Tracy Sugarman and Bill Buckley have spent their lives using film, words and illustrations to affect social change.

Bill Buckley trains his camera on the past -- and the future

Now in their 80s — but not slowing down — they brought their 20-minute film, “Immigrant from America,” to the Westport Arts Center last night.  Their mission:  to inspire youngsters from Westport and Bridgeport to keep up the fight.

About 20 students from Bridge Academy – the renowned Bridgeport charter school — and 10 involved with the Westport Youth Film Festival watched the documentary, a probing look at how African Americans used education, economic strength and politics to overcome racial barriers.

Tracy and Bill then led a discussion about stereotypes that remain, 40 years after their film was made.  They challenged the teenagers from both communities to look outside themselves, and work toward a better world.

The filmmakers urged the Westport and Bridgeport youngsters to tell their own stories.  They can use traditional mediums like movies, art and literature, new ones like computer graphics and the internet — and those that have not yet been invented.

Everyone has something to say.  Personal stories are powerful.  After hearing from 2 men who have spent decades telling their own stories, and helping others tell theirs, last night’s audience seems ready to pick up the torch.

Could it be that broadcasting rewards the worst instincts in both politics and religion?

What kind of religious leader is most successful on television, for example? The slickest, greediest, most egomaniacal and self-absorbed—Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell. The best work in that field is done at the grassroots level by the “foot soldiers” in their places of worship, or by a Billy Graham, who took his ministry to the people, not to the sound stage.

In politics, what kind of commentator is most successful on the airwaves? The confrontational, judgmental, provocative, egomaniacal and self-absorbed—Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity.

What a shame that broadcasting has eclipsed the written word in our culture. Writing fosters reflection, depth, self-criticism. Broadcasting fosters shallow spontaneity, emotionalism, self-promotion.

The best political commentary on television tends to come from writers and columnists like George Will, David Brooks, Pat Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, and Michael Kinsley. The cable news and talk radio commentators so predominant today can’t hold a candle to Walter Lippmann and Bill Buckley.

The most profound religious thought, I believe, comes from our best writers—Henry David Thoreau, or, if you read his less popular works, Mark Twain.

Quote for the day: Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. —Thoreau

Newsprism

At his speech to Republican Party state chairs today, RNC Chairman Michael Steele engaged in some fascinating name dropping.

First, he invoked three conservative legends: Edmund Burke, William Buckley, and Ronald Reagan. Burke is the intellectual founding father of conservatism; Buckley was its greatest American proponent; and Reagan its most compelling American icon. The renewal of the GOP couldn’t be based on a more stable foundation, and by invoking these three, Steele demonstrated a depth sorely lacking in other contemporary conservative figures.

Steele went on to suggest that Republicans should stop attacking Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Tim Geithner, and Barney Frank and concentrate their fire on President Obama and his policies. Again, Steele demonstrated depth and directness where too many on the right have become loose cannons engaged in a circular firing squad.

Finally, Steele alluded to the two most toxic voices on the right, a “conservative talk radio host” and a “former vice president,” without actually naming them. While his criticism was implicit rather than explicit—testament to the ruthlessness and viciousness of both Limbaugh and Cheney—Steele clearly sees them as liabilities, and rightly so.

The fact that Cheney actually prefers Limbaugh over Colin Powell as the face of the party shows how out of touch the former veep has become. Limbaugh’s character alone should disqualify him from that role, while Powell’s is beyond reproach. Limbaugh is an entertainer with zero governing experience of any kind, while Powell has served as Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during nearly half a century of exemplary public service; how can any serious person even compare the two, much less dismiss Powell and lionize Limbaugh?

The most serious problem conservatism and the Republicans face is the success of shallow, mean-spirited, hyper partisan, McCarthyesque ideologues like Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage. These entertainers aren’t fit to shine the shoes of thoughtful figures like George Will, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Buchanan—the heirs of intellectual conservative giants like Buckley and Walter Lippmann.

If conservatism is to make a comeback, its leaders must go back to its roots in Burke’s foundational philosophy and Buckley’s brilliant rhetoric. Re-establishing conservatism’s intellectual integrity may be the first step towards finding its next Ronald Reagan.

With the exceptions of fundamentalists and senior citizens, the Republican Party is losing adherents across the board, but especially among the college-educated.

With a childish clown (and college dropout) like Rush Limbaugh as its most prominent voice, is it any wonder?

Newsprism

Being careful with my time and the subjects I read, I haven’t read any of Christopher Buckley’s books about his parents, writer/columnist William Buckley and his wife, Mrs. Buckley. But I get the impression that son Christopher has achieved a modicum of fame and some income out of writing about them. And now he has come out with another book, called Losing Mum and Pup. (Pup is his dad and mum is, of course, his mom).

Now, would you like to read a book about my mum and pup (mamma and papa)? The background is different, they were immigrant Italians. But their story is also interesting on its own way.  So I appeal to readers to let me know and if you’re for it, to give me also the names of a few publishers who might be interested.

