Tale of Two Enemies Offers Interesting History Lesson | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Andy Taylor, who is a professor of Political Science in the School of International and Public Affairs for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    RALEIGH     The recent movie "Best of Enemies" revisits 1968, one of the most dramatic years in modern American history. Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon have produced a documentary surrounding the 10 televised debates between the conservative intellectual and founder of National Review, William F. Buckley, and Gore Vidal, the radical postmodern essayist and political commentator.

    The debates were watched by millions and took place against the immediate backdrop of that year's national party conventions, gatherings colored greatly by the ongoing war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and broader cultural upheaval, as well as the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations.

    The movie makes the debates' most dramatic moment a central focus. During a heated exchange, Buckley responds to Vidal: "Now listen, you queer, I'll sock you in the goddamned face, and you'll stay plastered." Even though Vidal was sneering and antagonistic - he was notoriously nasty to friends and foes alike - he didn't deserve the insult.

    Buckley had lost his cool and after a few moments stormed off, clearly as annoyed with himself as with Vidal. Its recent embrace in certain gay circles notwithstanding, the term "queer" grates our contemporary sensibilities. It is undoubtedly a slur, and much of the media coverage of the movie has focused on its utterance and what it revealed about Buckley's politics and temperament.

    That Buckley's outburst was provoked by Vidal calling him a "crypto-Nazi" (Vidal later claimed he meant to say "crypto-fascist") has not been given nearly as much attention. Perhaps the oversight is unsurprising since many people on the Left today toss around the term loosely and frequently label their conservative opponents as quite conspicuous Nazis, not worrying to suggest the trait is hidden in some way.

    Conservatives also use it to describe their critics - as illustrated by Rush Limbaugh's "Feminazis." I've been called a Nazi before, and in fairly polite conversation, too. The accusation did not hurt, since it was simply untrue and, besides, the epithet has lost most of its meaning through such frequent misuse.

    It hurt Buckley, though. It is easy to forget that today we are as close to Bill Clinton's first election as president as 1968 was to the end of World War II. At the time Buckley and Vidal clashed, the long dark shadow of National Socialism and Hitler's destruction of Europe and efforts to eliminate the Jews still fell across the Western world.

    Nearly everyone who was watching that night clearly understood what Nazism was. Hitler's co-conspirator in the division of Poland, totalitarianism, and extermination of political opponents, Josef Stalin, had been dead only 15 years. It was outrageous to put Buckley in a camp such as that.

    Buckley was a conservative. He understood the idea of obligation, had a deep understanding of history, and respected institutions like the military and organized religion as essential to social cohesion and national greatness.

    But like most conservatives then and now, he also embraced classically liberal ideas based on a belief that individual liberty should constitute the central organizing principle of societies. He had his differences with people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman - the latter vigorously debated him on optional but incentivized national civic or philanthropic service - but Buckley was cut from similar cloth.

    The connection helps explain Buckley's explosion. The architects of the classical liberal revival that followed World War II - Friedman, Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Walter Lippmann, Albert Jay Nock, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, among others - were influenced profoundly by their devastating personal experiences with totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s. Many were Jews who came to the United States and Britain with a deep suspicion of the state and desire to be free.

    The "Nazi" epithet often demonstrates a tremendous ignorance of the origins of the modern center-right in America. Probably more grating to Buckley personally was Vidal's simplistic assertion - often made today - that any critic of modern liberalism and socialism must be some kind of Nazi.

    Many of Buckley's writers and editors during the early years of National Review had themselves been leftists who opposed fascism and the extreme right in pre-War Europe. But they had come to realize that the Soviet Union and rising communist and socialist movements elsewhere were designed to strangle individual liberty in monstrous bureaucracy that bred conformity, suffocated initiative, smashed opposition, and generally squeezed the hope out of people. Nazis, fascists, and communists were all the same side of the coin. Indeed, just before his outburst Buckley had compared the Viet Cong and its allies to Nazis.

    The Buckley-Vidal feud continued after the televised debates and became quite toxic. In a back-and-forth on the pages of national magazines during 1969 and 1970, neither draped himself in glory. On that famous night

    Buckley certainly contributed to the spitefulness that was to come, but Vidal, we should not forget, played his part just as venomously.
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