Know Your Enemy patreon

The Inconclusive Mr. Buckley

🕑 Added 2024-05-05 14:21:16 +0000 UTC

Comments

Doug Griffith

Yes, his lack of graduate training shows through.

JimJim5122

Speaking of Buckley threatening Vidal, eight months later, Buckley threatened Chomsky on Firing Line (at 9:20): https://youtu.be/9DvmLMUfGss

Caitlin

The recent Sylvia Plath biography, Red Comet, says she was one of the Buckley’s house cleaner when she was in high school, when William F. would’ve been in high school or college. She was neighbors with the family, friends with one of the siblings. Just an interesting crossing of intellectual paths.

seaward

I watched it on Roku> PBS app> American Masters series. You may have to register. They would like you to contribute but I was able to watch it and the Moynihan episode without any recent contributions.

Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way

the Bozell line has zagged a bit since the patriarch stormed an abortion clinic some decades back..

Mark K

Buckley was a modern Voltaire, both known for using others’ controversial ideas in their own brilliant performances. Neither one wrote a magnum intellectual opus, that wasn’t what they were about.

Shane Burley

I’ve been looking around to find how to watch this but can’t see it available anywhere. It’s not listed on their On Demand service or even rentable anywhere I could find. Anyone know where I might be able to watch it?

Aaron Deveson

Dear KYE, are there any plans to cover the Marty Peretz memoir? There’s a great review in The Nation, but I think you’d offer excellent additional insights. (Apologies if this has already been discussed on Twitter or elsewhere.)

Daniel D.

Congrats on being a part of the documentary, Matt! Thoughtful episode and y'all are doing excellent marketing for the Tanenhaus book. I watched the documentary,and something I was utterly unprepared for and wrestled with afterward was how charming and witty Buckley was on TV. "Demand a recount," however contrived, is a great line. His response to "not being able to think on his feet" was also funny. Seeing the clips made it easier for me to see how his telegenic allure could bolster a political movement. It was a good reminder of the crucial role of performance in politics. (Something I think technocratic liberals would rather ignore.)

drizzly_november

You could say that about nearly every figure discussed on a show called Know Your -Enemy-. If that were the beginning & end of their discussions, the pod wouldn't have lasted 5 years.

Charles Zug

The main takeaway I get from every Buckley themed episode is that he was an intellectual lightweight and that his main strength was coalition and network building. Going forward, It might be worth stating up front that it’s not really worthwhile trying to understand this guy as a “thinker,” because what passed for his thought was mostly hackneyed boilerplate. He’s interesting mainly as a political phenomenon, as someone whose strength was connecting capital with organizational power. That way , we don’t have to spend any more time puzzling over his vapid utterances as if there’s a “there” there.

Adam Lewis

Naughty words opposition succeeded so markedly against George W. Bush and Trump that we cannot but follow that course.

Steven Ngo

I agree. I also think it’s inseparable from the personal image and persona of Buckley. Gary Wills, if I recall correctly, points out in his Confessions of a Conservative that the NR set imitated Buckley’s mannerism. The aristocratic image he presents appeals to certain people. I often wonder if what really bothers conservatives is that over the 20th outsider culture, essentially black culture, became attractive to a wide audience through consumer culture. And what really upsets them was that it became increasingly aggressive. There’s a big difference between Duke Ellington and gangsta rap or the gender bending of Tyler the Creator. If you’re a conservative based in any metropolitan city, say NYC, this confronts you every day and probably fuels a great deal of personal animosity and fear. That in the mimetic triangle of desire they are losing against those whom they consider their inferiors.

Edmundo Saballos

He was a racist piece of s— asshole. Why cant you just say it?

Know Your Enemy

Hi Holly, I'd love to give you some recommendations, send me an email at matt.sitman@gmail.com

Chad Stanton

I think the criticism of nostalgia for Buckleyite conservatism has to be connected to the consistent elevation of young erudite conservatives who are later to be revealed as racist reactionaries. Conservatives themselves seem to be cognizant of how to present themselves to appeal to this nostalgia and for folks on the left it’s seen as a revealed preference for interlocutors. It’s a pretty central knot for genuine political discourse and understanding.

Steven Ngo

The dashing figure of Buckley really paints an (at best) ambiguous role of political, literary intellectuals in the 20th and 21st c. There’s often this refrain about the loss of public intellectuals or that its intellectuals alone a la Zola that opposed the madness of mass politics. But in truth their role in courts of powers and competitors for power is much more in the red of the ledger. Firing line. The Hitch’s support of the Iraqi war. Dawkins’ racism. Whatever ideological project Jonathan Haidt is fomenting in The Atlantic. I feel the nostalgia for Buckley amongst liberals and conservatives is a longing for when politics was just entertaining spectacle and the dislocations as a consequence of politics was distant or ignorable.