The 2006 and 2008 elections were, at least in part, rejections of the extreme individualism of American conservatism in favor of a more collectivist approach to governance.

As a libertarian conservative, I value individual liberty above all else. But I also recognize that social order is a fundamental necessity if liberty is to thrive.

Absolute freedom is anarchy, and anarchy inevitably subverts individual freedom to the tyranny of the strong and the ruthless. What good is your absolute liberty if you’re oppressed by others who will inevitably abuse theirs?

Absolute freedom is not perfect freedom; far from it.

In its original conception by Edmund Burke, modern conservatism had at its center the wisdom inherent in tradition. Social traditions evolve out of social order; that which works to create and maintain order wins out over that which destroys or erodes it. Over time, traditions may change, but their essence always tends towards the maintainance of order.

To the Burkean conservative, society is conceived of not as a collection of individuals, but as a single organism, as in Herbert Spencer’s sociology.

In the West, a tradition of individual liberty and individual responsibility has nonetheless produced a dynamic and relatively stable civilization. Liberty unleashes the most innovative and creative human faculties. The French and American Revolutions (which Burke strongly criticized at the time) produced a paradox: a high degree of individualism can lead to a thriving and prosperous, well-ordered social organism.

Individualism and social order aren’t opposed to each other, but rather depend on each other. Still, there are limits, and over the last sixteen years, the limits of individualism have been stretched to the breaking point. The reckless and selfish indulgences of Bill Clinton, while damaging to the presidency, were, compared to the policies of the Bush years, superficial distractions from an otherwise relatively centrist administration.

The character and politics of both Baby Boomer presidents were formed in the social turmoil of the sixties, but with very different results. The Great Irony of post-Reagan conservatism is that the sixties generation so famous for its leftist radicalism has produced a kind of conservatism so undisciplined, and so self absorbed, that the label is nearly meaningless. If sixties leftism made a fetish out of progress, contemporary rightism has made a fetish out of self interest.

While he has plenty of company, most notably Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush is the poster child of this undisciplined, shallow, idealistic conservatism, which has no intellectual roots, little knowledge of its history, and a poor understanding of the singularity of circumstance. Neoconservatism as practiced by Bush isn’t conservatism at all. It’s far too radical and far too rigid, rejecting the vital center—social, cultural, and political—so brilliantly elaborated in the sociology of Edward Shils.

Neoconservatives, and to a lesser degree Republicans in general, act as if self interest is all that is needed to maintain social order. What Burkean conservatives understand is that enlightened self interest undergirds social order, while merely crass, atomistic self interest erodes it. In addition, Burkeans understand that social order evolves slowly, step-by-step and institution-by-institution, with every society unique, every circumstance singular. To attempt any radical change in a society is to invite unintended consequences, and to ignore the latent virtues that exist in traditional, socially centrist institutions like marriage.

This is why on the economic front, Bush and Limbaugh’s ideology has brought such disastrous consequences. The current crisis is largely the result of unregulated and unenlightened self interest, of naked greed masquerading as virtue, of an “I’ve got mine” attitude that isolates the individual from the traditional social context so necessary to true human liberty. Gated communities and McMansions, much like the sky-scraping commercial fortresses of our cities, where the affluent are insulated from the realities of the larger society, are sad, lonesome icons of the times.

On the foreign policy front, the Bush agenda has been an equally tragic disaster. The naive and idealistic notion that American-style democracy can be transplanted into the Middle East makes as much sense as the hope that one can chop down a fig tree and expect a cherry tree to spring up in its place. Does anyone really believe that if China were the world’s hegemon, she could impose communism on America by force? Iraq and Afghanistan can’t be transformed by brute force or good intentions. To attempt to do so was the height of arrogance, and of ignorance.

The more intellectual conservatives—George Will, Pat Buchanan, David Brooks, the late William Buckley—realized early on that Bush is no conservative, at least not in any sense that retains the essence of conservatism. Similarly, intellectual conservatives, like those at The American Conservative magazine and (sadly, less and less so) National Review hold their noses while their powerful ally, Rush Limbaugh, sacrifices far-sighted traditionalism on the altar of short-term individual self interest.

Imagine Limbaugh, who quite literally advocates gluttony and ridicules frugality in our use of oil, trying to explain to Burke (or to future generations) how maximizing consumption of natural resources, rather than conserving them, is conservative!

Buckley put it this way:

Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress. And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge.

The reaction to President Obama’s stimulus plan illustrates the crisis American conservatism faces as it attempts to balance individual liberty with social order. The same congressional Republicans who slathered bill after bill with pork during the Bush administration are suddenly aghast that Obama is spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in order to stabilize the economy they helped to devastate.

