[2ndDivisionVet]

That's mostly as I remember it.

[Bobalu]

I want to see this film.

I was a big Buckley fan.... what a mind :-)

Woody Allen vs William Buckley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNErWi_lTig

[mindburglar]

Why? They’ll just trash WFB. The only reason anybody makes this movie is to trash WFB and to prop up super drunk fag vidal as his intellectual equal.

http://youtu.be/ZY_nq4tfi24

[Cincinatus]

Today’s conventional conservative narrative, in which the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marks the triumph of the “movement conservatism” of Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater over FDR-LBJ liberalism, gets the history wrong.

Lind has the "conventional conservative narrative" wrong.

It was Reagan's winning of the Republican nomination that was the triumph of "movement conservatism", not his election. The election demonstrated that a conservative running as a conservative could win a national election, negating the previous narrative from the 1964 Goldwater debacle.

[jobim]

Thanks for that insightful post. Time streams forward, and I do find myself stuck in opinions formed without full knowledge, or insufficient knowledge, yet I carry those opinions forward. This Michael Lind does prompt a reassessment of labels and demarcations.

A tangent on WFB, but does anyone else long for a Firing Line today, two important figures (& thinkers, one hopes), engaged in a 90 minute conversation, without talking over one another, letting ideas be sifted and examined at leisure? No shouting, no grandstanding. Is this even possible today?

[LS]

A few points: I didn't know Buckley. I spent a few hours with him in 1964 when he spoke to the college Republicans in Santa Barbara. I did not at the time know that he was a great classical piano player. He gave some excellent advice to young writers. Asked how he wrote so much he said "I get up, I brush my teeth then I start writing. Every day." When my female co-organizer and I introduced him, he said "XXX and Schweikart show that the term intelligent conservative is not an oxymoron."

I do dis agree with Lind---who, by the way, went on to write a good nook defending the Vietnam War---that Reagan was more the product of some fusion of Dems and New Dealers who saw the light than of traditional Republican forces. Those Dems came later, especially in 1984. Reagan in 1980 represented a protest vote against Carter by people willing to give him a handle but not yet fully convinced about conservative ideas. Lind is trying to give Dems too much credit for Reagan's initial rise.

In a sense, both Carter and Reagan ran "against Vietnam", Carter for going in, Reagan for not winning. There were almost no Dems in 1980 who supported Reagan's view. Lind eventually came around.

[WayneS]

The result was Nixon’s re-election by a landslide and generation-long control of the White House by hawkish Republicans from 1968 to 1992.

Really? Did this guy put Jimmy Carter down the memory hole?

Not to mention that Grrald Ford was not exactly a "hawk".

[miss marmelstein]

My opinion of the two men differ from FR. I think Vidal was a brilliant novelist and essayist; Buckley unreadable - particularly his fiction. I never got over Buckley’s awful condescension to the Moral Majority guests on one of his programs years ago. I guess it was Firing Line, this was the very late 70s/early 80s. Not “intellectual” types, he kept asking them questions in that double-negative form he loved so much but left me so cold.

[Cletus.D.Yokel]

:: the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh ::

Slipped this one, didn’t he?

McVeigh was an anarchist; neither “left-wing” or “right-wing”. His ideology flowed more from Guy Fawkes and the present-day “Occupy” group than from either end of the political spectrum.