"At this moment, the difference between the candidates is a chasm. There has never been a greater difference...."

"Take Biden's campaign positions. Farther to the left than any Democratic candidate in memory on things like climate. It's far better than anything that preceded it. Not because Biden had a personal conversion or the DNC had some great insight, but because they're being hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders movement and others. The climate program, a $2 trillion commitment to dealing with the extreme threat of environmental catastrophe, was largely written by the Sunrise Movement and strongly endorsed by the leading activists on climate change, the ones who managed to get the Green New Deal on the legislative agenda. That's real politics.... This is not support for Biden. It is support for the activists who have been at work constantly, creating the background within the party in which the shifts took place, and who have followed Sanders in actually entering the campaign and influencing it. Support for them. Support for real politics. The left position is you rarely support anyone. You vote against the worst. You keep the pressure and activism going."

Said Noam Chomsky, quoted in "Noam Chomsky wants you to vote for Joe Biden and then haunt his dreams/The lion of the left on the pandemic, the election, the word Bernie Sanders needs to stop using, the Harper's letter, the 1619 Project, patriotism, and the greatest social movement in U.S. history" (The.Ink).

The idea of the Russians intervening in the American election is "a joke. Half the world is cracking up in laughter."

Says Noam Chomsky. His reasoning:

The United States doesn’t just interfere in elections. It overthrows governments it doesn’t like, institutes military dictatorships. Simply in the case of Russia alone—it’s the least of it—the U.S. government, under Clinton, intervened quite blatantly and openly, then tried to conceal it, to get their man Yeltsin in, in all sorts of ways. So, this, as I say, it’s considered—it’s turning the United States, again, into a laughingstock in the world.

Chomsky also says Democrats should welcome Trump's effort to ease tension with Russia.

And it is a kind of a paradox, I think, that the one issue that seems to inflame the Democratic opposition is the one thing that has some justification and reasonable aspects to it.

"What kind of a crazy person celebrates Noam Chomsky's birthday like it's some kind of official holiday?"

Just one of the many great scenes in "Captain Fantastic," which Meade and I watched on streaming video last night. I give it the Althouse seal of approval. You can stream it here. And let's talk about it!

I enjoyed listening to Tom & Lorenzo talk about that movie in this podcast. Tom was outraged at the Viggo Mortenson character, calling his treatment of his children "child abuse" and said that because the man was inculcating left-wing politics in his children, viewers were not going to be able to detect the badness of his fathering.

That resonates with something I said to Meade immediately after watching the movie (and before listening to Tom & Lorenzo): This movie would be experienced very differently by someone with left-wing politics, someone who actually thought Noam Chomsky was great. Things we found hilarious — and also painful — would read entirely differently. I think this was Tom's problem, but it forced Tom to see that there's something abusive about inculcating children with politics (he just thought the common people needed clearer instruction, which would have been there if the father's politics were right-wing or Christian fundamentalist).

The movie is complicated, hilarious and dramatic. A father is sort of leading his band of 6 children against the world. He's both good and bad. And the grandfather who disapproves — played by Frank Langella — is also good and bad, even though he's in the position that would normally be The Villain. (He's trying to take the children away.) There's a great dinner-table scene where the 6 children try to relate to their cousins, and it's complex to think about. There's some of the feeling Meade and I remember from many movies circa 1970 where the people who reject American society are morally and intellectually better, but that's also challenged as one of the boys yells at his father for making them into "freaks."

And I just want to say: Viggo Mortenson is 58 years old. He looks great. And we got a comprehensive look at him at one point.

Trump's speech would look a lot more coherent if the transcripts were properly punctuated.

I was watching Bill Maher's show last Friday, and was struck by this mockery of Trump:

BILL MAHER: I have seen this guy change his position from the beginning to the end of a sentence.

DAVID AXELROD: With no punctuation.

That got a big laugh, but what does it mean to say that spoken word lacks punctuation? Unless you're Victor Borge, you don't voice the punctuation. Occasionally, people say "period" to stress a sentence, but the great bulk of what we say has no punctuation. Only when words are written down does punctuation enter the picture.