Hypocrisy reveals self indulgence and a lack of intellectual discipline, as when the same Rush Limbaugh who celebrates imprisoning marijuana users was found out to be a narcotics addict. Now, Limbaugh would rather see Obama’s social policies fail, with all the damage that would do to the greater society and the world, than see them succeed and discredit even slightly the extreme individualism of the contemporary far right. Conservatism is by its very nature center-ist, if I can coin a word, not radical or extremist.

Earlier this week, Rick Santelli of CNBC went on an on-air rant about how unfair it is that some citizens who made poor financial decisions may be bailed out by those of us who made wise ones. But wouldn’t a true conservative understand that sometimes circumstances demand some sacrifice by the few to maintain the social order necessary for all? To whine about necessary, albeit perhaps overreaching, solutions to a social crisis because you might lose a few dollars yourself is short-sighted and selfish, not conservative.

The conservative American Issues Project  condemns the $787 billion stimulus package in a TV ad that shows the three wise man as the narrator says, “Suppose you spent $1 million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born — and kept spending through today. A million dollars a day for more than 2,000 years. You would still have spent less money than Congress just did.” The upshot of the ad is that Jesus would oppose the stimulus… But what true conservative actually believes that Jesus, the champion of the poor, would oppose taxing the prosperous to protect those who are at risk in a communal crisis?

David Brooks, as usual, gets right to the heart of the matter. While he bemoans the irresponsibility of those whose greed and dishonesty led to the economic crisis, Brooks accepts, in “Money for Idiots”, that the stimulus package is, from the perspective of social order, a necessary evil. He begins,

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible. Over the last few months, we’ve made a hash of all that. The Bush and Obama administrations have compensated foolishness and irresponsibility.

But unlike all but three Congressional Republicans, and Limbaugh, Santelli, and the American Issues Project, Brooks is able to put rigid ideology and his own self interest aside and think about what’s best for the social order. He concludes:

The responsible have been punished along with the profligate….(But) it makes sense for government to try to restore some communal order. And the sad reality is that in these circumstances government has to spend money on…people who have been idiots.

The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.

I don’t relish the advance of socialism under the Democrats. But after eight years under Bush, maybe we need to turn left to get right.

And as conservatism demands, ideology must not trump the contingencies of the moment. The natural enemy of conservatism is radicalism, not liberalism. Part of the genius of the American system is that the people, that reservoir of traditional wisdom, can choose leaders suited to the circumstances of the day.

Excessive individualism subverts social order, which in turn threatens individualism itself. Freedom requires order. Until American conservatism learns that lesson, it risks being increasingly marginalized.

American conservatism must return to First Principles. We must reject the pop culture conservatism of Rush Limbaugh and the neoconservatism of George Bush in favor of the philosophical roots of conservatism: Edmund Burke’s traditionalism, Herbert Spencer’s organicism, and Edward Shils’ center-ism.

Newsprism

To begin with, I see the issue primarily as one of freedom or non-freedom. To the extent that a fraction of the individual’s time, which we will for convenience equate with his earnings, is a priori mortgaged to the government and against this will, then he is to that same extent not free. Since there is no money except the individual’s money, and since his money represents his labor or his savings or the produce of his tools, the assessment of that money by the State represents a direct levy on that individual’s freedom. Now, if it is true, then it must follow that the American people no longer value maximum individual freedom.

Excerpted from WF Buckley’s 1952 Commonweal essay by Jonah Goldberg.

Reefer Madness   [Andrew Stuttaford]

 

Look, I don’t blame Michael Phelps for apologizing. He has a living to earn, so he did what he had to do.

 

In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man’s failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone’s health—and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.   http://corner.nationalreview.com/

To my mind, you HAVE to have a great sense of humor to be a conservative in New England. And this article certainly seems to lend some credence to my assertion.

I don’t know what I like most about this article; that the study it talks about was conducted in Boston (there are still some conservatives left there?), that conservatives liked absurdist humor – all humor – even more than liberals, or the exposure of what borders on elitist bigotry among social scientists. This article has it all!!

When defining two types of humor – incongruity-resolution humor (your standard joke) and nonsense humor (think Far Side and Monty Python), Willibald Ruch came to some conclusions, apparently without much actual…what is that thing scientists claim to always be hunting for… oh yeah, evidence. On the former type:

Dr. Ruch and other researchers reported that this humor, with its orderly structure and reinforcement of stereotypes, appealed most to conservatives who shunned ambiguity and complicated new ideas, and who were more repressed and conformist than liberals.

Well, we’re off to a rollicking start, aren’t we? And on nonsense humor?

This humor was reported to appeal to liberals because of their “openness to ideas” and their tendency to “seek new experiences.”

