Iqra’i

Despite my search for a summer job (Do you want a heterodox conservative intern? Are you in DC? Will you pay me ridiculous amounts of money at all? You know where to find me…) and my oscillating comtempt/love for Julien Benda (Le Trahison des Clercs is Enlightenment apologetics disguised as tract against rampant nationalism), I occasionally come up for air.

Today’s interlude is prompted by the death of William F. Buckley.

Last fall, Mr. Buckley spoke to the Yale Political Union. For the sake of those who don’t want to download a Word file, I include the text of his speech:

Ladies and gentlemen of the Political Union

I can’t say that I am actually happy to be back at the Political Union for this, my terminal speech on public affairs. Because this is the sixtieth anniversary of my first appeal to the Union to hear my thoughts on public issues. The Political Union that night, in 1946, initiated its plodding record of rejecting my advice, which is why we have war, inflation, and inequality of income.

The one feature most to be dreaded in reappearances on the stage by retired performers is their reminiscences. Orations that include the words, “As I recommended fifty years ago” are only just less offensive than those that begin, “As I explained in some detail fifty years ago and will do so again now.”

With that paralepsis, I nevertheless pause to recall the single splendid evening I had under your auspices. David Boren was president and I agreed to appear before you. A week later I saw in an issue of the Yale Daily News an article giving the roster of the speakers the PU had lined up for that fall. It included the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the United States. I sent a note to Mr. Boren and told him to drop my own name from the fall list, as I declined to appear on any roster of speakers that included an official of the Communist Party. This was about the time Solzhenitsyn published his book on the Gulag Archipelago and I and a few others thought to associate ourselves with his plea for a universal boycott, even in such attenuations as this little protest against the incorporation of a defender of the Gulag on a guest speakers list.

But, I said to President Boren in my letter, I would agree to appear provided the resolution of the house were altered to read, “Resolved, The Yale Political Union should rescind its invitation to William Z Foster to appear as guest speaker.”

David Boren, whose political acuity took him ten years later to the United States Senate, and then to the presidency of the University of Oklahoma, called me on the telephone to say that the officers of the PU, after much deliberation, agreed to debate my resolution as proposed. And then, in a tone of voice especially endearing when used by young men addressing people decades older, came the avuncular warning: “Mr. Buckley, I think I should warn you that you will get not mare than ten percent of the vote arguing your resolution.”

The evening aroused considerable campus interest and the audience finally crowded into Sprague Hall. But there, that night, democracy had one of its great validating moments. When the vote came, a majority voted to rescind the invitation, even achieving notice of their deed in the New York Times. Needless to say, my old friend, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, interjected himself into the picture the very next morning by inviting the Communist leader to make his appearance at Yale as a guest of Dwight Hall.
Well, Bill Coffin is not with us to gainsay your vote tonight, though perhaps we can predict that someone in the larger New Haven community will deplore your vote, at the conclusion of the proceedings, calling on everyone running for office in next week’s elections under Democratic auspices to step down.

But whatever others say, your prescience here tonight will make its mark, in its own way, in its own time, and future historians of the Political Union will surely remark that while others dithered, the PU flashed out its insights and determination in recommending bold and conscientious political action.

I add only this, that when last spring I accepted your kind, recurrent invitation to rise from the dead and address the Political Union one more time, I said all right – and gave the language of the resolution I would be willing to espouse.

My letter was greeted by the president with what I could only interpret as stunned silence; but then, finally, with a message that the resolution I proposed would need to pass muster with the PU’s governing council, leaving the whole business in abeyance. With the result that for a couple of golden summer months I comforted myself that I would after all be permitted to prolong my six-year-old retirement from public speaking.
But then, in September, I had word from vice president April Lawson reaffirming the invitation, and accepting my proposed resolution. She added that I should be reminded that, as she put it, “one of the traditions of the YPU is to hiss to show disapproval and to pound on our desks to show support for what a speaker is saying.”

In fact I hadn’t remembered this tradition. What Ms. Lawson did not mention was the more ancient tradition of carrying out the speaker on your shoulders when positively transported by enthusiasm for the resolution, for the speaker, and for the speaker’s advocacy. That occurrence is rare, and has not happened to me since the day I persuaded your predecessors to disinvite the Communist speaker. I must ask you to be so kind as to rein in that impulse, should it seize you at the end of the evening. I am very old and very fragile, and might not survive forceful body contact with people of your age, with such agile minds and limber muscles, if inclined to such a demonstration.

Well, on to my proposal, which rests on a few postulates.

