“I should like to begin by asking Mr. Ginsberg whether he considers that the hippies are an intimation of the new order.”
Here’s an interesting conversation that simply would not happen with any modern day conservative. William F. Buckley of the program “Firing Line” speaks to the poet Allen Ginsberg.
He was a more honest conservative, I must say. Look what he said of Atlas Shrugged (via Open Culture).
He also famously threatened to “smash” Noam Chomsky in the face (he said something similar to Gore Vidal): This is a must-watch debate (full video)
Buckley is perhaps best known for founding the conservative magazine National Review. Despite his unsavoriness, he’s clearly not as bad as current National Review contributor, Conrad Black, who just recently argued that the world “worked better under colonialism.”
No one could seriously dispute that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans.
Can we rescue conservatism from the crazies? Political philosopher Gerald Cohen has a TVO: Big Ideas lecture I highly recommend.
