The Lesson of Mark Lilla and William F. Buckley
It’s a strange and disorienting experience to read Mark Lilla’s review of Sam Tanenhaus’s long-awaited biography of William F. Buckley in the current issues of the New York Review of Books.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that many years ago, when Lilla reviewed my book on conservatism in the same publication, he excoriated me as a cretin—I don’t think that’s too strong—for flattening the fine distinctions, built up over the decades by conservatives and liberals alike, between conservatives and reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries. Several times in his review, Lilla held up Buckley as Exhibit A of the former type, the true conservative, as against my portrait of the conservative as reactionary counterrevolutionary.
Even though I had direct evidence to the contrary, from the mouth of Buckley himself, whom I interviewed, Lilla insisted that “most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites.”
Autres temps.
Thirteen years, and a couple of Trumps, later, Lilla’s gotten the memo that the distinction between the genteel conservative and rabid reactionary that he grew up with and got strong on was mostly a public relations ploy and that Buckley was thick as thieves with the McCarthyites, the violent defenders of Jim Crow (he even claimed that it was “a crazed Negro” who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham), and more.
Would that more more centrists and liberals had learned this lesson sooner.
All of this would just be old and sour grapes, were it not for the fact that we’re seeing, right now, in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk, an absolute replay of the way conservatives like Buckley used to be hived off from the more radical and rabid types. We seem to never learn the lesson of Buckley and Lilla—that these distinctions are more in our heads than in reality—until it’s too late.
That said, Lilla is absolutely right that Bernardo Bertolucci’s vastly overrated film The Conformist is “predictably cartoonish.”
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3 Comments
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Avram
Sorry, but in my humble opinion Dominique Sanda is outstanding in that film and even better The Garden of the Finzi-Contini.
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Stephen Zielinski
“Anyone around and alert during the Long Sixties knows the type. The scion of a wealthy family who gives his fortune to revolutionaries and for his trouble is electrocuted while planting a bomb; the salon maven who arranges a fundraiser for sullen militants sporting sunglasses under her chandeliers; the radicalized valedictorian who inadvertently blows up a townhouse and disappears naked into the streets of Greenwich Village, only to emerge a decade later to rob an armored truck and get a Brink’s guard killed. Figures like these—Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, Kathy Boudin—were in no way original. Their precursors can be found in any history of the major European left-wing revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in the novels of writers who tried to plumb the psychology of economic class traitors. Their motives usually turn out to be a jumble of idealism, parricidal anger, boredom, and misplaced noblesse oblige.”
So, Lilla begins his review with stereotypes and bullshit. It’s not a pomising begining.
He could have begun with the child of the working class whose time at the university radicalized him or her, who looked back at the McCarthy era as a sign of incipient authoritarianism, who considered the Viet Nam War as emblematic of the empire the United States became after World War II, who considered the conformity, consumerism and imperialism that drove the economy as the materialization of that empire in an everyday life and that beat the life out of people with velvet clad hammers. Then, of course, there was the racism, the presence of which, along with the War, drove the New Left. As we know today, the fables of abundance that once legitimized America are obsolete, having been replaced by fascist fantasies of greatness intended to provide coverage for the decline that is now upon the country.
But, this was a review of a book about Buckley, the child of a reactionary oilman, whose self presentation evoked the presence of a educated member of Britain’s gentry but which, retrospectively considered, must be treated as ironic because the sun was then setting on the British empire.
Now, I must decide if I will continue with Lilla’s review.
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“Buckley(‘s)…self presentation evoked the presence of a educated member of Britain’s gentry”
One of the many interesting things I learned from one of the Tanenhaus interviews was that Buckley’s first language was (Mexican) Spanish and his second was French. He had to start learning English when he was 7 or 8 (IIRC). The Wiki says he did that in London, but I think Tanenhaus stresses the Buckley compound in CT. Anyway, that weird accent he had is still of not entirely known provenance AFAIC
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