Word: buckley
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...Buckley's main problem is that he is the child of a bankrupt "non-tradition." American conservatism, derived from the great British conservative tradition, today bears little resemblance to its forebears. True Conservatism-that of Burke and John Adams-is not unlike what we now call liberalism. It believes in the unity of the past, present, and future; in the organic view of society, compelling a social responsibility that overrides immediate class or group interests; in personal property as the foundation of stable human relationships; and an understanding of the fact that while not all change is reform, stability...
...dead than red" approach to foreign policy, an aversion to any form of collectivism, and a concern about moral decay. But American politics is a politics of property, not of principle. Victory goes to the man who can achieve the broadest consensus among contending self-seeking groups. Goldwaterism and Buckley conservatism contain few ideas that can be given institutional form-so the unions, farmers, business executives, blacks, ethnic groups, the aged and the unemployed will never vote for their candidates. Only small business owners and other independent types are sufficiently free from institutional needs to assert their prejudices...
...BUCKLEY'S writing is an exemplum of the shoddiness of present-day conservatism. He is one of those souls whose self-image far transcends any real situation. Whereas Edmund Burke would say, "I must see the things; I must see the men," one gets the impression that Buckley has never cut himself from the invisible umbilical cord that runs through rallies, magazine offices, receptions, VIP functions, and any other situation whose essence is the maintenance of the prejudices it has brought together to reaffirm. He glides along the soft surface of isolated dogmas and brings you back to the bright...
...latest book is filled with the favorite Buckley gambit,: proof by non-sequitur. The idea is to make a proposition and then surreptitiously prove it by some trivial argument which you present as an aside but which actually takes up most of the piece. Johnson's State of the Union message, for instance, is analyzed in terms of the syntactical construction of two sentences in a manner that suggests that if Bill Moyers doesn't brush up on his Strunk and White the Republic is in trouble. The triviality inevitably derives its impact from the original assertion; thus many pieces...
ANOTHER hallmark of the Buckley approach is the either/or proposition he plants in almost everything he says. A quintessential Buckley sentence is "The purpose of education is to educate, not to promise a synthetic integration by numerically balancing ethnic groups in the classroom." The mind reels. Does education necessarily preclude integration? and vice versa? Is not learning to live with those of another race a valuable part of education? No, no, says Mr. Buckley, education is an " intellectual rather than a sociological process." Or: "It does not follow that if someone is old enough to die in Vietnam...