So far everything checks out just as we’re usually told it does. It would seem like a pretty safe bet to run a study on these reports. And hey, whaddaya know, there’s a presidential election going on! This would be a great time to reinforce who’s against “openness to ideas” and “seeking new experiences”. But, of course, as with the best laid plans of mice and social scientists…

They expected conservatives to like traditional jokes…that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes. And because liberals had previously been reported to be more flexible and open to new ideas, the researchers expected them to get a bigger laugh out of unconventional humor…

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

HUH! I’m as shocked as you! Even better, though:

When we asked our respondents to self-report how funny they are, liberals indicated that they were funnier. This means that liberals are not finding life to be funnier, but they think they are.

I must admit: even as I write this, I’m having trouble supressing titters (a conservative having trouble with supression? The surprises just keep coming!). Helpfully, the article offers a couple of explanations for this…

“Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general,” said Dr. Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. “A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a sense that things need to change before one can be really happy.”

This is what Bill Buckley, that happy warrior, God rest his soul, summarized with “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton”. Loosely translated, don’t try to create heaven on earth. It doesn’t work and just leaves you -  and everyone affected by your decisions, however well-intentioned – disappointed. It’s not that we don’t see problems in the world, we just know that there are tradeoffs to every solution, which are sometimes worse than the problems.

Another possible explanation is that conservatives, or at least the ones in Boston, really aren’t the stiffs they’re made out to be by social scientists. When these scientists analyze conservatives, they can sound like Victorians describing headhunters in Borneo. They try to be objective, but it’s an alien culture.

And this is what I really came here to say. I have liberal friends and family who are gasping-for-air, fall-down-a-manhole-and-die riots and, charitably, insist I am, too. This study is just a snapshot of 300 folks on the streets of Boston. While it may show some indicators about worldviews and humor, it says much more, I think, about the researchers. And, helpfully, here’s what it says!

Could it be that the image of conservatives as humorless, dogmatic neurotics is based more on political bias than sound social science?

Maybe the stereotype of the dour, rigid conservative has more to do with social scientists’ groupthink and wariness of outsiders…

Conservatives often get pegged as being “anti-science” for their skepticism of reports that proffer explanations for data at odds with traditional understanding. But, while seemingly open with their findings, the above researchers, their assumptions, and their bafflement at their own results, are a perfect and glorious example of one of my favorite forms of humor…

Irony.

You just have to laugh!!

She’d never say so, and that’s part of why she’d have made a great vice presidential choice, but Peggy Noonan would have made a great vice presidential choice. Or at least, she’d have been at least as credible as Sarah Palin, whom she skewers (along with President Bush) in her column, “Pailin’s Failin’”, today:

…we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office.

Noonan is no less gentle on President Bush, whom she compares to Palin and, implicitly, to Dick Cheney:

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can’t be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush’s style the past few years, and see where it got us.

And then there’s this classic line describing the president’s role in the economic meltdown:

George W. Bush … darts out like the bird in a cuckoo clock to tell us we are in crisis.

Noonan winds down her column with a jab at certain elements in the conservative movement, and ends with a taunt. Noting that, with founder Bill Buckley fresh in the grave, National Review pushed son Christopher Buckley out for merely criticizing Palin, she scolds,

the conservative “intelligentsia” (my quotation marks) are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.

Anticipating being “bitterly attacked” herself, Noonan, with characteristic grace and humor, gently taunts the vulgar right:

At any rate, come and get me, copper(s).

The center, and therefore the country, has rejected the emptyheaded Rush/Rove reacionism of the far right—including the second-rate “intelligentsia” running most conservative magazines these days as well as Limbaugh’s more vicious and vengeful, more confrontational and controversial, colleagues, like Coulter, Hannity, Savage, and Horowitz—and in so doing has cemented Sarah Palin’s legacy as John McCain’s Harriett Miers.

Noonan understands the depth and the ramifications of Palin’s, and of negative rhetoric’s, failures. Like Harriett Miers on the Supreme Court, the idea of Sarah Palin in the Oval Office is laughable.

Newsprism

William Kristol might, at one point in his journalism career, have been considered one of the leading intellectual lights of the conservative movement; not up there with Bill Buckley, or William Safire, perhaps, but a credible contributor to the cause. No more. Following his drooling endorsement of Sarah Palin, encouraging her to wade even deeper into the muck of baseless character assassination that has now become the hallmark of the Republican campaign, Kristol has debased his brand and sunk to the level of the likes of Ann Coulter, as just another witless neocon hack. It is really quite amazing – and amusing – to watch the cream of the neocon establishment willfully and slavishly following Palin down the rathole to political oblivion. Great way to clear the decks and start over again with a conservative movement with brains.

Thirty or forty years ago, the liberal bias so pervasive in the American press was relatively mild and counterbalanced by a strong, principled minority led by the likes of William Buckley. Liberals and conservatives fought their ideological battles with honor, and at the end of the day they laid down their arms and socialized, much like the Union and Confederate soldiers who sang, drank, and played baseball together between hostilities during the Civil War.

With the growth of cable news, talk radio, and the Internet, American journalism has become increasingly adversarial. Ethical standards have plummeted. Such are the vagaries of decentralized decision making in an era marked by proliferating media and a broader erosion of civility in our culture.

