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Who’s Right? Patrick J. Buchanan or William F. Buckley, Jr.?
On the prospects for Western civilization, Patrick J. Buchanan said in an interview today with the Daily Caller:
When asked if a Trump victory in the United States, and the success of groups such as the National Front in France could offset this demise [the demise of the West], Buchanan was not hopeful. “Do I think those books stand up very well? Yup,” Buchanan told TheDC. “The West is disintegrating. Its faith is dead. When the cult dies, the culture dies and when the culture dies the civilization dies, and when the civilization dies the people die, and that’s what’s happening to Western civilization.”
The conservative commentator was especially grim about Europe, Buchanan said, “It’s hard for me to see how the Europeans survive whether they have the will just given the trend-lines in terms of population and in terms of immigrants pouring in.”
He told TheDC, “I’m not a great optimist about the Western civilization.”
In contrast, here is William F. Buckley, Jr., addressing a rally at Carnegie Hall to protest a visit to the United States by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on September 17, 1960:
Ladies and gentlemen, we deem it the central revelation of Western experience that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep… Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature …
Even out of the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury [them].
Well, good people of Ricochet? Who’s right?
Published in Culture
Yes, but no ability (or desire) to manufacture more.
Political culture has never been lead by majorities of people. It has always been a dedicated minority that has made the difference, who have directed the whole behind them. It’s still that way today.
You forgot Oprah Winfrey.
Yes. Eventually. The ebb and flow of reason and nonsense, civilization and barbarism, is like a signal, with countless epi-signals and epi-epi-signals riding it, oscillating forever. What Buchanan and Buckley said may not be mutually exclusive because they referred to different temporal scales.
Of course Buckley is right. What was the question again?
Ad hominem
Maybe they’re both right. Our “ultimate resources” are “moral in nature,” as Buckley said — and as Buchanan suggests, we actively stifle the Faith at every turn. But if we do not acknowledge that our defeat of the Soviet Union was owed primarily to our moral and spiritual resources, then the West perpetuates a materialistic project not so different (in the final analysis) from Communism and its Man-centric destruction. Along these lines, it is astounding to see how right Solzhenitsyn was, speaking in 1978 — (excerpts) —
If Sweden can pull back from socialism, there is always hope:
http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/11/scandinavia-isnt-a-socialist-paradise/
North America didn’t replace Europe; it supplemented it. Today, we have flourishing societies in both Europe and North America. If you mean that pole position will be taken by some other part of the world, then you join a long chorus. When I was young, the two big candidates were the Soviet Union and Japan. Today, you mention China and India (I don’t believe that you mean seriously that Islam might take the lead in that sense).
I’m very fond of both countries, but working in China was a pretty good way of being reminded just how rotten their accounts are. They’ve purchased domestic peace by avoiding even the semblance of a slowdown during my lifetime (1977), and their current success at maintaining peace appears to require the continuation of that outcome. So far, that’s meant bailing out any entity that appears to be failing and clogging up their system with ever more hidden toxic assets. My guess is that the next half decade will see the last predictions of Sinatic triumph for a while (I just re-read the Clash of Civilizations with its prediction of a Sino-Islamic military alliance, a claim that ASEAN would never be able to become an FTA with an open approach to trade with the rest of the world, and other claims that China would have an easier time than it’s having; these predictions have been being wrongly made for a while).
I’m just back from Delhi. Previously, I’d spent time in Bangalore, and this trip was something of a shock to the system; while Bangalore is much like other fast developing parts of the world, this time I spent more of the trip in places that were not improving. Modi is pretty great, and there are many wonderful things going on in India, but a two trillion dollar country is going to take a while to overtake an eighteen trillion dollar country. With growth coming largely from imitation of America and Europe, it’s not obvious to me that such an outcome would be particularly bad for Western Civilization anyway.
Last night I sat on the veranda, enjoying the coolth of the evening, pondering life’s imponderables. The door was open to let the cool breeze in to the sitting room, where my eldest daughter, a young woman of 16, sat, reading. I called in: “Victoria, play me some Beethoven!” And she did. And it was wonderful. Thus I say to you: Buchanan is wrong.
