It is frustrating as a viewer in the present moment to see the rhetorical tricks that Buckley plays against his guests. Surely he was playing to his conservative audience members but a lot of his points seem indefensible to my modern ear. the best example I think being a protracted interrogation on Malcolm X’s “real name”. It’s not that asking the question itself it is out of bounds, but surely Buckley knew that Malcolm X would not budge on this topic and the whole thing was just fodder for his viewers to see Malcolm as obstinant.
Somehow it’s even worse than the ham fisted strategies Fox News employes now like just talking over an interviewee, because Buckley was /so smart/.
Thanks for the clown-shoe polemic. I left the GOP because of folks like you. Don't bother replying as I suspect I could map out the quality in advance.
The very first thing that Buckley did in the public eye was to demand an intellectual safe space for people like him at Yale and for the professors he deemed too left wing and not sufficiently Christian to be fired.
Does anybody else feel strange about the reemergence of this particular debate as a sort of fetish object of our time? There's the venue (Oxford), a weird place for two American intellectuals to have it out. There's the framing (a civil discussion between two intellectual giants) which, I guess, was Buckley a giant at this time in his life? He had his lows and highs. Was he really so civil, either in this debate, or in general?[0] Was he really that smart?
You can argue all these questions one way or the other, but I feel like a lot of the animus for the perverse modern-day sainthood of Buckley, a man who supported Barry Goldwater, is a sort of misplaced nostalgia for the supposed halycon days of the US, where it was supposedly less barbaric than how it is today, ignoring the fact these conservative figures were all going to parties with David Duke (who Goldwater once employed) and the KKK was still lynching people in broad daylight for delighted audiences.
Not to mention, Baldwin scared the liberal establishment just as much as BLM do today.
[0]:"listen, you queer. Stop Calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the face!"
I believe that this is a result of two trends in our national politics that has led to a politics of aesthetics rather than a realist politics that actually acknowledges the effects of policy on people.
1. The left wing folks in power in the US are largely dominated by people with elite backgrounds or technocrats. There are populist elements within the party, but rarely among leadership. This makes it difficult for the leadership of the left to engage with the idea that various systems are broken or that their opposition is acting in bad faith, since their credentials are tied to these systems. How can the Ivy League be broken if the reason that they are so important is because they went to the Ivies? They want to believe that "high intellectual" solutions to problems will work. This means a willingness to engage in the aesthetics of policymaking. It also carries the trend of "TED-ification" of policymaking, where leaders seem to believe that if they just find the one simple trick that it'll fix things.
2. The populist right recognizes this bias towards aesthetics from the left and sees the opportunity to smuggle ideas into these spaces to grant them an air of legitimacy. The Supreme Court is probably the clearest example of this. By getting five or six conservative justices to put on the aesthetics of logical reasoning and legal analysis, they can enact policy goals while relying on the left to write endlessly about how the court is actually somehow making decisions based on a consistent intellectual framework that we must simply learn to analyze and understand.
This is how you get situations where Senators think that asking conservative scotus appointees if they'll respect stare decisis and then calling hypocrisy when Roe is overturned is somehow a win.
"""
While usually reduced to short clips, the full hour-long debate – presented here in its entirety – is a remarkable historical document in its own right. Conducted in front of a large, almost entirely white and predominantly male audience at the Cambridge Union, the encounter offers a sense of campus intellectual life in the mid-1960s through the atmosphere in the room, the things that made people laugh, and the particular references made by the debaters. After the always eloquent Baldwin evokes his personal experience to describe a perpetually disorienting and demeaning existence for African Americans, Buckley responds with facts and figures – as well as an ad hominem shot at Baldwin’s speaking voice – to argue that there’s an American Dream available to all those who would pursue it. In the end, Baldwin prevailed, earning an ardent standing ovation and a landslide victory in the Union’s vote on the motion raised.
"""
22 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 53.4 ms ] threadIt has all moved to YouTube now, but everyone is in their safe space instead of having a shared commons.
It was legendary for Buckley only insofar as he got the debate version of a royal beat down in public.
Somehow it’s even worse than the ham fisted strategies Fox News employes now like just talking over an interviewee, because Buckley was /so smart/.
The left-wing radicalism of the 60's fizzled out due a failure in the competition of ideas.
baldwin and his contemporaries were influential to the civil rights movement, which had a concrete impact on improving the nation.
> The left-wing radicalism of the 60's fizzled out due a failure in the competition of ideas.
i don't think it was "the competition of ideas" that caused them to fizzle out. unless you consider state propaganda to be a part of that?
and i don't think it's fizzled out. the new left is the dominant mode of american leftism at the current moment in time.
Let's start with that.
The other arguments about systemic racism are the same arguments pushed by the radical left today, I'd hardly call it "widely accepted".
See this one shared over the years, even just earlier this year
‘Don’t call me a crypto-Nazi’ the lost heart of political debate
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9989251
You can argue all these questions one way or the other, but I feel like a lot of the animus for the perverse modern-day sainthood of Buckley, a man who supported Barry Goldwater, is a sort of misplaced nostalgia for the supposed halycon days of the US, where it was supposedly less barbaric than how it is today, ignoring the fact these conservative figures were all going to parties with David Duke (who Goldwater once employed) and the KKK was still lynching people in broad daylight for delighted audiences.
Not to mention, Baldwin scared the liberal establishment just as much as BLM do today.
[0]:"listen, you queer. Stop Calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the face!"
1. The left wing folks in power in the US are largely dominated by people with elite backgrounds or technocrats. There are populist elements within the party, but rarely among leadership. This makes it difficult for the leadership of the left to engage with the idea that various systems are broken or that their opposition is acting in bad faith, since their credentials are tied to these systems. How can the Ivy League be broken if the reason that they are so important is because they went to the Ivies? They want to believe that "high intellectual" solutions to problems will work. This means a willingness to engage in the aesthetics of policymaking. It also carries the trend of "TED-ification" of policymaking, where leaders seem to believe that if they just find the one simple trick that it'll fix things.
2. The populist right recognizes this bias towards aesthetics from the left and sees the opportunity to smuggle ideas into these spaces to grant them an air of legitimacy. The Supreme Court is probably the clearest example of this. By getting five or six conservative justices to put on the aesthetics of logical reasoning and legal analysis, they can enact policy goals while relying on the left to write endlessly about how the court is actually somehow making decisions based on a consistent intellectual framework that we must simply learn to analyze and understand.
This is how you get situations where Senators think that asking conservative scotus appointees if they'll respect stare decisis and then calling hypocrisy when Roe is overturned is somehow a win.
""" While usually reduced to short clips, the full hour-long debate – presented here in its entirety – is a remarkable historical document in its own right. Conducted in front of a large, almost entirely white and predominantly male audience at the Cambridge Union, the encounter offers a sense of campus intellectual life in the mid-1960s through the atmosphere in the room, the things that made people laugh, and the particular references made by the debaters. After the always eloquent Baldwin evokes his personal experience to describe a perpetually disorienting and demeaning existence for African Americans, Buckley responds with facts and figures – as well as an ad hominem shot at Baldwin’s speaking voice – to argue that there’s an American Dream available to all those who would pursue it. In the end, Baldwin prevailed, earning an ardent standing ovation and a landslide victory in the Union’s vote on the motion raised. """