A Stitch in Haste

I was trying to find William F. Buckley, Jr.'s infantile, insulting and insolently inaccurate 1982 column on Ayn Rand's death, when I instead stumbled upon this:

There's nobody more interesting than Ayn Rand, the founder of the Objectivist Order. And she was pretty assertive in the late '50s. She figured that the conservatism that didn't embrace her point of view 100 percent was going to sort of die of malnutrition.

That was William F. Buckley, Jr., in 2003.

Isn't it interesting that "the conservatism that didn't embrace her point of view 100 percent" (i.e., the conservatism of George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, etc.) is indeed now dying, not of malnutrition but rather of gluttony — the gluttony of political megalomania, moral self-righteousness, irrational mysticism and primitive bigotry, all glued together with the stale kiddie paste of mob rule and adorned with the glitter-on-glue of petty hypocrisy?

Movements come and go. Philosophies endure. Buckley founded a movement. Rand founded a philosophy.

Now that both are dead, the real test of whose ideas will win out over whose can begin in earnest.

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Incidentally, the Buckley column I was looking for is — "Ayn Rand, R.I.P.," dated April 2, 1982 (PDF - 3 pages).

On his supposed dedication to logic and intellectual consistency (from 1983):

I do allow increasingly for what I call the artistic dimension. ... For instance, if you asked me, "Do you believe in assassinations?" I would say no. But if you were to ask, "Do you believe that assassination is the worst crime?" I would say no. "Well, what's worse?" A world war is worse. "Do you believe therefore that there ought to be laws against assassinations?" Yes. "Does that mean that you believe that there ought to be no assassinations?" No. Now, if you can find contradictions in that, go ahead, because I recognize them. I'm simply saying that no statement of my position that fails to permit these artistic exemptions -- and I think they are artistic -- will do justice to what I want to say.

In other words, whenever someone exposes your reasoning (e.g., "the United States does not torture...") as a self-contradictory pile of steaming, malodorous gobbledygook, simply call it an "artistic exemption" and loudly harrumph an indignant "How dare you!"

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Ross Douthat:

There's no question that Buckley's mid-century moral blindness about race and civil rights -- a blindness shared by most if not all conservatives at the time -- is a significant stain on his record. I tend to think that treating this blindness as the defining aspect of his long career is a serious mistake[.]

To which I commented:

Was Buckley's homophobic proposal, made in 1985 and I-told-you-so'ed in 2005, that all HIV+ people be forcibly tattooed, also a case of "mid-century moral blindness"?

Feel free to "artistically exempt yourself" in the comments.