If liberal bias once predominated, we’ve moved well beyond bias, even beyond contentiousness, to a journalism more akin to professional wrestling than its older iterations.

Nowhere was that more apparent than in the treatment of Sarah Palin’s daughter this week. If Rush Limbaugh’s brand of sneering Machiavellianism took political commentary beyond mere bias, a new generation of cable news anchors, radio hosts, and bloggers have descended even further into a clownish, contemptuous, contrived confrontationalism that blurs the line between journalism and (sports) entertainment.

Worse yet, even the old guard has been increasingly sucked into a downward ethical spiral. Lately, the New York Times’ Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd have peppered their columns with the kind of churlish sniping usually reserved for us amateurs in the blogosphere.

Peggy Noonan puts it like this:

The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical website.

Crazy cable news anchor Keith Olbermann, who derides Rush Limbaugh as a “comedian” and regularly lambasts Bill O’Reilly as his “Worst Person in the World,” leads the way into perdition at MSNBC, which has been drifting to the left ever since Tucker Carlson departed and Olbermann took over in prime time. (We’ve moved it four positions to the left at Newsprism.com.) DailyKos stooped lower than anyone, suggesting that Palin’s infant son Trig was actually born to her teenaged daughter. (The post has since been removed.)

The broadcast networks, CNN, and print outlets includingThe New York Times all used Palin’s daughter as fodder in an ugly ideological barrage that Gerard Baker describes as a ”frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion…” The degree of defensiveness displayed by news executives in response to Republican protests at least suggests a sense of guilt, if not shame.

Conservatives shouldn’t be too quick to judge, either. Sean Hannity consistently lives up to the label once applied by Bill Moyers: “vile.” WorldNetDaily makes Hannity look classy, running unfounded accusations that Obama had gay sex and did methamphetamines. Then there’s FoxNews, which has inexplicably returned Geraldo Rivera to mainstream journalism. (Who’s next—Jerry Springer? If he can draw an audience, why not?)

Sarah Palin handled the attacks on her family brilliantly. She fired back at the liberal media with both force and good humor, and with her traditional principles and small town authenticity, she rejuvenated a conservative movement that has been floundering on K Street. As David Brooks writes, “(Palin) embodies the spirit of the moment: impatient, fed up, tough-minded, but ironical. Even in attack, she projected the cheerfulness of someone confident about the future.” Sounds like Ronald Reagan to me.

Pat Buchanan adds, “The war the right lives for, against the people the right truly loathes — the liberal media elite who savagely ‘Bork’ every true conservative who gets on the path to national power — has been reignited.” A double win: the base is energized with optimism while its most powerful enemy takes a firm public spanking.

Even the Mafia has a hands-off policy when it comes to family; many a journalist could take a lesson in ethics from La Cosa Nostra.

Newsprism

Leon Hadar posts some excerpts from a biography on Bill Buckley showing his desire to see a black man in the oval office.

Perhaps Buckley’s most extreme please for racial preference came in a January 13, 1970 article in Look in which he argued for the election of a Negro president “in 1980 (or thereabouts) (GL, 181). His point is that such a dramatic gesture would be emotionally liberating for black and white alike. Significantly, the therapeutic candidacy would come not from among the national civil rights establishment, but from among “a class of young Negro leaders who work in the ghettos, in economic cooperatives, in straightforward social work, who are arguing that progress is possible within the System” (GL, 184).

Read the rest.

Republicans In Trouble, And In Our Opinion – Rightfully So!

Story by NewsMax.com on tough words from Richard A. Viguerie publisher of ConservativeHQ.com and the pioneer of political direct mail.   “Republican Party leaders must resign,”  said Viguerie.  “The hard work of the last 50 years by millions of conservative campaign workers, donors, candidates, writers, intellectuals, and activists has been trashed,” he said.  The Nebraska Observer also agrees with this assessment.

After the success of its “Top 100 Liberals” and “Top 100 Conservatives,” the UK’s Telegraph has now unveiled its “Top 50 Political Pundits.” All three lists have had many in the media buzzing (like flies around a fresh, steaming cow patty.)

Before you check the lists out, a warning: they’re broken down into mini-lists of 10 or 20, so that to peruse them all, you’ll wind up clicking on 17 separate web pages—a cynical ploy aimed at maximizing the Telegraph’s web traffic to drive up advertising rates.

So never mind the Telegraph’s gimmicky lists, which confuse popularity with influence. Influence is a poor measure in the first place, especially when the news media have become more oriented towards entertainment than analysis. By what criteria are comics like Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh, or a superficial confrontationalist like Hack Hannity, or Glenn Beck, considered alongside the best journalists and political pundits of our time?

