Sesquipedalian Obscurantism

The NY Times today pays way too much respect for a man that does the world a whole lot of good dead than alive.

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate
conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died at 82.

Breathes the first sentence of Buckley’s obituary. Described as the “sesquipedalian spark of the right”, Douglas Martin credits Buckley as the architect of U.S. conservatism, the one that transcended and dominated this country’s political discourse post-WW II.

Liberals ruled this country since the FDR’s New Deal, so that,

Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

Thanks to Buckley, neoliberals had an ideology that married right wing libertarianism, free market economy, and anti-communism. How did the bourgeois scion of an oil tycoon author an ideology that was to so captivate the white working class, and usher Reagan and the Bush family into the White House?

“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”

Buckley was an anachronism: a throwback to the interests of the white aristocracy who subsisted on the profits of the land and black slaves. What I’m curious is about is how his genteel and obfuscatory white supremacy and classism translated into a populist ideology for the majority of white workers, and how did the religious right react to this pompous fool?

His magazine National Review professed to “stand(s) athwart history yelling Stop.”

An essay written for an August 1957 issue justified southern segregationists in preventing blacks from voting, because of the former’s cultural and biological superiority. Here’s the essay, taken from an email sent to the NYMAA mailing list.

All the ten-dollar words in the world can’t hide Buckley’s sneering racism and support of the white elite’s class power.

William F. Buckley, 1925-2008, the angel of history sees you as another catastrophe piled at her feet, attempting to impede her progress with your wreckage.

Update five hours and 20 minutes later — Accolades about Buckley are pouring over the web. Slate offers another Buckley nugget, “Letter from Spain”, published in the National Review and cited in Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal:

General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihlistis that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain’s historical identity.

Goodness. Timothy Noah offers a different interpretation of Buckley: he distinguishes between small-state conservatism and large-state, or those who embrace the New Deal versus them that hate it, at least in principle, and Eisenhower-style Republicanism. Therefore, according to Noah, Buckley is the last of a dying breed: a small-state, free market, white supremacist and fascist. Reagan and Bush I and II were Buckleyites, in talk, but not walk.

Reagan had railed against big government while doing little to reduce it; Bush dispensed with the rhetoric and used the federal agencies as a patronage machine for disastrously incompetent loyalists. Bush also turned his foreign policy over to the neoconservative movement to a much greater extent than Reagan had, with the unending Iraq war the result. Buckley had never cottoned to the neoconservative movement, probably because it was too tolerant of the New Deal.

This is interesting; I’m going to mull over this a bit more.