openpolitics.com

The conservative thinker’s work is a reminder of how intellectually self-satisfied politicians and cable-news have become.

There are many plausible explanations for how things got so bad. But one persuasive argument, which Hendershot makes in her book, is that the nature of debate itself has changed: Particularly on television-news programs, there’s little empathy on either side for opposing viewpoints, and scant willingness to engage in authentic intellectual battle. For all its flaws, Buckley’s work is a reminder that space for debate matters—true debate, between people of opposite worldviews, oriented less toward production values and sound bites than curiosity and strength of argument. In the absence of those spaces, Donald Trump’s unprecedented lies have come to count as much as putatively legitimate positions, further enabling the kind of self-satisfied complacency among Democrats that Buckley so hated about ’60s-era liberals.

.. The defining feature of Firing Line, Hendershot writes,was its standard of admission. Anyone, so long as they were famous or sufficiently chummy with WFB, could get on the show. This included Buckley’s ideological enemies: He delighted in debating everyone from Allen Ginsburg to the editor of The Nation; the black nationalist Milton Henry once appeared on the show flanked by bodyguards in military fatigues. No topic was out of bounds. Buckley eagerly took up controversial issues like race and civil rights, facing off with everyone from Alabama Governor George Wallace to James Baldwin.

.. It’s hard to imagine this kind of ideological free-for-all on today’s TV news shows, even those that rightfully prize debate like the PBS NewsHour, whose guests tend to be relatively moderate. The left has its bugaboos—a lack of willingness to engage with religious conservatives who have doubts about gay marriage, for example.

.. Studies have shown that people who watch Fox News are more likely to believe erroneous facts about issues like immigration, for example. Many conservative pundits have attacked the credibility of mainstream news outlets undermining trust in major information sources and empirically established facts. Arguably, this has enabled the success of Trump, a candidate who consistently spreads lies and misinformation.

.. Part of the problem, as Alan Jacobs argued in Harper’s earlier this year, could be that there are far fewer distinctively Christian (and, implicitly, conservative) intellectuals participating in mainstream media today.

.. Especially in the violent and politically divided ’60s, Buckley’s “rhetoric and self-presentation conveyed that conservatism was not the last refuge of raving lunatics,”

.. As The Atlantic wrote in its endorsement of Lyndon B. Johnson that year—the second in the magazine’s history—Goldwater’s “preference to let states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia enforce civil rights within their own borders … attracted the allegiance of Governor George Wallace, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birchers.” Although Hendershot argues that Buckley distanced himself from the Wallaces and KKKs and Birchers of the right, he shared some of their views. In fact, he provided some of the intellectual firepower for opposition to civil rights, claiming that it was primarily a question of federalism and state’s rights, rather than racism and justice.

.. In A Torch Kept Lit, he writes that Buckley was thoughtful on Martin Luther King’s legacy, only mentioning in passing that Buckley was “dreadfully wrong” about civil rights, such as when he referred to Southern whites as “the advanced race” in a 1957 editorial in National Review.

.. People learn the most from debate when they understand the best possible version of their opponent’s position, and further understand who their opponent is as a person. This is what the ultimate goal of debate in democracy should be: education and understanding.