If a young woman playing Beethoven on a 100 year old piano made by a German immigrant isn’t the sign of wealth, prosperity, and a thriving culture, I don’t know what is.
Let them eat cake.
Buchanan’s comment has a nice poetic ring to it, doesn’t it? It doesn’t make it true. He is always dark, seeing disaster around the corner. I’ll stick with Buckley, even though he made his comment at a different time. I hate to say that hitting bottom may be ahead of us, but I believe in our resilience and our future.
A lot has changed since he died. I think had he continued to live through the present, through Obamacare, SCOTUS gay marriage (thanks again, Anthony Kennedy), seeing how the Millenials (and thus, the future) have turned out, demographics, etc…. I think his outlook would be much more dire.
Shades of the Nockian remnant in Buckley’s statement.
Buchanan has this exactly right. The West is in denial and much of it has lost it’s faith.
We should pray for leaders like these two men:
The President of Poland
The former Prime Minister of Ireland
We have a sizable portion of our culture that thinks it’s an outrage to ask people to use the correct bathroom, and people still think the West isn’t dying? We’re whistling past the graveyard.
Buchanans ’92 protectionist hyperbole, in part, lead to Clinton, Inc.
Buckley’s perspicacious, penetrating mind lead the country to Reagan.
I’ll stick with WFB.
Buchanan is right and so is Mark Steyn.
But prophets are neither liked nor listened to in their own time.
One of the sadder things currently in conservative circles is so many of the writers and thinkers believe they can soldier on with Atheism as a foundation for liberty. You might as well build a battleship in a dry-dock made of straw.
I don’t think it is Western Civilization that is dying, but the post-Enlightenment order isn’t looking very healthy. The West has survived periods of secularism, periods of religious warfare, and invasions by Muslims, Vikings, and Mongols. The Thirty Years War didn’t kill Civilization, and I don’t think our current troubles are quite as bad. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if we are in for a period of blood-and-soil nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and eventual Christian revival.
Reasonable point, but goes back to the dichotomy of the OP. The aggressive Marxist power was a very real external fact of real life.
What we are experiencing today isn’t an external threat, but soft tyranny voted to power from within.
I’d wager against a vibrant Christian revival. I think that Science would have to fail in a big way for this to happen, as it now provides a second sun by which secularist mark day and night – unlike prior generations who only had to contend with other dominations and powers, false faiths and heresies.
There is no comparing the two. The internal weakness can be easily healed once people are actually willing to fight. On the other hand the world very much almost ended in nuclear devastation, because of aggressive outside our control Marxism.
The problem of this age largely comes from our own problems, and therefor are much easier to fix. Taking down the USSR was much more difficult.
Our problem is still a problem of persuasion, not of machine guns.
I fear the internal weakness more than external nuclear devastation.
We admit, identify, understand, and address external threats. We ignore the internal ones.
I think it was Lincoln who was correct.
“All the armies of Europe or of Russia could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio River. As a nation of freemen, we will live forever or die by suicide.”
His words were specific to the US but I think one could apply that to Western Civilization. After all it was the West that brought civilization to the globe, and then it was the same West that told ourselves that by civilizing the globe we were acting in a jingoistic, racist manner.
Buckley is right in one respect: there is hope. Sadly, for those who don’t know Him, it will not end with us living in the same world we find ourselves in now.
Nonsense. These things have ebbed and flowed for generations. It is not irreversible despite the negative nannies of the world, who desire to clutch their pearls and live in fear. Far to many people are simply unwilling to fight now, or they are following a false charlatan. Again this is a problem of persuasion not of machine guns. The west will always rise above the rest because our foundation are based on objective truth, we only need to embrace it.
On the other hand the Soviet Union very easily could have destroyed the entire country, if not the world at large.
Nonsense. You over estimate the external threat to cloak the internal one in ignorance.
Speaking of Lincoln my favorite quote of his comes from 9/30/1859
You can always fight back, and restore yourself. The only thing stopping us is our own fear.
Nonsense. There is nothing irreversible that is happening right now in our society, restoration is a real thing. Unlike what happens once the nukes start flying.