The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Reading William Buckley: Athwart History

As revealed in these writings from as far back as the late forties, WFB and the conservatives he led aimed to destroy every vestige of the New Deal in America by all lawful means and every trace of Marxism on the planet by wars cold, hot, military, and ideological.

Those were his and their top priorities, amply demonstrated in this collection, covering most of the Cold War and the rise of conservatism to absolute control of the Republican Party, the last half of the 20th Century.

The articles are loaded with the standard conservative polemical bilge, just as one would expect.

Interesting historical documents revealing details of the particular issues fought out over those years that covered so much of my lifetime.

I was born in 1949, the year China fell to Mao.

Buckley volubly disapproved of Eisenhower and Nixon, regarding both as collectivists, statists, and big government liberals.

He and his kind aimed to make sure the Republican Party had no room for the likes of them.

And they have succeeded.

Nixon wrote a great deal after he was driven from the White House.

I wonder if he ever had much to say about the takeover of his party by people IKE thought were crackpots and who hated him almost as much as the Democrats who eventually brought him down.

Or about how far the "southern strategy," a creation of the conservatives even before Goldwater tried it and as unnecessary to Nixon's 1972 victory as the Watergate burglaries, helped secure and safeguard the conservative conquest of the GOP.

Could the ridiculous and lying rhetoric of perfectly orthodox and mainstream conservatives, equating liberalism, the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, the interstate highway system, progressive income taxation, and the federal minimum wage with communism, Marxism, tyranny, slavery, and totalitarianism, be responsible for so many people refusing to believe Reagan's perfectly correct charge that the Soviet Union was an evil empire? 

For so easily believing Uncle Ho was a sincere admirer of the American Revolution and the values of Jefferson? 

If communist tyranny is just Social Security and Medicare, how can anyone believe it's an evil empire?

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