Sidetrack: Punctuation had to be invented, and early written word was not punctuated. Greeks and Romans got some punctuation ideas and experiment, but the serious work in punctuation came with the spread of Christianity:

Whereas pagans had always passed along their traditions and culture by word of mouth, Christians preferred to write down their psalms and gospels to better spread the word of God. Books became an integral part of the Christian identity, acquiring decorative letters and paragraph marks (Γ, ¢, 7, ¶ and others), and many were lavishly illustrated with gold leaf and intricate paintings.

As it spread across Europe, Christianity embraced writing and rejuvenated punctuation. In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning. Later, in the 7th Century, Isidore of Seville (first an archbishop and later beatified to become a saint, though sadly not for his services to punctuation) described an updated version of Aristophanes’ system in which he rearranged the dots in order of height to indicate short (.), medium (·) and long (·) pauses respectively....

Much more at the link, which goes to a BBC.com article.

Punctuation developed out of the idea of preserving the meaning that a speaker would naturally convey if he were speaking from his own thoughts. And, of course, that is what Trump has been doing as he has successfully reached the minds even of "poorly educated" people as he speaks extemporaneously, tumbling out phrases, often inserting ideas inside ideas.

But the transcripts! Some speakers might end up looking clear and coherent in a verbatim transcript cranked out with no intelligent effort at punctuation, but Trump has all these phrases within phrases. The transcripts make the speaking look like a mess — changing his position from the beginning to the end of a sentence as Maher put it and with no punctuation as Axelrod quipped fancifully but aptly. Or... I should say: Axelrod's quip is aptly applied to the transcript but not to the live speaking, which does have the voiced quality that good punctuation would capture — at least in the ears of a sympathetic listener. If you don't like Trump, when you hear him speak, you might think Ugh! Word salad!

Hey, but salad can be good, even salad that's not salade composée. Sophisticated people are supposed to understand recursion:

In linguistics, the core application of recursion is phrase embedding. Chomsky posits an operation, unbounded Merge, that recursively merges words to create larger phrases. For example, given, “Jane said Janice thought June was tired and emotional,” merge would construct something like: {Jane, {said, {Janice, {thought, {June, {was, {tired and emotional}}}}}}}. In Chomsky's view, the evolution of unbounded Merge is the genesis of language:

Within some small group from which we are descended, a rewiring of the brain took place in some individual, call him Prometheus, yielding the operation of unbounded Merge, applying to concepts with intricate (and little understood) properties … Prometheus's language provides him with an infinite array of structured expressions. (Chomsky, 2010)

Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if Trump's rhetoric is the leading edge of evolution?

We are going somewhere, and social media is affecting our brains. Trump is a master of social media, perhaps the greatest master of social media the world has ever seen. The man leaped over traditional media, stodgily written, to wow us — some of us! — with a combination of tweeting and old-time blabbermouth rallies. It's too late to cower in fear of schizophasia (AKA word salad).

Stop scoffing at the mess of a transcript and start visualizing the missing punctuation. Yesterday, I was blogging about how the internet and social media were restructuring our brains and how I'd said, before the election, that "Trump may seem weird by old standards" but that he deserves credit for figuring out how to speak in this new culture that has emerged.

In the comments, prompted by gadfly, wildswan took a transcription of Trump speech that Slate had presented as "Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!"

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

Wildswan wrote it this way (intending some additional indenting that didn't show up on publication):

My uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT;
good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart,
the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—

You know, if you’re a conservative Republican,
if I were a liberal, if, like,
OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat,
they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—

it’s true!—
but

When you're a conservative Republican
they try— oh, do

They do a number—
That’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—

You know I have to give my, like, credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged— but

You look at the nuclear deal. The thing that really bothers me [is that]
—it would have been so easy, and

[The nuclear deal is not] as important [to us] as these lives are.

Nuclear is powerful;
my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and
that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going
to happen and he was right—who would have thought?),

But when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—
now it used to be three, now it’s four—
but when it was three
and even now,

I would have said
It's all in the messenger, fellas.
and it is fellas because,
you know, they don't, they haven’t figured
that the women are smarter right now than the men, so,
you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but

The Persians are great negotiators; the Iranians are great negotiators;
so, and they, they just killed,
They just killed us.