They are that Democrats are dominated by craven, greedy, hypocritical thought. Kindly signify your acquiescence in this matter by pounding on your desks, as promised. Louder, would be in order…

I begin with a modest tour d’horizon over public concerns as listed by the Democratic National Committee at their convention in Boston in July 2004.

The platform committee, listing its concerns alphabetically, began with “Abortion,” #1, and ended, #24, with “Welfare and Poverty.”

The policy perspective of the Democratic leadership was dismayingly conventional. The Democrats at the Boston Convention came out vigorously against – the budget deficit of the Republican Party!. They even pledged that if give the power to govern, the Democrats would cut the national deficit in half in four years!

We have to wonder at the naivete. John Maynard Keynes taught us with biblical authority, eighty years ago, that concern for national deficits is a residual superstition of outworn canons of capitalist dogma. It is not so easy, in parsing the Democrat platform of 2004, to say simply that the economies contemplated amounted merely to reduced costs by ending the lunacy of our Iraqi venture. No, the Democrats in Boston had much else in mind.

But why haven’t they tackled the dominant challenge? The first question to ask is: How do the Democrats reconcile their opposition for a society of extremes in rich and poor, like our own, with their ambition to reduce the deficit? Because to do so would mean to reduce the scale of federal intervention in the lunatic dispositions of the market place. Here and there in their platform they touched down on this inequality allusively; but these were forced ideological landings, you remember, done quickly and all but unnoticeably.

Consider the matter of income inequality. The Democrats promised to revise the tax code. What they would do, they promised, was eliminate that much of the tax reduction package of the first Bush administration that inured to the benefit of Americans with incomes of $200,000 or more. The Democrats’ contribution to equality! The Democrats of 2004 proposed keeping the tax relief for Americans who earn less and eliminating them for those in the highest brackets.

What then happened? The Democrats ran into the emptiness of their rhetoric. In the two measures addressing tax policy in the past two years, Democratic congressmen made zero corporate gesture to protest the shameful disparity. Indeed, 29 Democratic legislators voted against any revision of the code.

The same platform in 2004 had lisped out a protest against benefits to the rich that work down through corporation tax policies, and vowed that these too would end.

They have not ended, and this is – in part – because Democratic legislators ran into economic realities. Yes that is one part of the story. But another is the Democratic failure to revise realities. It is obviously difficult to revise tax and budget agendas when remedial action is repressed by antique orthodoxies that uphold the essential architecture of our capitalist system!

What is the mission of the Democrats? – if not to confront these pillars of superstition and offer the voters a repristinated vision of a society in which justice prevails over greed and acquisitiveness?

But perhaps you will agree that the principal delinquency of the Democratic majority lies in its epicene reaction to our war in Iraq. I will not take up your time, Mr. President, by simply reciting the conflicting records of critical Democratic leaders. Their last presidential candidate, my colleague, John Kerry, educated in these halls, twice voted his approval of our middle East extravagances, slavish to the perceived interests of Israel, and logy with avarice for four million barrels of oil, and twice that many barrels gushing out of the earth in Saudi Arabia, great canyons of oil required to maintain the jet fleets of the extortionists who rule their country and continue to impoverish its lower classes; except, to be sure, for those few who seek escapism by attaching their own lives to the cause, that terminal sincerity of the protester who gives his life to the cause of ending imperialist exercises in pursuit of wealth and privilege!

The Democratic platform of two years ago did not even go so far as to call for pulling back immediately on our misspent forces from Iraq. And on the broader question of our continued reliance on militarism, the Democrats did not call for the rejection of the military. No, they actually called for a stronger military, one reoriented to international objectives, among them the education of the Muslim world, so that Islam could better recognize such purposes as we are allegedly engaged in in Iraq, never mind the failure of our Democratic leaders themselves to perceive the contradictions, the futility, the exorbitance of what we have done and are doing!

Some of you will think that our call tonight is futile. But we reject such cowardice. We address all Democrats running next week for office: Renounce, we say, the auspices under which you are running. Choose fresh careers, aimed at elevating our national sights from the materialist and parochial concerns that now blind our vision and enervate our consciences. I dare hope such weak-of-heart as cavil at our resolution underestimate your will and your courage.

What an opportunity you have tonight! The venerable undergraduate political organization of Yale University saw through it all! You focused, with unsparing precision, on the higher forces of democratic idealism. And you registered your willingness to take one brave step forward, by saying to Democrats everywhere You had your change!. Let us turn now to a greater challenge, to ends more sublimes.
So, ladies and gentlemen of this august house, join with me, I implore you, in advancing this holy goal, this sacred release from the old rigidities.

Aut vincere, …Aut mori.

Ave atque vale!