WFB RIP Round-Up

K-Lo:

He died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.

Kirchick:

He seems so anachronistic now, in this age of blogs and non-stop cable news. Amidst the shouting matches, spin, and ad hominem attacks that dominate our political debate today, it’s difficult to remember that a man like Buckley and forums such as Firing Line ever existed.

Rod:

He was the kind of man who, though absolutely clear in his dismissal of liberal ideas, would not stoop to trashing someone’s character for the sake of political gain.

Ambers:

His was a conservatism of doubt.

Joe Klein:

His book, The Unmaking of a Mayor, an account of his own wry run for mayor of New York in 1965, is not only hilarious but also an early – and accurate – critique of the political correctness, unionized sclerosis and wasteful bureaucracy that almost killed the world’s greatest city in the 1960s and 1970s.

WFB RIP

I cannot pretend to have been much influenced by William F. Buckley Jr. Nonetheless, even for those of us who were not in America the 1960s and 1970s, when his most remarkable work was done, he still existed as an emblem of a thinking, rational, non-doctrinaire conservatism. He helped many understand more deeply that left-liberalism is a profoundly unsatisfying account of human nature and human history. He helped remind us that communism was as evil as socialism was mistaken. By legitimizing the concept of a conservative intellectual, he helped deepen and broaden conservative thought.

He lived long enough to see this precious inheritance grotesquely squandered by the conservative establishment he helped build. Like many of us, he came to see the administration of George W. Bush as in some ways the deepest, darkest betrayal of conservative values, and the hideous hateful movement that sustained it unthinkingly as part of the problem rather than the solution. But he was surely not surprised. A skeptical, thinking conservative knows that in time, great, abiding ideas can ossify into ideology and ideology can become propaganda and propaganda can degenerate into toxic factionalism. It is part of human nature and human history. There is no reason why conservatism as a political movement should be immune from its own critique of all such movements. He was polite about this, of course – much politer than many of us. But he had enough intellectual integrity not to disguise it either.

What did he know? That there will never be heaven on earth; that there will never be an end to poverty or bigotry or discontent. That there is more wisdom in tradition than we might first believe, and freedom is indispensable for tradition to shift and adapt and move responsively to changing human needs and wants. That ideology is always and everywhere a lie. That government is best when small and adept and aware of its own limits. That a society that seeks to extirpate transcendent religious truths is as doomed as one that regiments itself according to divine will.

These truths were once unspeakable heresies. That they have survived at all in mass democracy is a small miracle. But Buckley knew that all that conservatism needs to survive is the freedom to think and a willingness to rethink and an eagerness to debate. These virtues he exemplified. May we all try to recapture them in his vast, choppy wake.

Obama Vs. The Successful

Obama’s appeal to the upper middle classes is powerful. But it remains a fact that the impact of an Obama presidency would be very tough for anyone earning over $160,000 a year. Removing the cap on the payroll tax, in particular, will clobber the successful:

Betsy’s marginal tax rate goes up from an already ridiculous 42.5% to 51.4%—not including the new 6.2% marginal tax on your employer. Subject to how she structures her withholding, Betsy’s take home pay drops an average of $515 a paycheck—less in the early months of the year, but much more in the later months of the year. Add in the effects on her bonus, and Betsy loses nearly $20,000/year in take-home pay.

I added a third column: how big a pay cut would you have to take to receive the same take-home income? The answer is that Obama’s tax increases have a bigger effect on your income than a law firm cutting New York salaries by $34,000.

“He Hates America”

NRO linked to this unhinged rant. It packs in so many paranoid stereotypes that its hard to know where to start. Is he a closet communist? Is he controlled by his angry wife? Was his father a drunk? Did his mother hate America? It goes on and on. It should be said that strong criticism of Obama’s views, policies, and even a skeptical view of his past are perfectly legitimate. Stories like this one in the Times of London should be appearing in the US press more often. But the primal toxin of reactionary fear that one sees circling the drain of American conservatism says more about Obama’s enemies than about him. One new hope one feels in this election cycle is that Obama might be a poultice that brings more of this bile to the surface and help us get past it. It will be a good thing for the American right if we do.

“We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For”

Just a quick note about an Obama line that has drawn a lot of derision. I can see why. There’s an element of messianic self-regard about the sentence. And I sure hope Obama doesn’t get too cocky or begins to get carried away by the wave of support he has inspired.

But I think some have missed a nuance. The phrase is actually a self-indictment as well as a self-congratulation. The point is surely that we shouldn’t wait for someone else to save us, or lift us up, or fix our problems or address our fate. We are the only ones who can do this. And we’re responsible for our own failure. The sentence is actually a criticism of Obama’s own supporters.

What makes Obama’s liberalism different from both the technocratic meliorism of the Clintons and the 1970s big government liberalism that preceded it is that it is an inclusive, self-help kind of liberalism. It is participatory, not passive. It is not about government saving us; it is about us saving the government.

Now, I don’t share a lot of what Obama favors in domestic policy (but then I’m pretty disgusted by Bush’s policies as well). I’d prefer to see self-empowerment work outside the channels of government. But he defuses my libertarian impulses by his emphasis on participation and self-help. If I’m going to have to tolerate big spending liberalism, I’d rather have Obama’s version than Bush’s. And that has been the choice. At least Obama will pay for his redistributionism by taxing Americans rather than borrowing it indefinitely from the Chinese. And if you want to blame anyone for making America safe again for liberalism, the current White House is where you should direct your ire. Once a Republican has said that government’s purpose is to help people who hurt, who can blame a Democrat for following through? In fact, Obama’s left-liberalism is not quite as paternalist as Bush’s. And it comes with fewer theological strings attached.

Blast From The Iraq Past

As part of a continuing series that looks at previous efforts of a Western government to run Iraq as a functional, non-despotic entity, here’s a cartoon from the London Daily Express from December 1922. It’s reprinted in The Mesopotamia Mess, a useful compilation of press reports from the 1920s and 1930s detailing almost exactly the same morass that the US is now in:

Iraq2