For what it’s worth, here are Newsprism’s Ten of the Best Political Pundits in America, all on the same page and commercialism free:

10. Michael Kinsley—while he occasionally veers off into liberal la-la land, Kinsley is thoughtful, lucid, and incisive. He’s the most reasonable voice from the far left, idealistic yet practical in a Pat Moynihan sort of way.

9. Charles Krauthammer—a solid bedrock conservative with unmatched acumen in foreign policy, Krauthammer’s analysis of the Middle East is spot-on. He’s as hard-nosed as Bush is hard-headed, staunchly nationalistic without succombing to the naive idealism of the neocons.

8.  Christopher Hitchens—an exceptional writer, Hitchens is also stubbornly independent. He defies categorization in an era marked by polarization; he’s loyal only to his own judgment, never taking sides or pulling his punches, lefts or rights.

7. Dick Morris—he’s as sleazy as the Clintons, and as brilliant, a Karl Rove without the charm (or loyalty.) His cynicism is matched by his insightfulness. A mean streak and his hatred for his former employers make him fun to follow.

6. David Brooks—while the market rewards extremism, especially on the right, Brooks is a moderate conservative devoted to what’s best for the country rather than winning an argument. Brooks is highly intelligent and knowledgeable, and his columns range across critical social and political issues.

5. Frank Rich—a writer on par with Hitchens, Rich anchors the New York Times opinion pages and has the ear of journalists left and right. His background as a critic of culture adds depth and dimension to his political analysis.

4. Karl Rove—the man got George Bush elected. Twice. George Bush. He’s been demonized by the left and stained by his association with the policies of his most famous client, but Rove understands American politics as well as anyone. He’s been outthinking the pack for nearly thirty years.

3. Peggy Noonan—both the woman and her writing are graceful and wise. Never pretentious, she has a way of making profound points effortlessly. Her wit is elegant, simple but never simplistic. Noonan may seem as soft as a feather, but that feather cuts like a scalpel. Her criticisms of George Bush, for example, go right to the heart of a presidency with no moral or philosophical foundation.

2. Pat Buchanan—with the best grasp of history in the business, Buchanan puts contemporary issues into a sweeping historical context. His perspective spans the breadth of Western civilization in an era whose memory barely reaches beyond the 24-hour news cycle. To “get” Buchanan, you should read his books and columns; his appearances on MSNBC don’t do him justice.

1. George Will—nobody connects the dots like Will. His commentary reflects attention to the highest principles while at the same time being grounded firmly in contemporary American culture and history. Will compares favorably with William F. Buckley and Walter Lippmann. His wit isn’t dry, it’s arid, a droll sarcasm befitting his bemusement at our increasingly uncivil society. A collection of his columns like The Leveling Wind transcends punditry; he’s a philosopher who happens to write columns.

Newsprism

By Tommy Jadoo

A colleague once said, “The world will be a much better place when the baby boomers die off. There will be less racism, less oppression, less discrimination.”

Oh how the days of Bill Buckley are missed.

American conservatism has been dealing for decades with a rift between the social conservatism of evangelical Christians and culture warriors on the one hand, and the libertarian conservatism of free-market individualists on the other. Part of the genius of Ronald Reagan was his ability to energize both factions while smoothing over their differences. Too many conservatives today are altogether ignorant of this rift and therefore risk widening it. 

Over the last couple of decades, another rift has been opened, one that has benefitted conservatism significantly but may at the same time have begun an erosion of its core principles in favor of the superficial and the marketable. This rift separates intellectual conservatism—that practiced by Bill Buckley, Newt Gingrich, George Will, and Pat Buchanan, for example—and a more populist strain that dominates talk radio, the popular book market, and cable news. Instead of “populist conservatism,” however, I think it would be more accurate to label it pop culture conservatism, since its primary home is in the popular media.

Pop culture conservatism emerged out of a long era of American journalism in which liberalism dominated public discourse. The Media Elite, an influential 1986 study of political bias, found that nearly 90% of leading journalists had voted for Democratic candidates in prior presidential elections. When Rush Limbaugh demonstrated in 1988 that a huge audience of disaffected conservatives was ripe for the picking, pop culture conservatism burst onto the scene, and it’s been flexing its muscles ever since. Now, slickly-marketed popular figures like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and Laura Ingraham exert far more influence over the conservative movement with their confrontationalism and intemperance than more substantive and measured voices do with reasoning and balance.

Intellectual and pop culture conservatism worked together brilliantly in 1994, when Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” consolidated the Republican base and swept Republican candidates into majority positions in both Houses of Congress. The result: the Clinton administration was forced to control the growth of government, so that by the time George Bush took office in 2000, the federal budget was in surplus.

A conservative Republican president inheriting a budget surplus should have set the foundation for a serious, measured restructuring and contraction of our imperial federal government. Instead, Bush has grown the government from a $2 trillion “enterprise” to one that will spend well over $3 trillion in 2008, with disastrous economic and monetary results. The numbers speak for themselves:

The federal government’s budget has grown from under $2,000,000,000,000.00 to over $3,000,000,000,000.00 per year!

