When partisanship goes too far...

[tagryn]

Ran across a very disappointing comments thread on William F. Buckley's passing over at Eat Our Brains, a blog I usually enjoy. I found the glee at WFB's death very off-putting. Apparently speaking ill of the dead is considered OK by some, if they were politically on the other side.

I considered posting a rebuttal, but I figured, if someone is ideologically so far gone they're taking glee in someone's passing, they're too far gone to reach (by a few words on the Internet, anyway). By way of comparison, I disagreed with Paul Wellstone on most everything, but I felt no joy whatsoever in his passing. I don't think we check class and dignity at the door, just because we disagree with someone's philosophy; regardless of whether you agreed or disagreed with him, WFB was hardly Stalin or Mao.

Comments

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Is it OK to speak ill of the living?

What is it about being dead that makes someones actions no longer shameful or worthy of criticism? Is there a mandatory period of grace during which we are not permitted to speak ill of the dead?

Sorry, despite his profound intellect, erudition, wealth, and personal attractiveness, the man was an elitist snob, a racist, and gloated over his success in inspiring less gifted people to do things that were profoundly harmful to other people because those other people lacked the wealth and power to defend themselves.

This does not make him a demon, or even an unusually evil man, in and of itself, but it's the sum of all such acts over his life, and counterbalancing acts, which will determine whether he was despicable, bland, or laudable.

Discussion of the merits of his actions is important because those actions led and shaped the ongoing policies of many people in our government.

It's not a failure in ideology to speak ill of Mr. Buckley as a person (if you knew him and had reason to do so) nor to criticize his philosophies, actions, and the results of his intellectual leadership of a movement. It's a failure in morality to take glee in the pain of others, and it's a failure in manners to publicly rejoice in his passing. In that I agree with you. It's true he had little direct political power, and cannot be held accountable for crimes against humanity as Stalin could, or for instigating and ignoring them, as Mao could. It's not necessary for someone to be a paragon of tyranny to become, and be recognized, as a philosopher of tyranny.

[tagryn]

For one thing, the dead are no longer there to defend themselves, so its rather a cheap shot to wait until they're gone to criticize them. That's why its considered a classless move to speak ill of the dead, especially right after they're gone. It also shows a level of dislike coming close to hate to immediately express joy at someone's demise, and that's also something that speaks more about the person expressing the glee than about the deceased it is being made towards.

Making an evaluation of someone's legacy should wait until there's enough historic distance to make an impartial judgment, and a couple days or weeks isn't nearly enough time. For example, I don't think Buckley's "dining with Satan" for being a conservative, as a couple of the commenters put it. I make an exception for proven crimes against humanity (massacrers, for example), but Buckley didn't commit any. He had his weaknesses, but who among us is without flaw?

If you do consider conservatives to be "philosophers of tyranny," I'm off the boat with you at that point, though. Conservatism <> fascism, just as liberalism <> communism.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Conservatism has drifted in interesting and not particularly positive directions over the last several decades, and a large part of that drift can be attributed to Buckley's influence.

I especially lay at his feet the transformation of the adjective "liberal" into something that was casually and unthinkingly accepted as the moral equivalent of "child molester".

[foomf.livejournal.com]

The following logical fallacies beset your response:

"Defending the dead from ... waiting until they're gone to criticize them"

Many of the people who are criticizing the man and his legacy were critics of his actions through the sixty years during which he was building that legacy. It is true that he can no longer speak in witty dismissal of what they say, and it's also true that during his lifetime, a great deal of what he said to dismiss his critics did not actually address what they were saying, but simply mocked, distracted, and confused them. Do not confuse his success at argumentation with his being factually, ethically or morally right; sometimes his best rejoinders in terms of wit were also the ones which had no bearing whatsoever on the argument he was dismissing.

This is not to say that he wasn't capable of answering a point with a counter point, or answering a theory with a telling analysis of the flaws in the theory, because he was. However, when it came to the harder questions, the ones where neither "liberal" nor "conservative" approaches are adequate to the situation, where it takes the hard work of cooperation, compromise, creativity and sacrifice? Not his forte, in my experience, based on observing his debates on his personal public pedestal.

Other people who are now speaking ill of him, may have never had the opportunity nor the reason to examine him and his life, and some may have been "cowardly" in that they did not feel safe in speaking ill of the man in life. And given the nature of the press and public speech, without the opportunity afforded by his death and the publicity attending to it, there are surely many whose ill words were simply ignored as not-too-newsworthy.

"historic distance"

This is a popular quash. It's also silly for two reasons:

That "legacy" you speak of has been built over the last 50-60 years, and while we cannot know every outcome, we can and do know many of them already. To reduce it to the absurd: the legacy of a mass-murderer (say, Jim Jones) is pretty much laid out then and there before us when the action happens. Historical distance actually serves to cloud and confuse the events themselves, unless someone is able to go in and analyze, document, and yes, draw conclusions.

