Faggots, queers, and Nazis—the debate continues

A reader forwarded to me this e-mail he had received along with a YouTube video:

Subject: William F. Buckley Would Call Gore Vidal A Little Queer, But Then He’d Have To Go To Rehab

Awful, just awful video with worse sound of this, um, notorious “debate” at the 1968 DNC.

Just so you know what you’re listening for—Vidal fillibusters for a while, Buckley says that little hooligans encouraging enemy troops to kill American soldiers and Marines (sound familiar?) ought to be ostracized, at which point Vidal calls him a “pro-war crypto-Nazi” (sound familiar?) and Buckley says “Don’t call me a crypto-Nazi, you little queer, I’ll punch you in your goddamned head.”

I wrote back to the reader:

Yes, but that face-off with Gore Vidal was a significant turning point in Buckley’s career, and for the worse. As told in John Judis’s biography William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, Buckley was traumatized by that argument, ashamed of what he had said to Vidal, and resolved to avoid such confrontations in the future. But what “avoiding such confrontations” turned out to mean in practice was avoiding serious confrontations with liberals. It was a step in the decline of Buckley from an important conservative figure to a mainstream entertainer and icon.

In any case, this incident, far from suggesting that calling someone a homo in public is “Ok,” shows that it’s not ok, as Buckley was ashamed of himself and it led to his own self-muzzling.

The lesson is: using indecent insults against the left does not strengthen our side, but weakens it.

That is also the point I make in an exchange with another reader.

Larry G. wrote:

I did not see this event, but the context I think you’re missing is that Coulter is an entertainer. She was not invited to CPAC to give a serious policy analysis. She was there to rally the team and to poke fun at the other side. Being called names by Don Rickles is quite different from being called names by Don Corleone.

LA replies:

I don’t buy that. I do not buy the idea of someone calling someone a deadly insult on national television and then saying, “Oh, I was just kidding.” How’d you like it if someone called you a racist on national television, and then, on being criticized for it, said, “Hey, it was just a joke.”

Larry G. replies:

I understand your position, and I think it has merit in the proper context, which would be a serious speech sans humor. Coulter is really trying to have it both ways, being taken seriously—or not—depending on how the comment went over. I can see how that is unfair. “Everybody does it” isn’t a good excuse, but unfortunately, these days, with the blurring of the line between news and entertainment, many people do.

But on the other hand, as Coulter points out in the column you linked this morning, there is a kind of one-way warfare occurring between conservatives and the left. It is similar to the way we are fighting in Iraq, where we observe the Geneva Conventions while our enemies do not. It is a losing strategy. The left can equate Bush to Hitler on a daily basis, and when we complain they do nothing to stop it. But if someone on the conservative side makes a remark, before the left even has a chance to complain, we jump on and attack our own people. We’re trying to influence the left’s behavior by setting an example and playing by civil rules, while they are out to destroy us just as surely as the jihadists. So I would say civility is certainly appropriate within our own ranks—Ronald Reagan’s “11th Commandment”—just as we should observe the Geneva Conventions if we ever go to war with England, but when the enemy fights by different rules and will not adopt ours, we need to play by their rules, ruthless and vicious as they are.

LA replies:

Of course I want our side to fight, and the failure of our side to fight has obsessed me for many years. But the way to fight is not to call your enemy a faggot! That only harms our side.

- end of initial entry -

Mark J. writes:

I must disagree with Larry G. and the others who suggest that we are in a war with liberals that requires us to get nasty à la Coulter. Larry G. writes, “We’re trying to influence the left’s behavior by setting an example and playing by civil rules, while they are out to destroy us just as surely as the jihadists.” Actually, I think our goal is not to influence the behavior of leftists, but to sway the opinion of the great mass of decent people who are currently under the thrall of liberalism. And we don’t do that by behaving like yahoos as the left does so often. Some of the left’s biggest vulnerabilities is its tendencies towards vulgarity, flag burning, idiotic demonstrators, and so on. That does nothing for their cause.

It puts me in mind of the white Southerner(s) who bombed the black church during the civil rights era and killed four black girls. That single act of violence may have done more to defeat their cause than anything else. They stooped to violence and lost legitimacy in the eyes of the majority, while people like MLK Jr. seemed to conduct themselves with quiet dignity and thus gained the moral upper hand.

We need to do the same in our argumentation. We should be incisive, clear, well-supported, and convincing. But the way we conduct ourselves should be above reproach and that includes refraining from childish name-calling which only alienates the grown-ups out there. In the long run, the best ideas win, not the team who issues the sharpest and most personal put-downs.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 08, 2007 11:38 AM | Send