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MrRodgers -> The Fall of conservatism ? Part of it here. (7/6/2017 4:01:24 PM)
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Fox News host Sean Hannity will receive the William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence later this year at a gala dinner in Washington, D.C. Not much of an award but something...much less of a recipient and what does that tell us ?
On the subject of cycles, Warren Buffett likes to talk about “the natural progression, the three I’s.” As he put it in 2008, those I’s are “the innovators, the imitators and the idiots.” One creates, one enhances and one screws it all up. Then, presumably, the cycle starts afresh.
So Buckley's conservatism had its innovators, its imitators and now we...have its idiots.
But sometimes symbolism is more potent than fact. If we have reached the point where rank-and-file conservatives see nothing amiss with giving Hannity an award named for Buckley, then surely there’s a Milton Friedman Prize awaiting Steve Bannon for his insights on free trade. And maybe Sean Spicer can receive the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent for his role in exposing “fake news.”
The floor’s the limit. (or, in Hannity’s case, the crawl space beneath it)
But I've followed Buckley and while I liked him, his writing and many of his ideas, I still come back to this feeling:
For all of Buckley's obfuscatory prose and strange upper-crust mannerisms, his ideas were no more refined than the thugs who shill for his party today. He was exposed as a man of thin ideas and thinner skin countless times, just look up his debates with Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky for a start. If you poked holes in his ridiculous premises he would do one of two things, mug for the camera or make physical threats, as he did with Vidal.
He was a man with loftier pretensions but with a sharper a mind than Hannity. However, shallow minds like far too many of today's commentators were fooled by him for years, (Buckley jumped in bed with the corporate, rent-seeking crowd) unable to distinguish substantial arguments from fatuous ones even though I still gave him a few.
What conservatives now lament in the passing of Buckley and the coming of Trump, (Hannity ?) although hardly a straight line, is not a coarsening of conservative discourse, but the revealing of its true and consistent nature.
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