And secondly, it is every bit as much the right and responsibility of people here and now to examine "legacy" that we are living with, as it will be of people in the more distant future. In fact, it's more inherent on us to deal with it NOW, thanks to the hijacking of "conservatism" by a cultic religious minority that has resulted in a corruption of the principles of conservatism, the partial dismantling of the system of checks and balances in our government, and the instigation of an ego-building war at the cost of our next decade or so of economic stability.

In other words, while Buckley should not be blamed for the actions of a cadre of the variously stupid, venal, and insane, he is the gardener who tended the weeds rather than the flowers. Whenever he championed the cause of those in power and encouraged their support and adherence to their examples, he shares their culpability. Whenever he rejected their actions and argued for a return to more true principles, to real conservatism rather than the current blend of fanaticism and carpet-baggery, he points out their culpability.

Which is also a way for me to say, "I have not bothered to follow anything he's said or done in this century, but I know that the current regime greatly admires him and claims to be following his example."

[tagryn]

* Point being, the critics *had* their opportunity to confront him while he was living. If they couldn't get the better of him then, trying to rehash old arguments after the opponent is gone is sour grapes.

* If you're going to argue that his skill at writing and arguing didn't make him right, well, to steal a meme from another thread on Buckley, most of the same things could be said of Molly Ivins. They're actually pretty good mirror images of one another.

* Public debate formats such as WFB engaged in on "Firing Line" and via National Review aren't known for "cooperation, compromise, creativity and sacrifice"; that's left to the legislators to work out afterwards. I've run across two seperate testimonials that WFB was known for consistent graciousness with his opponents while still disagreeing with them (which is more than I can say for the dance-on-his-grave critics that I criticized in my original post).

* On the rest, I think your obvious dislike of the current administration is somewhat twisting your perspective on WFB's actual influence (and illustrating, I think, the need for historical distance to squeeze the emotion out before an accurate analysis can be made). Buckley disagreed with a lot of what has gone on, and said so - most notably on Iraq, but hardly the only example. He was not a "neocon", insofar as that term has any meaning anymore.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

No, you don't cut off discussion and analysis of someone's life and character just because they're dead. If you did, there would be no value to history. Good manners requires that you give the survivors the grace of a month or so before castigating the dead, and I'm sure that Miss Manners would be happy to extend that to six months or even a year, but in the case of someone who explicitly removed himself from the category of 'private person' there is good reason to give no more than the month. In other words, I agree that they should lay off, but I don't think there's anything shameful after the body is suitably cold in the ground, scattered, in the urn, or whatever method is used to dispose of the unwanted leftover bit. I also think it would be shameful for nobody to counter the slanderous bits.

I have no quibble with saying that skill at writing and argumentation do not make anyone right, conservative or otherwise, except where that skill is used to facilitate the reasoned analysis and to present the supporting information for a stance.

My point is that these can be used to overwhelm a valid argument from a weak rhetoritician despite a faulty counter-argument, and that they can be used to buttress and reinforce an otherwise specious argument, and I assert that I saw Buckley using them in that way.
In no way does this require or imply that the speaker is ungracious or rude, and in fact, it's part of the skill to deliver the riposte in such a way that the victim smiles, nods, and shakes your hand with gratitude for being so neatly skewered.

Testimonials are nice things. As the Wizard said to the Tin Man, "None of these people has a big heart, but what they do have is a big testimonial."

I did observe, once or twice, that Buckley was somewhat dismissive, ignored or genteelly sneered away the point being made by his opposition, and in at least one instance, by simply ignoring the man. That _was_ in the Nixon and Ford time-frame though.

Recognizing that Buckley was not a "neocon" does not reduce his influence in creating the conservative groundwork on which they built, and still there is little of his reasoned approach in their doctrine, which seems to be more one of using the values of conservatism to justify profound, sociopathic selfishness.

Still, I find his statement that Bush suffered "the absence of effective conservative ideology" to be a peculiar observation for two reasons: first, his own contributions are claimed (falsely? stolen gravitas?) by the neocon and dominionist crowd that used Bush; second, saying that there could be "effective" conservative ideology suggests there would be "ineffective" conservative ideology, and that leads to the question, "So, what makes a given ideology effective, why, and how?" and that leads to the question, which I wish he'd answered, "what differentiates a 'true' conservative from a 'false' conservative?"

Though I suspect the answer would be subjected to the same degree and kind of frenzied dispute as the question "What differentiates a 'true' Christian from a 'false' Christian?"

And of course he could be claiming that "effective conservative ideology" is the same as saying "effective ideology" or "conservatism" ... which would be so hubristic as to confirm the critics, and I don't believe it.