October 16, 2008
They keep surprising me. They shouldn't given the complacency of Bill Buchanan and most of the Michigan GOP. Conservatives, I mean. Christopher Buckley, son of WFB, Jr., has endorsed Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States of America.
I would like to blame this on Manhattan. Home of the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, CBS, NBC, the New York Review of Books, Dissent, the Village Voice, Broadway, the New School, the headquarters of the Episcopal Church...
But hidden on the side streets of the Skinny Island are First Things, the New Criterion, Commentary, not to mention the Power House, residence of the Archbishop of New York.
On the Daily Beast site, Mr. Buckley lays out the argument, a desultory one that stops bravely at the surface of this desultory campaign. (And, given, that his mother died last year, and his father only this past February, it feels a cold hand to the chest to read it is a "good thin my parents aren't alive" -- I might lose my trust fund. Sluggish, clumsy writing from the son of the National Review's eloquent founder.)
Mostly, he is disappointed in McCain. Who isn't? The senator's hot/cold barely running campaign (maybe he thinks he's "standing" for parliament) has left many dispairing. But to say that Sen. Obama has a "first class temperament" a la President Roosevelt? This is lazy thinking garbed in campus slouchwear.
Like so many of his class, his identity is wrapped in school colors. We hear about "Yale men" and "Harvard men" as if these consideratons were central to the leadership of this country. The "best and brightest" have made a mess of things, says Buckley, not long after praising Sen. McCain (an "Annapolis Man?") for supporting the surge -- forgetting that it was a Yale man, George W. Bush, who made the decision that preserved American integrity and a legitimate military victory.
The last eight years have been exhausting for the country. No one wanted a "war on terror" (to use the Economist's irony quotes). We got one anyway. Mr. Buckley does not mention September 11th. That was so long ago. But it was only last week that the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Martti Ahtisaari, a Finnish diplomat. He defends the war in Iraq because "I know that about a million people have been killed by the government of Iraq, I do not need those weapons of mass destruction." A million slaughtered should be mass enough for anyone outside of Turtle Bay.
Buckley's endorsement is a breezy walk along leafy Central Park West. It is the noncommittal committment of a man who calls himself a "conservative/libertarian whatever." Libertarianism is a license to live the Whatever Life. And Buckley is living it to a full glibness. It is a life of low threshold boredom. The Republican party is boring; Bush is boring; the war is boring; old white-haired men talking about duty and committment are boring.
Somewhere someone in a church basement in Manhattan has started a support group for Excitement Addiction. It's the writer's disease. Shared by academics and publishers and news editors. Sen. Obama's "first class temperament" sounds a lot like "he's just more fun than McCain." As if the Oxford Union was authentic civics, rather than a stale rerun.
The fact is civics is boring, mostly. It is the work that has to get done. The effort that must counter all the challenges and forces confronting civitas: national security, Constitutional integrity, multiculturalism, post-modern goofism, secularism (Buckley seems to have jettisoned the family Catholicism when he jokes about "secular prayers") post-opportunity civil rightsism. All the stuff all of us are tired of thinking and talking about.
Sen. Obama's self-regard expresses itself in racial paranoia. People hate me/love because I'm black. Mr. Buckley's delusion: his views are relevant only because of who his father is. But, Mr. Buckley wrote, until this week, for his father's greatest achievement, The National Review. He is a bestselling author. Famous and rich in his own right. But like the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, he mistakes doctrinal confusion for "diversity of thought." He calls conservatives "arteriosclerotic" in their thinking. The underlying principles are never addressed. They might get in the way of good time BillMaher-style.
The greatest disappointment is bundling himself with those who believe that the "religious right" has ruined the decorous life style of the Republican party. Gov. Sarah Palin is the incarnation of that victory. Enthusiastic, focussed on the "mundane," speaking the vulgate of the truly vulgar. Gun-toting, Bible-gripping. Snowmobile races not the America's Cup. I don't doubt there's a bit of class snobbery at NR, but Buckley's condescension to her and those she represents -- working people -- betrays the Reagan Democrats who made conservatism victorious in the eighties. The Reagan revolution that his father worked so hard to see happen.
Buckley is oblivious to Senator Obama as the incarnation of the extreme Left's takeover of the Democratic Party. Abortion is not an issue with Mr. Buckley. No surprise. But, neither is local control of schools; a vigorously resistant Constitution understandable to voting Americans; and an institutional and popular culture that continues to put the young at risk. Obama's presidency will be the final mile in the long march through the institutions. As Bill Ayers once said, "is this a great country or what?"
Christopher Buckley "hopes" that the senator will grow and develop in office (something that Gov. Palin would be incapable of?) and come to common sense conclusions and policies. Where is that in evidence in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Compton, Oakland, Detroit, Pontiac, Cincinnati, and the District of Columbia where the Democratic Left is as entrenched as a unionized civil servant in a no-show job. And what in Sen. Obama's life offers dim hope for change of mind or heart? He spent fifteen of his forty-seven years in that isolation tank known as the American Law School where nothing gets in and only delusions and perpetual dissent come out.
After Mr. Buckley's father died last February, many friends and colleagues noted again and again that Buckley pere rarely talked politics at home or play. His enthusiasms for music, literature, writing, art, sailing, and friendship took private priority over the public work of the National Review. Perhaps that is why WFB never found his principles tedious and "arterisclerotic." He knew what politics was for. He knews its limitations and its potential. And for him, politics was the necessity that made the important possible. Much else was "rendered nugatory." When Abbie Hoffman said that if politics isn't fun then it isn't worth doing, he articulated civic culture as portrayed in film and song, soundstages and classrooms. And apparently in Christopher Buckley's Manhattan as well. But not his father's.
William F. Buckley, Jr -- now there was a man with a first class temperament.
Sam Macomb
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