Life After Buckley
Meditating on WFB, Ezra Klein nails the big picture:
in the last two or three years, a whole host of giants have passed away, men who were political thinkers at a time when that made you a cultural figure. John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Norman Mailer, and now, William F. Buckley Jr. Gore Vidal is just about the last of their number left. And that’s a shame. They would write serious books of political analysis and sell millions of copies — they were the writers you had to read to call yourself an actual political junkie [emphasis added]. Now, the space they inhabited in the discourse is held by the Coulters and O’Reilly’s of the world. Where we once prized a tremendous facility for wit, we’re now elevating those with a tremendous storehouse for anger. Run a search on quotes from Galbraith, Buckley, or Friedman, then do the same for O’Reilly and Coulter. We’re really losing something here. And we don’t even have Molly Ivins around to wrest it back.
‘We’ are not producing tremendous storehouses of wit, because ‘we’ are not producing intellectual aristocrats as we once did — a generations-long project that actually cannot be preplanned and gamed out and effectively managed by any kind of hive mind or professional organization. At the same time, ‘we’ are not even producing an audience for intellectual aristocrats as we once did — a generations-long project, etc., etc. I would point out that rarely nowadays do the professionally angry make it big without also having an immense talent for public sarcasm. The incredible opportunity provided to the lowbrow by a public taste for being able to mean something and not mean it at the same time has more or less directly resulted in fame and fortune for the Snark Class, who have fanned out across the entire infotainment world.
One disturbing thought is that the seed for this evil kudzu plant was nestled indeed within the imperious irony and cold touch perfected in the Golden Age by the deck-shoe dandies of the blueblooded Right and the Olympian homosexuals of the left intelligentsia. Soon, we discovered, one needn’t write fifty historical novels like Gore Vidal in order to dialectically bitch-slap designated public pinatas sort of like Gore Vidal might do. And one needn’t grow up behind ivy-encurled fencework like William F. Buckley to get a conference room full of coeds to laugh, cheer, and buy autographed copies. More importantly, one didn’t need to be as wise as these men — one could be ‘smart in a different way’, ‘street smart’, ‘incredibly hardworking at what one does’, etc., etc.
So, congratulations, latter-day America, your moment has come, with all the pomp and gravitas of Trivial Pursuit ’90s Edition.
Cross-posted at Postmodern Conservative.
We have Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan!
Yikes.
In all seriousness, like Mr. Klein upon hearing about Buckley my first thought was “Lord, why isn’t Molly Ivins here to pick up the pieces? She wasn’t finished with us yet!” (shaking fist toward the sky)
— tom · Feb 28, 08:27 PM · #
Meh. In forty years, the people we complain about will be the Old Guard, and we’ll be complaining about the upstarts in their thirties who just didn’t have what they had.
— Joe Marier · Feb 28, 09:40 PM · #
I would point out that the original modern thinking class, men like Vidal and Buckley, were the ones who defined the current political climate by developing the two major philosophies all of us use to disect mundane comtemporary issues like abortion, war, taxes, the ERA, gay rights, immigration, guns, etc…etc…etc… The point being that we needed them to set the parameters of the debates in which all of us engage every day. They established the “sides” of right and left, conservative and liberal. Good for them.
When our culture finally comes to terms with these issues (as we did earlier in the century with prohibition, isolationism, suffrage, voting rights, monetary issues, etc…) then the modern age, as we know it, will be over. For better or worse, we will no longer be discussing things like gay marriage and stem cell research and the “war” on Christmas, because we will have settled them. At that point we will move on and face a new set of issues that defy our contemporary defintion of right/left and a new set of thinkers will emerge to introduce the debate and give us the tools we need to understand it.
So don’t fret… when we need them, they will come.
— gartrip · Feb 28, 11:34 PM · #
I just want to associate myself with gartrip’s comments. Hereby associated.
— Matt Frost · Feb 28, 11:48 PM · #
The perils of postmodern Penelope, nicely framed.
— James · Feb 29, 01:46 AM · #
Christopher Hitchens
Andrew Sullivan
Frank Rich
Ariana Huffington
Aren’t these the giants of our time? I think Hitchens could go toe to toe with Buckley or Vidal in both intelligence and wit. The other three are at least as intelligent. The best known lines of Vidal are when he called Buckley a pro-crypto-Nazi, to which Buckley responded, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” Witty stuff. Now compare that to Hitchens saying “If you gave Jerry Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox.” Also, God is Not Great will probably be one of the most read books on philosophy in this century. Hitchens is going to have the massive impact (ie. Shaw, Nietchze).
— alex · Feb 29, 03:21 AM · #
Norman Mailer an intellectual? A blowhard in the literary scene, maybe. Same for Vidal, Buckley, etc. Posers all. Galbraith and Friedman were at least economists who did some work.
We now have Anthony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Mark Steyn. Stanley Kurz. Victor Davis Hanson. Both Hitchens brothers. A lot more serious intellectuals.
You could read Gore Vidals pompous and lengthy novels about Xerxes and Greece, for example, and never understand how the mighty Persian Empire which dwarfed Greece and Greek manpower could have been defeated. When they’d beaten everyone else. Hanson of course explains it nicely.
We probably have a far BETTER crop NOW. Because instead of class, birth, and inherited wealth, “intellectuals” can make lots of money independently by selling their books to avid readers who with a little more money want something edifying and more sastisfying than the niche stuff in TV and movies. And find Universities in the business of PC thought control rather than education.
Heck the Teaching Company makes $$$ by producing lectures on areas of interest to the average person.
— Jim Rockford · Feb 29, 08:29 AM · #
Mark Steyn a more serious intellectual than Gore Vidal? Seriously, are you high?
— ERM · Feb 29, 03:23 PM · #