The obscurantist

Regarding my comments about WFB, a reader writes:

Are you saying that we have a case of a conservative with nothing to say … who has said nothing for decades?

Reminds me that I was sitting a few years ago in my living room watching TV with a friend (a Russian immigrant). Happened to be tuned into Buckley’s “Firing Line” program on PBS. After half an hour, my friend asked me. “What has this man been saying—I haven’t understood a word? Is it that he has no ideas, or is it that I don’t understand his big words?”

I answered, “Buckley uses archaic language and arcane terms because he has no ideas.” He simply can’t get from A to B in a straight line because he doesn’t know what a straight line looks like …

Meanwhile, Buckley worship goes on and on, as in this article by Michael Uhlmann at Claremont Review. How much of the modern conservative movement consists of pious rehearsals of the glorious history of the conservative movement? Some people can never get over the fact that there is a conservative movement and that it’s had some real successes. I don’t dismiss that achievement. America has elements of a genuine conservative resistance to left-liberalism that is unlike anything in Europe, and for this we should be grateful. But at the same time the conservative movement is so compromised and so disengaged from the principles that once defined it (both the compromise and the disengagement being personified by Buckley himself) that to go on celebrating the specious triumph of conservatism adds up to a practical surrender to liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 18, 2005 02:12 AM | Send