Wildswan said:

So this is how I would diagram what Trump said. When he was speaking he puts in verbal cues that he is making a digression, making a joke, going back to the point. I've heard him speak and he is perfectly clear. As here: For thirty years the incredible power of nuclear weapons has been clear to me since it was explained by an MIT professor. (People say the conservative Republican are stupid whereas if I had run as a Democrat they would be saying I'm the smartest person in the world as Valerie Jarret said about Obama. It would happen!! But being a Republican, I have to explain credentials over and over as I just did.) Anyhow I know this about the nuclear deal (I won't be heard because what gets heard depends on who is saying it) but I know this - we gave the Iranians nuclear power in exchange for four hostages - and that was a bad deal for America.

Now why does Trump throw in all the side comments? I think they make the speech more interesting when you hear it because it resembles inner thought. When I write I strike out side issues but speaking isn't writing and maybe the internet is making speaking more important than writing. Also on the internet you do jump to little informational bits and sidebars.

And let me add this passage from Janet Malcolm's great book "The Journalist and the Murderer":

When we talk with somebody, we are not aware of the strangeness of the language we are speaking. Our ear takes it in as English, and only if we see it transcribed verbatim do we realize that it is a kind of foreign tongue. What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech — that Molière’s M. Jourdain was mistaken: we do not, after all, speak in prose — is something like what the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies revealed about animal locomotion. Muybridge’s fast camera caught and froze positions never before seen, and demonstrated that artists throughout art history had been “wrong” in their renderings of horses (among other animals) in motion. Contemporary artists, at first upset by Muybridge’s discoveries, soon regained their equanimity, and continued to render what the eye, rather than the camera, sees. Similarly, novelists of our tape-recorder era have continued to write dialogue in English rather than in tape-recorderese, and most journalists who work with a tape recorder use the transcript of an extended interview merely as an aid to memory—as a sort of second chance at note-taking—rather than as a text for quotation. The transcript is not a finished version, but a kind of rough draft of expression. As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean—thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak. The tape recorder has opened up a sort of underwater world of linguistic phenomena whose Cousteaus are as yet unknown to the general public.

I've quoted that on this blog before. Back in 2012 — before Trump became a candidate — I said:

Now, I think some people do speak in unbroken, well-structured sentences that are free of grammatical errors that could be transcribed directly into excellent writing, but I don't think those stuck listening to them are very happy with it. We need the backtracking and disfluencies to feel comfortable.

Similarly, most good writers "hear" their words and think about them as if they were speech — it feels speech-like as you go along — but it's actually different from speech.

I'd tend to be suspicious of anyone who seemed to be trying too hard to speak like writing or to write like speaking. I'd wonder what's up? What's the motivation? A speaker who strains to sound like writing might have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature. A writer who affects an overly speech-like style may be padding or talking down to us.

A speaker who strains to sound like writing might have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature. So maybe I should deduce that Trump does not have an inferiority complex or a pompous, arrogant nature. Oh, but his haters sure think he does. I'm just saying the man is going to be President. Your snorting about his character and coherence have gotten, suddenly, very old.

How can you get up to speed? Sit down with a Trump transcript and engage in the meditation practice called Punctuation.

The 4 beards of Tom Wolfe's "Kingdom of Speech," ranked in order of the prominence of the bearded one.

1. Charles Darwin's beard — which appears twice in Wolfe's delightful new book about the politics of linguistic science. First, when Darwin is 54: "[H]e had cultivated a so-called philosopher’s beard of the sort that had been the philosopher’s status symbol since the days of Roman glory. Darwin was forever pictured sitting slightly slumped in an easy chair… his philosopher’s beard lying on his chest all the way from his jaws to his sternum… like a big old hairy gray bib." And second, when Darwin is 60: "Vomiting three or four times a day had become the usual. His eyes watered and dripped on his old gray philosopher’s beard. The chances of his leaving his desk in Down House and going out into the world looking for evidence, as he had on the Beagle, were zero. Instead he chained himself to his desk and forced himself to write... So he wound his imagination up to the maximum and herded all the animals together in his head, like some Noah the Naturalist...." (I'm picturing Noah's beard now too, but Wolfe didn't mention that.)

