Document of Non-Dialogue
Up from Liberalism.
by William F. Buckley, Jr.
McDowell, Obolensky. 205 pp. $3.50.
There are two possible tones whose employment toward William F. Buckley fits the fashion. One is the tone of hostility, by now a shade passé but still being worn in some college towns and other provincial places. The other is one of detachment tending toward amused tolerance. If I could muster it, I should prefer hostility to the newer mode.
To discuss Buckley’s work in tones of critical detachment would be to suggest a confidence that he is failing in his responsibilities to society and that I am succeeding in mine. The worst thing I could say about Buckley is that he is not Gilbert Keith Chesterton. But, when I think that, there immediately arises the reflection that I am not George Bernard Shaw—a reflection unrelieved by the consolation that no one else is George Bernard Shaw either. Since every man is his personal sun and every friend a satellite, I am left feeling sorrier for myself than I am about Buckley.
I never think of Buckley without affection and rarely do I think of him without a cloudy memory of one of the Winston Churchill anecdotes. Mr. Churchill was sitting through an especially tedious speech in the House when his eye fell upon an elder member who leaned forward holding up his ear trumpet, the better to hear the speaker. “And who,” Mr. Churchill asked, “is that fool disregarding his natural advantages?”
I do not here think of those natural advantages with whose possession Buckley is most generally associated. One of those, his skill at debate, seems to me, when indulged, a serious disability, diverting him from the reality of human existence. I might equate it, as a personal danger, with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s talent for composing political speeches for his inferiors. In both cases, the exercise of a superficial skill results in contamination of private feeling by official rhetoric and a turning of public self into caricature of private self.
Buckley has thus become one more casualty of our society’s policy of functioning without serious dialogue. Westbrook Pegler once described the syndicated newspaper column as a piece of packaged goods. The public Buckley, in deference to public custom, has endured the same process.
Our society’s most conspicuous substitute for dialogue is the television panel, where Buckley represents one side of public opinion, packaged and categorized as the Hard Right. His function on these occasions is to be told by his opponent—to the politely concealed satisfaction of the moderator—that he is no true conservative. This, of course, is no dialogue at all but a species of entertainment of a peculiarly empty sort. When Mrs. Trollope came to America in 1828, she was able to attend a series of public debates—in Cincinnati no less—between Robert Owen and the Reverend Alexander Campbell. Their subject: “The truth and falsehood of all the religions that have ever been propagated on the face of the earth.” We are fortunate these days if the subject of a public discussion is the length of a fingernail wider than: “Whom shall we choose—Wayne Morse or Claire Boothe Luce?”
We do not dare debate God; we accept the profit system. We do not even argue in any lively sense whether our country can properly threaten the murder of thousands of unarmed children as a technique of national defense. By common consent we have thrown out of our dialogue these questions which have engaged every century but this one and every country but our own. And, without them, what is left to men to argue about? We did have a debate of sorts about Senator McCarthy; but, when many people were listening, the argument never arose about the level of who was a more effective anti-Communist, McCarthy or Truman.
I cannot, then, blame Buckley for the narrow range and the transient character of this, his newest book. It is, in its way, better than most tracts of the sort, since it is rather more entertaining. But I leave it with a sense that, while I am always glad to hear from Buckley, he is a friend who left too long ago on a trip across a desert, and the landscapes he describes are very like the ones he reported in his last letter.
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Yet it still seems that Buckley’s natural advantages—even though they can hardly escape eventual damage—fit him for some higher function. He has passion, he has a restive intelligence; and he is an outsider, being both a Catholic and a young man of independent means, who is at once free from the compulsion to operate a business and the itch to run for office. I should say therefore that he is the repository of values insufficiently attended in an America which has come to believe that all social and spiritual development can be covered without any reference outside Freud, Marx, Henry Ford, the Reverend Daniel Poling, and Edward L. Bernays—that, in a word, the 20th century destroyed all previous values.
Buckley would deny with passion that he accepts this notion of the universe. Yet he’s so conditioned to the rules of the game that he plays it as though there was no century before our own and thus no tradition worth defending. He is not a man widely credited with sportsmanship; yet which of his enemies could claim a single act so gallant as this immense forfeiture?
I hesitate to tax Buckley with the accustomed complaint that he is not a true conservative; yet I think I must have a go at it in this case because it seems to me relevant to his difficulty. I am afraid that there has never been a serious body of conservative thought in America, although the reason for its absence by no means precludes the possibility of its developing tomorrow. The original disability was the acceptance of Jeremy Bentham. The American debate, with a few lonely exceptions, is cursed with utilitarianism.
I am thus surprised and not a little depressed at how much space Buckley devotes to economic exposition. I pay him the compliment of fervent fellow feeling when I say that this science is not quite his métier. Buckley examines at length and finally accepts the social security system as no longer an issue of practical controversy. He offers only the objection that it is compulsory, and “that compulsory participation in any enterprise is wrong, for human freedom is diminished.” This, I think, is a proposition with which I would have trouble quarreling.
But we live, as a fact of our lives, under a system of state capitalism and thus a state increasingly rigorous. One of Joe McCarthy’s continuing quarrels with two presidents of the United States, for example, was over the right of the Executive to keep secrets from Congress and thus from the voter. Liberal public opinion vigorously supported the Executive in this struggle. Vice President Nixon’s 1956 attitude toward those who would end hydrogen bomb tests and his 1959 attitude toward those who would resume them indicates that the man most likely to be our next president believes that certain matters—the most critical ones imaginable—are reserved to the decision of the president alone.
Compulsory social security is only one of that Executive’s demands upon us. Has the state the right to ban Fanny Hill and clear Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Has J. Edgar Hoover the right to refuse a defendant in a security case his chance to cross-examine the main witness against him? Can a secular state take the vengeance of God on a murderer? Can a Congressional committee conduct a state trial of and exact a public confession from a musician who may have belonged to the Communist party? I should suspect that Buckley’s answers to these questions would differ from my own. Yet, because he is a serious man, I think that he would struggle with them painfully, and I should then be confronted with the work of someone who had, in Yeats’s phrase, been sleeping on a bare board. Yet how much Buckley sacrifices when he accepts the terms of a debate so dismally confined to the practical!
This is a book not without value even though it be only journalistic. Buckley has undertaken to quarrel with the Liberal Establishment, and narrow as the terms of his quarrel are in practice—it can frequently be reduced to “you’re another”—the result is that he has set down examples of the condition of the dialogue in America which I am sure will be preserved nowhere else. Without Buckley, we should never have had the full text of the advertisement issued by the Committee for an Effective Congress which was labeled, “An Appeal for Clean Politics” and was an appeal, as God is our judge, for funds for Senator Wayne Morse. And there can hardly exist outside the Congressional Record the opening paragraph of Senator Fulbright’s assault on George Sokolsky, an abuse of Congressional immunity that would make Agnes E. Meyer weep. There is also an extended exposition of the adventures of Paul Hughes, who sold a group of ordinarily sensible citizens what purported to be espionage reports from inside the McCarthy committee. A friend of mine was saying the other day that the 50’s was also the decade when a group of reasonable Americans believed that Joe McCarthy was stacking arms in the bowels of the Senate Office Building. That part of the 50’s is recorded for popular consumption only here.
It is no proper answer to Mr. Buckley that he mourns the fall of Joe McCarthy, who did all these things, too. The proper answer is that we are most of us sick with a double standard of morality. The desert fathers would have a thing or two to say about it, and I wish that Mr. Buckley, who has them, after all, in his stable, would call them as witness for himself and us.
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