My Sunday Dallas Morning News column was a remembrance of Bill Buckley. Excerpt:
If you want to know what we've all lost, go to YouTube and watch clips of old Firing Line interviews between WFB and prominent left-wing figures. It is astonishing to think that high-flying political debate was once conducted with such artfulness, sophistication and – above all – civility. I know, I know, WFB was unusually gifted in that way, but wasn't there a time when all smart young conservatives aspired to meet his standard?The movement he founded is now, alas, foundering amid its failures. As conservatives try to figure out how to restore and renew our collective vision, we would do well to learn from the master. Bill Buckley, in his fathomless intellectual curiosity, gave voice to creative thinkers from various schools of conservative thought. He was no tub-thumping ideologue. He knew what he believed, and defended it peerlessly, but he was never vulgar or stupid. He didn't hate.
A conservatism that is marked by intelligence, wit, humanity and generosity of spirit is a conservatism that can win, and deserve to win. The last man who tried it moved the world.
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Colbert mocked the contrast the other day, saying "Why have this?" (showing a clip of Buckley being his usual eloquent self) "When you can say it in much fewer words?" (cut to a montage of Bill O'Reilly yelling "Shut up!", "Liberal Nazis", "Yadda yadda yadda" and so on).
Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil used to fight like hell during the day over legislation, but in the evening they would get together with their wives for dinner in the White House. They were opponents, but they liked eachother personally.
We've definitely lost some civility in our politics since then - Rush Limbaugh, in fact, regards civility to one's opponents as weakness.
Rod:
It's not easy to combine positive emotion with rigor. Well done.
Of course, it isn't just conservatives who have lost this civility.
The "inevitable" Senatorial candidate up here in MN wrote a book titled "Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat idiot" and wasn't even listed as "the worst person in the world" by K. Olberman. Stroll through the political books aisle in the bookstore and you would be very hard pressed to find a civil book from either viewpoint.
I'll say this:
Go back to that famous 1965 race for mayor of New York City. Imperious though WFB was, can anyone argue the city would not have been better off -- given that his two opponents, John Lindsay and Abe Beame, later became the two worst mayors at least since Tammany Hall and perhaps ever in the Big Apple?
New Yorkers, famously liberal, after such disasters subsequently grew to like imperious Republicans (or, in Mike Bloomberg's case, quasi-Republicans) in Gracie Mansion.
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