley would’ve sneered-leered-smiled but vociferously contend. That wasn’t what I meant at all.

I refuse, however, to give such a despicable man the last word here.

Let that go to James Baldwin [edited by Nicholas Buccola from an interview with Kenneth Clark on Perspectives: Negro and the American Promise], the man Buckley dubbed the ‘eloquent menace’.

“There are days, this is one of them, when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How precisely you’re going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I’m terrified at the moral apathy–the death of the heart–which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human… And this means that they have become… moral monsters.”

Assessing Our New Mayor’s Movement

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As we breathlessly await firm news of Mayor-elect Rob Ford’s committee appointments, I am trying to convince myself to look upon this not as a horrible, disfiguring moment in the city’s history but as…an opportunity. Yes, an opportunity. It isn’t a matter of perspective. No, it’s what kind of conservative our incoming mayor turns out to be.

Kinds of conservatives, you ask? How many kinds of conservatives are there? You’ve got your run-of-the-mill, always irate, incoherent kind, flailing about in the choppy, churning waters of cognitive dissonance and then there’s…? Help me out here. Other kinds of conservatives?

Well yes, at least in theory. There once were conservatives roaming about in the wild who were of Burkean stock. Wary of excess of any stripe including rabid anti-governmentalism, your daddies’ conservatives did not seek to dismantle the New Deal/Just Society welfare state in its entirety. They simply wanted to reshape it in their own vision. Red Tories, let’s call them. These guys were the elitists of their time. Democracy was all well and good as long as there wasn’t too much of it.

Movement Conservatives, on the other hand, the spawn of William F. Buckley-Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher, are a lot less amiable. Theirs is “a revolutionary doctrine hostile to any public enterprise except the military” and, I will add, national security except for that whole no junk touching stream of unconsciousness that has recently emerged. They have manifested themselves in the likes of George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and, to some extent, our current federal Conservative government. There is no form of government that doesn’t drive them batty with inchoate anger. To their minds, democracy is merely a vehicle to smash up democratic institutions.

Much was made during this past municipal campaign about Rob Ford being our very own Tea Bagger, a bigger, louder, less foxy Sarah Palin. It’s a comparison that goes only so far. Yes, he was angry and adeptly tapped into, exploited and manufactured a wide swath of anger in the electorate. He made claims of reclaiming City Hall for the little guy. A deep streak of xenophobia, homophobia and misogyny runs through his core.

Yet, like the earlier strain of conservatism, Rob Ford seems more driven to eradicate government excesses rather than government itself. In fact, he may be prone to more democratic impulses than is normal in conservatives of any stripe. When he says he wants to take back City Hall, it is largely free of the racist, faux-grassroots chant we heard during the U.S. midterm election campaign. Ford actually sounds like an honest to god populist in wanting to give the reins of power to the people instead of his hated bureaucracy. (The irony of this is that the last thing his most fervent devotees would want or know what to do with is to actually exercise that power.)

Therein lies the opportunity at hand. On Metro Morning last week to promote the book Local Motion: The Art of Civic Engagement in Toronto, Dave Meslin told host Matt Galloway how, back in 2006, when Meslin was involved with the City Idol project that sought to shine a spotlight on a diverse set of council candidates, then councillor Rob Ford was very helpful in giving his time and advice to the proceedings. Ford’s face now adorns the endorsement page of Meslin’s latest adventure in advancing democracy, RaBIT, Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto. By all accounts, our next mayor is fully on board for helping further the cause of democratic renewal.

So, fighting our way past the recoil phase of October 25th’s fallout, we can prepare to seize what may be a truly golden moment for positive change on the democratic front. A politician elected to office who truly wants to invest more powers in the populace. It is a gift we should be ready to receive and not allow him to renege on or get horribly wrong (i.e. simply cutting council numbers in half). This may be the only common ground we find with this administration. Let’s not waste the opportunity to take full advantage of it.

— exhortingly submitted by Cityslikr