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

[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.