Getting It Right

A friend at work finished the subject historical novel by William F Buckley and I couldn't resist. The three or four other books that I have in various states of reading went on the shelf and I went cover to cover on this one. I found a more detailed review that gives on more specifics than I intend to include here.

The book is historical fiction about the late '50s and early '60s when Buckley and the National Review are working in the realm of ideas on the Republican Party. The fiction is told in the context of a romance between Woodroe Raynor a young John Bircher, and Lenora Goldstein, a follower of the Ayn Rand camp of "Objectivists". By virtue of his National Review magazine, as well as his intellect and developing connections, WFB was very involved in dealing with the conflicting sometimes conflicting forces of the Birchers and the Randians.

It stuck me how both groups fell prey to "reductionism/fundamentalism" and became "doctrinaire" in their own limited point of view. As regular readers of this Blog are aware, I continue to search for "the perfect word" to describe that path. Tonight I'm going with "dogmatic and doctrinaire" to see how they fit. As humans, we always operate far from perfection, the issues are just "how far and which way". The scribe and pharisee types fall in the ditch on the dogmatic path, the general lefty veers into the "whatever I do (today) is right" ditch.

The Birchers found a "communist conspiracy" everywhere all the time ... including Eisenhower and National Review. The Randians pretty much just "worshiped Ayn". The total inability for them to tolerate religion made them "less than compatible" with the conservative movement. I've always had respect for Buckley as an "intellectual pragmatist". He is extremely intelligent and educated, but keeps the "Dirty Harry Dictum" (A man has got to know his limitations") solidly in mind. Movements and people in general have far too much of a tendency to assume that "they have found the answer, leader or secret".

The biggest insight to form in my brain from this book was that when comparing integration in the South with sending in Federal troops to force it, many Conservatives found that to be "too big a cost in freedom for states rights". Interestingly, to the extent that the Kennedy wing of the Democrat party was representative, their position had moved 180 degrees in the 100 years since 1860, and coersion was now the way to go. Too big a question to even attempt to answer in this blog, but the book drew the fact of the dilemma out clearly.

It was simply a fun book to read, and it was great to get this picture of some of the people of this very eventful time ... Ayn Rand and her group, Kennedy, Robert Welch, Goldwater, and others.