[lbo-talk] Buckley throws in the towel on Iraq

[Chuck]

Dennis Perrin wrote:
>> Wow. You gotta admire the guy for the nerve & honesty. Is the right 
>> going nuts?
>>
>> Doug
> 
> 
> Didn't WFB tell Lingua Franca before its demise that if he were a young 
> today, he'd be a socialist, maybe even communist? There's long been a 
> weird fascination with the sexy world of socialists by public members of 
> the right, doubtless colored by the likes of Burnham and Chambers in 
> their early ranks. Buckley's resisted this since forever, but in recent 
> years he's clearly loosened up. For whatever that's worth.

Lucky me! I was going through a stack of books from the collection of 
our currently closed bookstore and infoshop. I was putting the books for 
sale on Amazon.com to raise some money for our project. Lo and behold, 
what should I find but a book by Dwight Macdonald that I didn't know we 
had in our stock. The book is Macdonalds' "Politics Past", which is a 
1970 edition of his "Memoirs of a Revolutionist" published in 1957.

Macdonald is an entertaining political writer. The book contains some 
insightful criticisms of the SWP as it existed in the 1940s. Then I 
found an essay on Buckley which illustrates the adage that the more 
things change the more they remain the same.

"God and Man at Yale sold 12,000 its first month, to date has sold 
23,000 and is still selling about a thousand a month--remarkable sale 
for a nonfiction work by an unknown author put out by a small publisher 
(Henry Regnery, Chicago) and dealing with no broader or livelier topic 
than Yale curriculum. Apparently there is a big market today for 
anti-liberal polemics: Lait and Mortimer's guttersniping USA 
Confidential is currently a top nonfiction best-seller; and Senator 
McCarthy's diatribe against General Marshall, put out by another small 
house, has sold 30,000 copies."
-- Dwight Macdonald, "The Neo-Non-Conservatism, Notes on a Career" in 
Politics Past.

Chuck0