While I think Conservatism is backwards and hurting our nation and a DEAD political movement, Brooks has another take on it. While I disagree with him on conservative principles, he is very measured. The irony of his short speech is it could have easily been made by a liberal. When he quoted James Baldwin at the end that is all I needed to know about a guy who struggles with his political leanings;
This debate between Baldwin and Buckley is worth the watch, Baldwin destroys Buckley and Conservatism, it is so brilliant, I often tell fellow progressives if you are feeling down about your political leanings just watch this debate, you will feeling better in a matter of minutes.
One of the more interesting moments was when Baldwin quoted JFK saying we will have a black president in 40 years (2005). Pretty crazy that Obama was inaugurated in 2008, only 3 years after the prediction. I think Baldwin said it best, ‘I guess a black man as president is not good enough until 40 years from now.’
Trump and his cohorts are fascists, and then there are conservatives who are often wrong but decent, while I’m a liberal and proud of it, and I don’t have to be called, nor do I want to be called a “progressive” just to market my thoughts, when actually what our markets could use are more liberal leaders throughout.
There’s much irony to Baldwin’s comments about RFK, Sr., and having the black man wait forty years for a black president. Baldwin asks why the black man must wait. AND, then prophetically, RFK, Sr., was nearly spot on as 43 years after this video from Cambridge, Obama was elected president. But many would argue that the advent of a black president eventually gave us Trump with the help of an Electoral College, which has a strong tie to slavery and the racial policies of this country for roughly the last 250 years. Now, speed forward to 2025, and RFK’s son and namesake is a part of the current racist Trump Cabinet. If you were to put all of this into a novel, people would call it unbelievable fiction and not finish reading it. But sadly, it is the truth. The Kennedys have done this to us many times before, whether it be Grandpa Joe and his admiration for the Third Reich prior to the War, Jack and Bobby inviting McCarthy to Hyannis Port to play softball, or Teddy hinting at a Kennedy/Wallace ticket in ’76, the Kennedy’s have disappointed us before, but many of us forget it due to the charismatic hope they often convey or have in the past. Baldwin’s disappointment in a Kennedy is historical, but often we forget about history, and that is why people like Trump often win.
Buckley, on the other hand, begins by making fun of Baldwin’s newfound British accent as he debates before the Union at Cambridge, which I also find very ironic since for years, I always thought that Buckley spoke like a man from Yale who wished he had come from Oxford or Cambridge. The crux of Buckley’s argument is an early 1960s attack on racial identity, or what conservatives like to call identity politics, but then Buckley gravely indicts himself by using this identity valuable as a way to express a distinction between Jews and Italians relative to blacks in America and how many doctors each has produced since 1900. Furthermore, when Buckley ingeniously says that the problem with Mississippi is not that blacks cannot vote, but rather that too many whites vote in that state, is a further dependency on his overall argument for identity politics, which he claims to dislike. Buckley wants the market to solve the problem, but how do you do this if the market does not allow some to play in it? This conservative disdain for identity politics assumes that all are fair, but the mere fact that Buckley says that too many whites vote in Mississippi further demonstrates how the disdain for identity politics and the mere fiating of a color-blind society is not only naive but also ill-conceived without any respect for the inevitable variable reality found within our society, which is called race distinction and placement.
( and Woodstock adds: “Say, was McCarthy any good at softball?”…. )
Here’s a fun one, too: McGovern versus Buckley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6q23Pyl0M8