2. The beard of the Creator: In Apache myth, there's a void and then a disk. "Curled up inside the disk is a little old man with a long white beard. He sticks his head out and finds himself utterly alone. So he creates another little man, much like himself... Somehow, up in the void, they take to playing with a ball of dirt. A scorpion appears from nowhere and starts pulling at it. He pulls whole strands of dirt out of the ball. Longer and longer he pulls them, farther farther farther they extend, until he has created earth, sun, moon, and all the stars.... The big bang theory desperately needs someone like the scorpion or the little man with a long white beard curled up inside a disk." (You might question my ranking the Creator of the Universe second, after Darwin, but Darwin is ultra prominent, and the Creator in question is not the God of the Bible or the Quran but a little tiny man who needs not only another tiny man but a scorpion to pull off the big creation trick.)

3. Alfred Wallace's beard: "Our story begins inside the aching, splitting head of Alfred Wallace, a thirty-five-year-old, tall, lanky, long-bearded, barely grade-school-educated, self-taught British naturalist who was off— alone— studying the flora and the fauna of a volcanic island off the Malay Archipelago near the equator…." (Alfred Wallace, do you even know who he is? He's the man you would know about if Darwin hadn't worked to eclipse him.)

4. The beard of  Daniel L. Everett (Everett is to Wallace as Noam Chomsky is to Darwin): "Everett was everything Chomsky wasn’t: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair.... He was an old-fashioned flycatcher inexplicably here in the midst of modern air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts. They never left the computer, much less the building." Later we see Everett's beard in a scene of terrible squalor, tending to his his suffering wife and daughter on a miserable boat: "The Brazilians couldn’t keep their eyes off the gringos who were gushing gringo misery out of their hindsides... The redheaded, red-bearded gringo kept taking the pot of sloshing diarrheic rot through crowds of passengers, constantly bending way down with his reeking pot to pass under the hammocks...."

"Get hard! Whatever you do, make it sound scientific. Get out from under the stigma of studying a 'social science'!"

"By now 'social' meant soft in the brainpan. Sociologists, for example, were to observe and record hour-by-hour conversations, meetings, correspondence, objective manifestations of status concerns, and make the information really hard by converting it into algorithms full of calculus symbols that gave it the look of mathematical certainty— and they failed totally. Only Chomsky, in linguistics, managed to pull it off and turn all— or almost all— the pillow heads in the field rock-hard. Even before receiving his PhD, he was invited to lecture at the University of Chicago and Yale, where he introduced a radically new theory of language. Language was not something you learned. You were born with a built-in 'language organ.' It is functioning the moment you come into the world, just the way your heart and your kidneys are already pumping and filtering and excreting away."

From Tom Wolfe's new "Kingdom of Speech," which I've been audiobooking around town this week.

I also liked this passage, which is also about Chomsky (but made me think about Donald Trump):

Charismatic leaders radiate more than simple confidence. They radiate authority. They don’t tell jokes or speak ironically, except to rebuke— as in “Kindly spare me your ‘originality.’” Irony, like plain humor, invariably turns upon some indulgence of human weakness. Charismatic figures show only strength. They refuse to buckle under in the face of threats, including physical threats. They are usually prophets of some new idea or cause.

What it made me think about Trump was: By that description, Trump is not a charismatic leader. 

What's on bin Laden's bookshelf?

Noam Chomsky, Bob Woodward....

Symptoms of a leveling spirit.

That's a phrase I just Googled because writing the previous post (about the UK elections), I was reminded of something that came up yesterday in my reading of Robert A. Caro's "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III":

The Framers of the Constitution feared the people’s power because they were, many of them, members of what in America constituted an aristocracy, an aristocracy of the educated, the well-born, and the well-to-do, and they mistrusted those who were not educated or well-born or well-to-do. More specifically, they feared the people’s power because, possessing, and esteeming, property, they wanted the rights of property protected against those who did not possess it. In the notes he made for a speech in the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote of the “real or supposed difference of interests” between “the rich and poor”—“ those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings”— and of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would come to outnumber the former. “According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the latter,” he noted. “Symptoms, of a leveling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in certain quarters to give notice of the future danger.”

