Down on Liberals
HAAG, ERNEST VAN DEN
Down on Liberals Up From Liberalism. By William F. Buckley Jr. McDowell. 205 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Ernest van den Haag Professor of Social Philosophy, New York University WILLIAM BUCKLEY is...
...How would it be avoided...
...Yet he can be for the status quo ante only in a highly selective, speculative and perhaps unrealistic way...
...But Buckley would not think that one can validly criticize the Roman Catholic faith by lampooning the stupidity and venality of the hierarchy in a particular place and time...
...But he hasn't tackled serious liberals— unrepresentative as they may be...
...One is that his intention was limited...
...One cannot really quarrel with that, but one must wish that his ambition rise to his capacity...
...mostly right—than in his implied and often vague proposals...
...His views bear some marks of haste and polemic...
...In other words, less government activity...
...At times he seems prepared to try to do this, only to be sidetracked by some more tempting and easy morsel...
...Reacting to the present behavior of the body politic, he wishes to return to a past that seems better...
...As it is, Buckley has proved that at least some conservatives can easily run intellectual rings around many representative liberals...
...With all this, how useful an exercise is Up From Liberalism...
...I do not think Buckley has given enough thought to finding out whether the means he proposes will effect or defeat the ends he wants, or by what means these ends can be achieved...
...I hope he will try to satisfy it...
...Many of his ideas about the future polity strike me as Utopian where desirable, and undesirable and vague where possible...
...Good public relations, no doubt...
...I don't know about politics being fun, but it can be funny...
...But it seems that faculties prefer to invite Mrs...
...Buckley is a reactionary more than a conservative...
...Thus we get a number of forays and excursions rather than a well-mapped voyage with a defined end...
...Buckley is better in his criticism —often brilliant, always stimulating...
...Buckley proves it with regard to Joseph Rauh and the late Elmer Davis...
...I had always suspected that the professional anti-McCarthyites were no better, at least in the means employed in their battle against him, than they thought McCarthy to be...
...but perhaps it is good public relations and the nearly systematic exclusion of any well-presented viewpoint that account for the apathy currently deplored by the faculties...
...He runs so well and thinks so well on his feet, and he is so cogent and amusing, that my asking him to sit down awhile and stop being brilliant may seem churlish...
...Roosevelt to lecture on the United Nations rather than Buckley to lecture on liberalism...
...Reviewed by Ernest van den Haag Professor of Social Philosophy, New York University WILLIAM BUCKLEY is interested in contemporary politics and he is an iconoclast...
...Yet I think it necessary...
...The other excuse, buttressing the first, is that Hook, just because he is respectable, is not as powerful and influential as the persons dealt with...
...Though none of his targets is an intellectual giant, Buckley's verve and his exhilarating logic make the exercise amusing and often instructive...
...But who has...
...In America at least, the "conservative" is vehemently opposed to the status quo...
...Buckley manages eo ipso to prove wrong the stereotype of the moss-backed, stand-pat, stupid conservative as well as that of the rabble-rousing, anti-intellectual fanatic...
...All this is true, but in the long run, liberalism will stand or fall according to whether the best it has to offer is good enough...
...He has whetted our appetite...
...Buckley could easily stir many a college campus out of the political apathy which the liberals so deplore...
...As for the status quo post, Buckley seems to favor a mixture: unconservative individualism and laissez faire, restrained by a government-enforced morality...
...Why should liberals ask, as they often do, for a full philosophy of conservatism—definitions and all —when they have not succeeded in formulating their own...
...Intellectually respectable liberals such as Sidney Hook, and even respectable liberal ideas—the depositum fidei of liberalism—are disregarded or dealt with by obiter scripta...
...Buckley cannot reduce it to its degenerate forms—however powerful—unless he takes the trouble to show that that degeneration is inherent in the ideas...
...He commands not only an elegant style and a mordant wit, but a vigorous, inventive and well-stocked mind— whether because of, or despite, the Yale education he deplores I'm not able to say...
...Buckley, of course, has two good excuses for this, though neither is fully satisfying...
...Still, Buckley seems capable of contributing more toward a political philosophy and a political program than he does in this book...
...Admittedly this is hard to resist...
...He has not worked out a full program and a viable philosophy of politics...
...Accordingly his targets are the ritual pieties and occasional ideas, the attitudes and the intellectual lore, of the liberal folk, ranging, as he sees it, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...And he has not investigated why the laissez faire and the individualism he favors have led us into the present he does not favor...
...For instance, even "liberalism" is defined denotatively as often as you wish, but connotatively hardly at all...
...The book is not as much "up from" but down on (or with) liberalism...
...Is it a necessary or just a possible degeneration...
...He does not fit any stereotype of a conservative— which may be one reason so many people are exasperated with him...
Vol. 43 • April 1960 • No. 16
