The Fault of Underlings
By Jerry A. Kane
We can now add the son of the late William F. Buckley (WFB), Christopher Buckley, to the growing list of Me-too Republicans who have denounced John McCain and disparaged Sarah Palin. Buckley, political satirist and novelist, opted to forgo the back page of National Review and make his mark through cyberspace, releasing his column “Sorry Dad, I’m Voting for Obama” on the Daily Beast (how delightfully apropos).
It was only back in February that the conservative bon vivant was “taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative.” In a “highly favorable Op-Ed” in The New York Times, Buckley writes, “the sum of Mr. McCain seems (to me, anyway) far greater than the parts…. And who among ‘us’ … would not sleep soundly knowing that the war hero was on the job calculating how to dispatch more Islamic fanatics to their rendezvous with 72 virgins.” Alas! “But that was—sigh—then.” Frailty, thy name is Buckley!
Buckley’s Jeffords-moment of clarity, from “God, this guy should be president someday” to “graffiti on a marble bust” tragedy, came during his “genuinely saddening” realization that the McCain campaign had changed the noble McCain: he became “inauthentic,” “irascible, and snarly”; his promises became “unrealistic”; his attack ads became “mean-spirited and pointless”; and his “positions changed” and “lacked coherence.” Conversely, the glib, urbane son of a stalwart conservative praised Obama as the “rara avis [rare person] … politician who writes his own books.” Buckley readily admits that Obama is a “lefty” (possible baseball jargon) but his prescience exceeds labels, given that he can see Obama’s potential as a “great leader,” the one who is “what the historical moment seems to be calling for.”
Despite that “Obama’s record is far more left than McCain’s is far right,” and that Obama has been “the most partisan in the Senate, McCain one of the most bipartisan,” or that an Obama presidency would mean open borders, “higher taxes, larger government, more entitlements, more of a UN-centered foreign policy, dialogue with an Iran, less coal, oil, and nuclear energy production at home,” and more living Constitution activists on the Supreme Court, the self-proclaimed “conservative/libertarian/whatever” offers little more than “airy-fairy” rhetoric to justify his “leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon.”
Buckley’s defense is mere pretext. His the-noble-McCain-has-changed argument lacks substance and is anything but persuasive. Yet his reason for “pulling the Democratic lever in November” is “bleeding obvious”; namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that.” Methinks a balmy zephyr has left behind a “foul whiff of aristocratic disdain.”
Herein lies the bloody truth behind the snide and sneering comments from the silver spoon-fed member of the life-of-the-mind crowd. To this Abbey School sophisticate, Palin is just another ordinary, stupid, upstart commoner, lacking the charm and social refinements of a “first-class” “Harvard man.” Palin belongs to the class of “discontented … rabble” as expressed by Henry F. Potter, the cantankerous, snobby old businessman character from It’s a Wonderful Life. Yet, Buckley would do well to remember that the rabble he’s talking about does most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country. WFB knew that about Reagan conservatives and understood that they were human beings, not “kooks.” As far as I’m concerned, “pup” was a man of high ideals who died a much richer and wiser man than his son will ever be.
Buckley said he tried to soften the blow of his Obama endorsement by not publishing it in the National Review, but location wasn’t the problem for the irate readers who e-mailed the magazine with threats of cancellations; therefore, Buckley offered his resignation, and it was readily accepted. Now that all is said and done, Buckley seems a bit thunderstruck with both the outrage and its subsequent consequences. After all, didn’t WFB endorse a few Democrats in the past, and was he not “quite tolerant of the surprising point of view” not wanting NR writers to be “in intellectual lockstep”? In what has to be a Dixie-Chick moment, the baffled Buckley said, “It’s an odd situation, when the founder’s son has suddenly become the turd in the punch bowl.”
Buckley refuses to accept that along with the wealth, social contacts, and membership into the privileged class, he has also inherited the personal responsibility that goes along with sporting the last name, Buckley. At such a crucial moment in our nation, when the mainstream media (MSM) churn out blatant propaganda for the Democratic Party in general and for Obama in particular, and the Republican Party tries desperately to keep the Democrats from gaining super majorities in Congress and absolute power over the Republic, all that seems to matter to the self-absorbed Buckley is that he has been slighted, and the world should know it.
Buckley’s pretentious manner and feckless thinking calls to mind the late Louis Nye, whose best-remembered character, Sonny Drysdale, is the spoiled, sissified, ne’er-do-well son of the Drysdales from the 1960s sicom the Beverly Hillbillies. Sonny D. is a smug, arrogant, overbearing, blue-blooded mama’s boy, who treats those whom he considers his intellectual and social inferiors with haughty disdain, and never tires of basking in the rays of his imagined self-importance.
Unfortunately, Buckley is not the lone elitist political talking-head, pundit, or commentator who belittles Sarah Palin in the minds of voters in saying that she’s out of her league, unfit to assume the presidency, and a huge mistake. The Beltway smart-set, who literally cannot separate good from evil, right from wrong, or better from worse, include George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, David Gergen, Ed Rollins, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Kathleen Parker. During an interview David Brooks compared Palin’s anti-intellectualism to President Bush’s and said that the Governor “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.” Brooks went on to describe John McCain and Barack Obama as “the two best candidates we’ve had in a long time.”
