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Chargement... Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatismpar Carl T. Bogus
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Bogus is particularly good at using Burke, Kirk and Taft as Cassandra figures to bewail the wrong turnings of the right. His discussion of the various intellectual players is well informed, and he makes a useful contribution to understanding the contending variations of modern American conservatism. But his argument gets lost in a thicket of irrelevant digressions, from a recapitulation of “Atlas Shrugged” to a potted history of Vietnam, and loses sight of Buckley himself.
History.
Nonfiction.
HTML: William F. Buckley Jr., was the foremost architect of the conservative movement that swept the American political landscape from the 1960s to the early 2000s. When Buckley launched National Review in 1955, conservatism was a beleaguered, fringe segment of the Republican Party. Three decades later Ronald Reagan-who credited National Review with shaping his beliefs-was in the White House. Buckley and his allies devised a new-model conservatism that replaced traditional ideals with a passionate belief in the free market, religious faith, and an aggressive stance on foreign policy. Buckley was an eloquent writer and brilliant polemicist whose works are still required texts for conservatives. His TV show Firing Line and his campaign for mayor of New York City made him a celebrity; his wit and zest for combat made conservatism fun. But Buckley was far more than a controversialist. Deploying his uncommon charm, shrewdly building alliances, and refusing to compromise on core principles, he almost single-handedly transformed conservatism from a set of retrograde attitudes into a revolutionary force. Scholar Carl T. Bogus gives us the most authoritative biography ever published of this vital, larger-than-life figure. .Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Schooled at home amid a large, wealthy Connecticut family, Buckley seemed to imbibe his conservatism at the dinner table, even when the conversation was not specifically about politics. At Yale University, he created a sensation by attacking the liberal faculty in a best-selling book, "God and Man at Yale" (1951), brashly contending that education was all about indoctrination, and that the Yale faculty was promulgating a godless secularism that should not merely be attacked but expunged from the college curriculum.
Raising money from his father and other donors, Buckley at 30 began promoting the conservative point of view in a magazine that sought to enlist the services of prominent conservatives, including Kirk and Whittaker Chambers -- the latter pilloried in the liberal press for accusing Alger Hiss, a State Department official, of espionage.
How did Buckley not only make a success of his magazine, but also enlist as his first subscribers Ronald Reagan and others who would take conservatism from the extreme edges of electoral politics to the mainstream? Bogus provides the customary tributes to Buckley's wit and commanding rhetoric, but, more important, he points to Buckley's organizing skills and the way he co-opted even those conservatives who opposed certain of his positions. In other words, Buckley used his magazine to drive a wedge into the heart of American liberalism, making National Review a force conservatives dare not oppose.
Perhaps the biographer's greatest accomplishment is exposing the shameful aspect of Buckley's legacy: a racism that his conservative contemporaries have tried to obscure. Bogus never calls Buckley an out-and-out racist, but this conclusion is inescapable, given the evidence the biographer supplies. Buckley thought African Americans were inferior, and he used the National Review as an apologist organ for Southern segregationists.
This sorry chapter in Buckley's biography and in the history of the National Review is, however, put in perspective, one that gives Buckley due credit for, in the main, making a powerful contribution to American political thought and to the culture of politics that would have been considerably diminished without his sparkling contributions. ( )