[Bret L]

(( Trucklin' Bill Buckley was no conservative. Nor was he a liberal,
systematically. He was a trendy ass kisser and glamor hound who, like
Andy Warhol and that dope-fetching guy in the OJ Simpson case whose
name I have forgotten, just wanted to be liked by people who
fundamentally held him in contempt. Bret.))


Mercer, Gottfried, Voegli, Buckley: Was The Civil Rights Act Really A
Good Thing?

[Peter Brimelow] @ 11:54 am [Email author] [Email this article]
[Print this article] [Print this article]

"By an amazing coincidence, two friends of VDARE.com, Paul Gottfried and Ilana Mercer, have quite separately just dared to criticize the now-sacrosanct 1965 Civil Rights Act, Paul in the context of his continuing scholarly study of the degeneration of the Establishment Right of which National Review and its post-purge Editor Rich Lowry are symptoms, (Obamacare Is a Civil Right, AltRight, April 2 2010), Ilana in a restatement of the very real but now repressed classical liberal objections to the legislation (Liberty and the Civil Wrongs Act, WND, April 2 2010).

This reminds me that, because of the usual chaos, I never got around
to noting the comment I was kindly asked to make, along with Paul
Gottfried and others, about William Voegli’s Summer 2008 Claremont
Review of Books essay Civil Rights and the Conservative Movement,
which was basically a discussion of the just-deceased William F.
Buckley’s typically confused contribution record on the issue. The
comment is here, but they make you scroll down a long way so I’ve
pulled it out:

I am afraid that William Voegeli’s subtle and almost serpentine
essay is somewhat weakened by its use of William F. Buckley as a
symbol and a symptom. Buckley-I realize with shock that I knew him for
30 years-was not a systematic thinker and, at least in his latter
years, was wholly motivated, so far as I could tell, by status and
insecurity. Thus for example his 2001 agreement with Michael Kinsley
that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was, on second thoughts, a good thing,
sort of, doesn’t need any more complicated an explanation than that
Buckley wanted to appease a prince of the New Media, who had
graciously allowed him to appear in Slate, and was anyway incapable of
thinking his way out of the currently fashionable consensus.

What I take to be Voegeli’s substantive point-that there really
were drawbacks to the immense expansion of government power in the
name of extirpating Jim Crow-is an important one that merits longer
discussion. I would only add that the American elite’s complacency
about the results of what must be called the Second Reconstruction is
misplaced. Firstly, it is not generally realized that black progress
by many measures (for example, employment relative to whites) stalled
after the 1960s. Secondly, the costs of integration fell, and are
falling, almost exclusively on the white working class-not a pretty
picture. Thirdly, the phenomenon of political correctness, which
partly stems from the sacramentalization of the Second Reconstruction,
threatens not merely liberty but also appropriate public policy in
areas like education and immigration. In significant ways, the
American Dilemma is as stark as ever.

Voegli replied:

“The 1964 Civil Rights Act would win handily, I submit, if its
retention were to be decided by a secret ballot among the current
staff of National Review, or the Heritage Foundation.

I suspect, further, that Brimelow (and Paul Gottfried) would vote
against the law in that secret ballot.”

Well, it’s hardly necessary to “suspect” what Paul and I (and Ilana)
think! How much clearer could we be? But Voegli and the Claremont
Review should be congratulated for raising a subject that really does
merit the longer discussion that few other than Paul and Ilana dare to
give it."

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/04/03/mercer-gottfried-voegli-buckley-was-the-civil-rights-act-really-a-good-thing/