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Does anybody else feel strange about the reemergence of this particular debate as a sort of fetish object of our time? There's the venue (Oxford), a weird place

Does anybody else feel strange about the reemergence of this particular debate as a sort of fetish object of our time? There's the venue (Oxford), a weird place for two American intellectuals to have it out. There's the framing (a civil discussion between two intellectual giants) which, I guess, was Buckley a giant at this time in his life? He had his lows and highs. Was he really so civil, either in this debate, or in general?[0] Was he really that smart? You can argue all these questions one way or the other, but I feel like a lot of the animus for the perverse modern-day sainthood of Buckley, a man who supported Barry Goldwater, is a sort of misplaced nostalgia for the supposed halycon days of the US, where it was supposedly less barbaric than how it is today, ignoring the fact these conservative figures were all going to parties with David Duke (who Goldwater once employed) and the KKK was still lynching people in broad daylight for delighted audiences. Not to mention, Baldwin scared the liberal establishment just as much as BLM do today. [0]:"listen, you queer. Stop Calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the face!"

UncleMeat 3y ago
I believe that this is a result of two trends in our national politics that has led to a politics of aesthetics rather than a realist politics that actually acknowledges the effects of policy on people. 1. The left wing folks in power in the US are largely dominated by people with elite backgrounds or technocrats. There are populist elements within the party, but rarely among leadership. This makes it difficult for the leadership of the left to engage with the idea that various systems are broken or that their opposition is acting in bad faith, since their credentials are tied to these systems. How can the Ivy League be broken if the reason that they are so important is because they went to the Ivies? They want to believe that "high intellectual" solutions to problems will work. This means a willingness to engage in the aesthetics of policymaking. It also carries the trend of "TED-ification" of policymaking, where leaders seem to believe that if they just find the one simple trick that it'll fix things. 2. The populist right recognizes this bias towards aesthetics from the left and sees the opportunity to smuggle ideas into these spaces to grant them an air of legitimacy. The Supreme Court is probably the clearest example of this. By getting five or six conservative justices to put on the aesthetics of logical reasoning and legal analysis, they can enact policy goals while relying on the left to write endlessly about how the court is actually somehow making decisions based on a consistent intellectual framework that we must simply learn to analyze and understand. This is how you get situations where Senators think that asking conservative scotus appointees if they'll respect stare decisis and then calling hypocrisy when Roe is overturned is somehow a win.

UncleMeat 3y ago

I believe that this is a result of two trends in our national politics that has led to a politics of aesthetics rather than a realist politics that actually acknowledges the effects of policy on people. 1. The left wing folks in power in the US are largely dominated by people with elite backgrounds or technocrats. There are populist elements within the party, but rarely among leadership. This makes it difficult for the leadership of the left to engage with the idea that various systems are broken or that their opposition is acting in bad faith, since their credentials are tied to these systems. How can the Ivy League be broken if the reason that they are so important is because they went to the Ivies? They want to believe that "high intellectual" solutions to problems will work. This means a willingness to engage in the aesthetics of policymaking. It also carries the trend of "TED-ification" of policymaking, where leaders seem to believe that if they just find the one simple trick that it'll fix things. 2. The populist right recognizes this bias towards aesthetics from the left and sees the opportunity to smuggle ideas into these spaces to grant them an air of legitimacy. The Supreme Court is probably the clearest example of this. By getting five or six conservative justices to put on the aesthetics of logical reasoning and legal analysis, they can enact policy goals while relying on the left to write endlessly about how the court is actually somehow making decisions based on a consistent intellectual framework that we must simply learn to analyze and understand. This is how you get situations where Senators think that asking conservative scotus appointees if they'll respect stare decisis and then calling hypocrisy when Roe is overturned is somehow a win.