The very core principles of conservatism—limited government, individual responsibility, individual liberty, market dynamics, free enterprise—have been buried under an avalanche of big government programs and out-of-control spending. It was Republican Senator Ted Stevens and Republican Representative Don Young who tried to push through billions in funding for Alaska’s infamous Bridges to Nowhere.

Intellectual conservatives have strongly condemned this liberal spending spree, but their voices aren’t being heard over the loudmouthed shouting of the pop culture talking heads.

Pop culture conservatism has created a class of citizens and politicians who don’t seem to value or understand the historical and intellectual foundations of classical American conservatism. These surfacy conservatives just spent seven years in power in the White House, most of that time with like-minded Republicans controlling Congress, yet they have done more damage to the institutions of free enterprise and individual liberty than any liberal in memory.

Shallow creatures of the media going off the deep end have helped put conservatism at risk of drowning in the warm, therapeutic waters of liberalism: naive idealism, spiraling debt, and dependence on government.

Newsprism

Posted by Jeffrey Hart on February 29, 2008 | Taki’s Magazine

Bill Buckley was many things, but centrally he was one of the great American journalists, whose historic achievement was the creation of National Review. Historians will look to his magazine when they seek to explain much that has happened to the America of our time. During the 1930s, Walter Lippman was an important journalist, and like Buckley wrote many useful books. But whereas Lippman explained and defended something that already existed, the reformist Progressive movement and the New Deal, Buckley brought into being something new, something that had no existence before—the modern conservative movement.

Through his public personality, and his distinctive prose style, he also gave conservatism a new public face—no longer Sen. Robert Taft, a man of integrity and intellect but someone who made Herbert Hoover look like Rudolph Valentino.

Read more…

Jacob Heilbrunn | Huff Post | Posted February 28, 2008 | 01:18 PM (EST)

With the death of William F. Buckley, Jr., conservatives have been eulogizing him as a pivotal figure in the history of their movement. President Bush declared, “His legacy lives on in the ideas he championed and in the magazine he founded — National Review.”

Not exactly. As Buckley headed into his final years, he became vehemently opposed to the crusading, neoconservative stance that the younger generation at National Review adopted in championing the Iraq War. Indeed, both Buckleys, William F. and his brilliantly talented son Christopher, became acidulous critics of President Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney. The elder Buckley declared that if Bush were serving in a parliamentary democracy, he would have to resign, if not impeached. And Christopher, writing recently in the Washington Monthly, noted that he hopes the GOP loses in 2008: “Who knew, in 2000, that “compassionate conservatism” meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief?”

What lies behind this disenchantment? A book that has not received the attention it deserves, and that goes a long way toward explaining why conservatism has become shipwrecked, is Jeffrey Hart’s recent history of the National Review, The Making of the American Conservative Mind. Hart, a longtime contributor to the magazine, makes two important points. The first point is that Buckley wasn’t a radical conservative. He didn’t believe in trying to destroy the Eastern Establishment; instead, he wanted to reform it. Hart’s second, and related, point was that Buckley’s devout Catholicism meant that he shunned evangelical Christianity. Buckley believed in hierarchy and tradition and authority, not in personal revelation. He was no fan of the southern evangelicals who wanted to carry on their own little crusade to renew America. Hence the distaste among older, Catholic conservatives such as Buckley and Hart for George W. Bush. According to Hart, Bush “a southern evangelical and moral authoritarian,” has championed policies based on a belief that “many moral issues [are] within the sphere of government.” Unconservative, in other words.

But what Buckley hated most of all was the rise of neoconservatism within the GOP. (something I also touch upon in today’s Los Angeles Times). Buckley didn’t believe in a Wilsonian crusade that consisted of fighting wars to create peace. Instead, he viewed such bellicosity as a recipe for another Vietnam, which is what Iraq has become. As Buckley fell out of step with the movement he had helped create, he himself was treated as though had lost it, as the British writer Johann Hari has shown, on a National Review cruise last summer. Buckley’s sin was to chastise Norman Podhoretz for clinging to the delusion that the Iraq War was about weapons of mass destruction.

No, Buckley never became a (gasp!) liberal. On the contrary, I suspect that his politics are, in many ways, most closely carried on by the American Conservative, which is published by Patrick J. Buchanan–and whom Buckley essentially expelled from the mainstream conservative movement on grounds of anti-Semitism. But that’s another story for a different day.

For now, it’s enough to note that Buckley deserves laurels not simply for his elegant flair and tolerant temperament, but also his contempt for radical ideologues on the right–the unhinged types who are now whining that John McCain isn’t conservative enough because he has the temerity to recognize that global warming is actually taking place and needs to be stopped. Or who, as the indispensable Spencer Ackerman shows in the Washington Independent, are using an organization called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to sponsor a spinoff called Defense of Democracies to lambaste Democrats for not supporting Bush on spying wiretaps. In other words, a neoconservative organization supposedly devoted to supporting democracy is subverting it in America itself.