On the one hand, this group of elitist snobs knows that Palin is the campaign’s tough, sassy, anti-elite, maverick who stands outside the Beltway establishment poised to attack the New York–Washington media elite, the liberal elite, and the Anglo-American elite who don’t believe in getting their hands dirty with work; yet, these prominent Republican “conservatives” continue to use such reproachful rhetoric in attacking their own party’s ticket while it is engaged in a political battle for the presidency, the Congress, and its very existence.
On the other hand, they persist in their agreement with the head of the Democratic Party’s ticket, heaping praise upon the man who, when trying to explain Pennsylvania’s blue-collar working class culture to San Francisco’s upper class culture, said, “each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Again, the answer is as bloody obvious as the “leadership class” they constitute. They are the members of an Eastern establishment elite class who think that everyone outside their circle of desirable social contacts is stupid and should defer to their judgment because they are the entitled, privileged class whose breeding and wealth have determined they deserve to run things.
Buckley’s judgment for supporting Obama may be problematic, but it’s consistent with his self-perception. Parker, Brooks, Will and the rest of the New York/DC Beltway elite have far more cultural connections to Barack Obama than they do to Sarah Palin or blue-collar America whom they ridicule for being intellectually and socially inferior.
Should the Republicans lose in November, the fault will not lie so much with McCain/Palin or even with the Republican elite, as it will with “ourselves, that we are underlings.”
EDUCATORS’ VISION BASED ON UNREALISTIC UTOPIA
Posted in Previous Commentaries on September 22, 2011| 1 Comment »
Educators’ Vision Based on Unrealistic Utopia
By Jerry A. Kane
I recently attended a dinner discussion sponsored by the Pennsylvania State Education Association. The title of the discussion was based on the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.” Excerpts from The Dream Catcher were read at various intervals throughout the evening. The story’s tenor suggests that children’s needs are better enhanced through a community effort. The story purports there is a natural symbiotic relationship between a child and its community.
The notion that a child draws its happiness and well-being from the community, while the community grows stronger through sustaining and nurturing the child, is the underlying principle of socialist societies, and not in societies whose foundation is based upon individual rights and popular sovereignty.
It seems that modern American educators no longer understand the philosophical basis for the American Revolution. The philosophical basis of the modem world was carved out in 1776 and 1789 during the American and French revolutions. Although both revolutions occurred in a little more than a decade of each, other, and each involved the overthrowing of a monarchy, they were worlds apart in their philosophies of understanding government and human nature.
The political ideas of the men who laid the foundation of the U.S. Constitution came indirectly from John Locke. The belief in Lex Rex (Law is King), or as we know it, the idea of “inalienable rights” is the founding principle of American government. The underlying notion of this principle is that man’s rights are endowed by his Creator, not by the state. In other words, man’s inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are given by a Supreme Being, and not by the state, and therefore cannot be taken away.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher who inspired the French Revolution, believed that primitive man “the noble savage” was superior to civilized man, because primitive man was innocent and free from the restraints and authority of civilization. But Rousseau’s idea of individual freedom could only be perfectly reflected in his notion of the “general will” as a part of a social contract. In his (1762) book, The Social Contract he wrote, “[W]hoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.”
Rousseau believed human beings could be molded and shaped by the general will once society’s old ideas and institutions had been eradicated from it. His aspirations were utopian in that he believed in man’s perfectibility. According to Rousseau, man’s potential for moral change is essentially unlimited, and it is up to the naturally virtuous human beings to transform man from what he is to what he could and should be.
Rousseau’s utopian aspirations were adopted by some “naturally virtuous” human beings during the French Revolution. Rousseau’s utopian ideals fueled the tyranny of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, which eventually led to the authoritarian reign of Napoleon.
Conversely, the United States has never been subject to a dictator. Locke’s idea that human nature is neither perfect nor perfectible is expressed in the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, which were included for both the governors and the governed That system has worked because it took into account man’s moral and mental limitations, which were based on a theory of improving the human condition, not perfecting it.
The United States was never intended to be a utopian motherland or “workers’ paradise” ruled by an Aryan superman, or managed by a “new Socialist man.” Our forefather’s envisioned a liberal democracy based on majority rule, individual rights, and limited government. The Founding Fathers did not want to possess a man’s soul or psyche, in fact, they wanted to do the exact opposite. They created a system of government that gave the individual the freedom to pursue his own interests, hold his own opinions, and live his own life.
America’s educators need to rethink what it is -they are doing in their classrooms. Students are without a national identity because they have not been taught what it is that distinguishes America and sets it apart from other nations. ‘They have .also been fragmented into groups, and set adrift in a sea of cultural diversity without a sail or a rudder to steer by. Their belief in national sovereignty has been uprooted and transplanted in a global community.
If America’s educators believe in those principles of national sovereignty and individual liberty as penned in the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist’s Papers, then they must realize that they are obligated by the Constitution to teach those ideals to their students. On the other hand, if America’s educators are utopian socialist engineers working to transform the United States from what it is to what it could and should be, then their hallowed halls and ivory towers have become nothing more than a breeding ground for socialist utopians.
The premise that it “Takes a village to raise a child” is a purely socialist concept. Americans have always understood that the responsibility for raising children belongs to the child’s family, and not to a community or a coalition formed by the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Members of the PSEA surely know that the fabric of American society is weaved around the family unit and parental authority, unless of course their goal is to lay a different social foundation based not on individual rights and parental authority, but on the rights, responsibility, and general will of the community.
NOTE: This commentary appeared in Mainline Newspapers in 1998.
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