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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
So nothing really came from the medievals–just from the ancients and through the medievals?
I’m not 100%. I don’t think Buckley was 100% sure either. It seems I heard him attribute it to several different people. I thought Pasternak was the actual though. I’ll see if I can find it.
I’m not sure what Reformational Christianity has to do with this, but if anything the Lutheran and Reformed Reformation ensured the flowering of Western Civ for centuries. Now if you want to talk about Anabaptist and Radical Reformation types setting the stage for the triumph of feeling over reason then you would have a point.
But you like separation of church and state, don’t you? The Anabaptists did more for that doctrine than any other group in church history–if not human history–even if (perhaps) they got little else right.
Good catch, I misremembered. In Lee Edwards book Maker of a Movement he says “Ilya Ehrenburg, rose to the defense of another Russian poet, Boris Pasternak”
Should’ve checked my quote notebook first. :)
After Barack Obama, raised a Marxist and at best now reformed to fascism, served two terms? And was endorsed by Buckley’s son, Christopher?
I think he might well come around to Buchanan’s view.
Yes, there’s a chance that Buckley’s right and Buchanan’s wrong, as trends rarely continue uninterrupted. But I think there’s something as fundamentally wrong with modern Conservatism as there is with Leftism, which prevents it from defending itself, or even recognizing the full extent of its losses since that quote in 1960.
Reagan was a speedbump in the Left’s march to domination, and they’ve won the war in every matter that counts.
Now all they need to do, having opened it, is continue to hold the door open. The barbarians are no longer at the gate.
Well, it depends on what you mean about “separation”.
Do I support a separation of the keys of the kingdom? (Sacraments, church membership, clergy appointment, etc…)
Yes.
In that sense I am anti-Erastian (State over Church) or Romanist (Church over State). The Church does what the Church does and the State does what the State does.
Do I support a separation of the Church and the State?
No.
I am a full believer in old school Establishment of Religion and the role of the civil magistrate in protecting the Church, or as Isaiah puts it in Chapter 49, verse 23:
For more on what I believe on this see this link.
You keep comparing this to Christianity, but it’s not the same. First, it was never just 12 men. There were any other number of men and women who followed Christ who were charged with preaching the Gospel. Secondly, Christianity is not a political movement or philosophy. You don’t persuade people to become Christians. The early apostles preached because they had met Someone who had changed their lives not because they were reasoned into an intellectual belief. Third, if you’re going to cite Christianity, you should be familiar with what its Founder said. Jesus didn’t describe the world as gradually turning into a utopia. He described a world that would grow further into darkness which would hate and persecute His followers. He never told anyone to argue people into the Kingdom or to fight with others. He told them to preach the Gospel, and if they reject your message, shake their dust from your feet and move on to someone else. Pretty much the opposite of what you’re advocating.
The idea that America or the West will never fall simply because we can refuse to by force of will is triumphalist nonsense. Civilizations fall. If it were so simple to just will themselves back to greatness, they would all do it. The cultural rot that precedes their fall is much more difficult to combat. When the enemy is external, you can point it out and unify opposition to it. When it is internal, when it requires your own people to change themselves, they are reluctant to do so. They have grown comfortable; they have grown soft. We are at that point now. It will require hardship and allowing this perverse generation to suffer the consequences for its actions before they will wake up to the need for change. Then those of us who have endured will be there to show a better way.
One of the things Buckley lamented late in life in a column in NR was despite all that he had done to combat it, the culture had continued to coarsen and was demonstrably worse than when he had started public life.
Augustine decided to speak to history, to tell Christians why Roman civilization was now divided and was being torn to shreds by German tribes. Julian the Apostate claimed that the gods of Rome were that city’s real protectors. Had abandoning the old gods brought about the fall of Rome? The City of God argued that Rome was not punished because Rome was Christian but because Rome failed to right itself from a course of sin. Augustine cited the pre-Christian virtues of Rome, praising the Stoic philosophers. Augustine condemned the corruption of a quasi-Christian empire in decline. He could not see a comparison between the powerful legions of Trajan and the military of Stilicho. Augustine said that God had recognized the virtues of pagan Rome and rewarded it.
We have survived Clinton and we will survive Barry. The question is whether we’ll take what we can get and do something with it. Either Republican is an opportunity such as the Democrats don’t offer us. Should the Democrats win, we’ll see more political judiciary types, more bureaucrats, more taxation, less jobs, more onerous regulations, less freedom, a higher cost of goods and services, and a continuously emasculated and fiscally starved military.
Should either Republican win, we might find a respite from some or even all of this.
CS Lewis wrote about this. He noted that people are controlled by the technology they develop. The pill has an effect on future generations by determining if they will be born, or not.
We are no longer having children in large enough numbers to maintain our population, most likely because we have no hope, and children are a sign of hope. The death of Europe, ably described in many places, is a harbinger of this consideration.
Rome still exists but only by a renewal. Great Britain is no longer great in that the sun never sets on its flag because the sun does set on the flag of Great Britain.
We have a country lacking a southern border. People whose countries have failed them arrive at this borderless area in hopes of acquiring the wherewithal to support their families; and the business class (described as the Chamber of Commerce), wanting to save money on the cost side, encourages this behavior.
We are at odds with ourselves. A house divided cannot stand.
The same Flavius Stilicho that defeated the Visigoths under Alaric repeatedly, saved Africa from a revolt by Gildo, and defeated the invasion of Italy by Suebi, Vandals, and Alans?
Leading the same military that was formulated by Saint Constantine with the Foederati, Limitanie, Palatina, and Comitatenses? Ancient Rome was not full of wholly virtuous men and the same faults of Pagan Rome haunted Christian Rome.
If the Christian Western Roman Empire was truly so deserving of failure then it would have fallen in 410 AD when Alaric sacked it. Instead it lived on for another 76 years, not counting the Eastern Roman Empire. Augustine’s narrative was not that prescriptive or descriptively accurate.
There is hope, but not for us. – Franz Kafka
I think some sort of combination of #2 and #3, with the bureaucratic state and corporations blended into an unaccountable blob, with a public face driven by technology, with 24 hour a day ads/propaganda enforcing the desires of the bureaucracy, and everyone’s life organized from birth to death, and all key decisions made for us. We won’t even notice when artificial intelligence takes over, and decides we are parasites to be eliminated.
That is really dark, but seems to be where all of this is headed, if we don’t discover some method of better supporting property rights, and shrinking the absolute size of government. I become less hopeful each passing year.
And Augustine was well aware of it.
I don’t think Augustine would have been surprised a bit by that–morally and theologically. (Having witnessed military defeat, he might have wondered how it was politically and militarily possible.)
By the time of 410 AD the Western Imperial Capitol would have been Mediolanium or Milan in plain speak (later it would be Ravenna). Alaric sacking Rome would not have hurt the imperial court personally or struck at any important functions of the imperial bureaucracy so his sacking was symbolically painful but not a victory of major proportions.
The Western Roman Empire was perhaps failing in a number of areas but her military structure and successful leadership under men like Flavius Aetius and Majorianus were too much for the Germanic super confederated tribes that invaded her.
While the Vandals and Visigoths might have been okay at marauding around they generally speaking couldn’t defeat the Roman Army in the field, it was just that good.