These are the kinds of zany ideological excesses that Buckley ultimately recoiled at. He didn’t try to edit reality. He lived in it. It’s something that conservatives of whatever stripe might want to think about emulating before they charge off on another misbegotten crusade.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons.

“…not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise…” 1 Corinthians 1:26, 27

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. was the founder of National Review magazine and was also, humanly speaking, the grandfather of modern conservative political thought. Buckley was instrumental in the years leading up to the recovery of freedom in the West during the 1980’s, and continued to exert an enormous influence on conservative political leaders for the remainder of the twentieth century. He ardently opposed some of the central threats of his generation: communism, liberalism, and statism. He died on Wednesday.

Though he would have dismissed the teaching that supports it, Buckley was a testament to God’s common grace in the world. Mr. Buckley emerged from college at a point in human history when historic Christianity was being increasingly rejected by the elites in our culture. With his first book, God and Man at Yale, the bright, young student forced many to seriously reflect upon the effects liberalism had taken on what was then thought to be the premier, conservative university in America. From that point, WFB (as he is often affectionately called in the pages of his magazine) continued to call Western culture to do essentially the same thing. He was instrumental in shaping the thinking of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and supplied much of the intellectual framework from which they operated and did great good. Buckley may be best remembered as exemplifying the goodness of God towards man by striving with him, effectively causing Western society to give pause on the way towards its self-destruction.

Yet despite all the good he achieved, Buckley never really understood who God truly was. He was enamored with the defense and vitality of human institutions in every aspect of society, and sadly he found Romanism all too ready to cater to this sentiment in the realm of religion. The pomp and pagentry of orthodox Catholicism lured Buckley to revere and trust the Church of Rome with his soul despite the apparent vaccuum it caused there. Buckley’s restless soul sought satisfaction in Bach, skiing, sailing, economics, word studies, and even novel writing in his later years. People that knew Buckley were always struck at the variety (and intensity) of his interests in things other than politics. If Buckley had taken the theology of Augustine more seriously, he might have realized that he was searching in vain for what the God of Augustine alone could be for him.

That is not to say that Buckley was openly hostile towards conservative Protestants or even evangelicals per se. To the contrary, Buckley seemed to adopt the Vatican II perspective of Protestants as “separated brethren” while holding firmly to the distinctives of Rome, even those most detestable ones reaffirmed at the Council of Trent. Buckley seemed to believe that the issues of the Reformation had either been rendered moot through the course of time or were insignificant relative to the new challenge of liberalism. For those reasons perhaps, National Review’s predominantly Catholic staff did have a few Protestants and they consistently downplayed the historic issues surrounding the Reformation.

Yet when forced to seriously deal with biblical theology, Buckley’s magazine regularly cast it as austere and cold. It often indirectly asserted that the Calvinism of Geneva repressed and crushed individuality. The Genesis account of creation is repudiated by all the editors of NR because this has become the position of Rome. In 1970, Buckley complied a number of essays that he felt defined what conservatism was. Despite Augustine’s tremendous influence on Luther and Calvin, one of these essays on modern Gnosticism casually proclaimed Augustine’s worldview as defunct by the end of the Middle Ages, an absurd notion. However, we don’t think the essay would have been selected if Buckley had not been intrigued by the argument.

The presence of all these things tragically indicate the truth of 1 Corinthians 1:26, 27: “not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise…” If there was anyone that could legitimately hold to the claim of being wise and noble according to the flesh, we think Bill Buckley would fit the bill. That makes his passing doubly sad.

He no doubt now understands where he went awry. Man possesses an eternal soul, and Buckley no doubt was very surprised Wednesday as he opened his eyes in eternity. He would be surprised to discover a host of liberals, communists, and patriotic conservatives alike damned forever under the wrath of God. He would have painfully discovered the proper importance of Paul and Luther’s teaching that salvation is not through a human institution but through personal union with Jesus Christ. He would have discovered many of the popes to have their claim as vicar of Christ to be utterly false. And perhaps most shocking of all, he would have laid eyes upon the granduer of the only true God that Romanism could not have prepared him for.

What are you trusting in? Do you know the God of the Bible in a saving, intimate way or do you simply believe your external association with the church will gain you favor with God? You do not have to be a Roman Catholic to have such a misplaced faith! Unless your full faith is in the blood and righteousness of Christ — His life and death meriting your justification before God — you cannot be saved. As the only Mediator between God and men, Jesus stands ready to grant pardon and forgiveness to all who come to Him in repentance and faith. That treasury of merit exists only through Him and because of Him, not because of past saints or through human priests. Do not allow those that would make their boast concerning you in the flesh deceive you regarding the simplicity of the message of the cross.