The funny thing is, though, that the entire first 2 pages of Google results were about a record titled "Symptoms of a Leveling Spirit" by a hardcore punk band called Good Riddance. Chris Moran of Punknews said it was "without question, the definitive GR album... not the same 1,000-beats-a-minute GR you've listened to for the last several years."

On the 3rd page of results, we finally get some Madison, the Records of the Federal Convention with the full context and somebody actually talking about it in a present-day setting (which is what I was searching for). It's the old Democratic Underground — "Does the Democratic Party still have the 'levelling spirit' I wonder?" — with the idea that the leveling spirit is a good thing. On page 4, in amongst many Good Riddance references, there's some Noam Chomsky:

Madison foresaw that the threat of democracy was likely to become more severe over time because of the increase in "the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings." They might gain influence, Madison feared. He was concerned by the "symptoms of a leveling spirit" that had already appeared, and warned "of the future danger" if the right to vote would place "power over property in hands without a share in it." Those "without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights," Madison explained. His solution was to keep political power in the hands of those who "come from and represent the wealth of the nation," the "more capable set of men," with the general public fragmented and disorganized...

"I called Lena Dunham... She said, 'Oh my gosh, it’s the coolest thing. It’s so subversive. You’re going to be in drag.'"

Said Allison Williams, who plays a character on Dunham's "Girls" and who got cast in the role of Peter Pan. Quoted in "The Cast of ‘Peter Pan Live!’ Knows You Hatewatched ‘The Sound of Music’/Allison Williams, Christopher Walken, and the cast of ‘Peter Pan Live!’ talk about bracing themselves for hate-tweets and our collective PTSD from last year’s ‘Sound of Music.’"

“I have full faith that this will happen.... People will hear the opening strings of music that they know deep, deep down in their heart, and it will make them nostalgic again. And they’ll crumble. And they might get one hate-tweet out really quickly, and then we won’t hear from them for a while—because they’ll have been sucked into the sense memory that hopefully will be Peter Pan.”

Is it "cool" to watch "Peter Pan Live!" on the theory that you are "hate-watching"? Or is the message that it's "cool" — that you're only hate-watching to snark and follow tweets — a device put out there by the network to overcome the defenses of those who really actually want to watch it because deep down somewhere they love the musical "Peter Pan" and they feel like rooting for the earnest efforts of actors performing it live on television but they're afraid it might be uncool? Well, you know, it's not cool to try to be cool or to think about being cool and there's always the old theory that the coolest thing is the straightforward, sincere embrace of something requires disdain from people who are insecure in their sense of personal coolness.

Oh my gosh, it’s the coolest thing. It’s so subversive....

What does "it" refer to?

ADDED: The relevant meaning of "subversive" in the OED is "hat challenges and undermines a conventional idea, form, genre, etc., esp. by using or presenting it in a new or unorthodox way." Example:

2007   Guardian 16 June (Guide Suppl.) 23/3   Enjoying commercial success with herky-jerky pop based on the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Thomas Pynchon,.. Devo were the most subversive band to ever crack the mainstream. 

"Chomsky has achieved so much in linguistics and political commentary that it's easy to forget he also fathered Marty McFly....."

The top-rated comment on a video from 1969 titled "william buckley threatens to punch chomsky in the face."



Oh! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Noam Chomsky: "It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law."

"There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress 'suspects.'"

This is the kind of thing that Barack Obama might have said before he became President. (Or do we only imagine that he used to say things like that?) A great benefit to having Obama as President is that he is not available to say things like that and very few mainstream Democrats or liberals feel tempted to say things like that.

More from Chomsky:

Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

Very, very angry people get even angrier. Chomsky invites you to worry about that. Didn't the decision to give bin Laden a religious burial and not to show the photographs make those angry people like us more? No, apparently, Chomsky has a line to Pakistan and he knows those people are angry and getting angrier all the time.

Speaking of angry, Chomsky proceeds to interpret the "Bush Doctrine" as Bush calling for his own assassination. He wonders how we'd "be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." The rant continues with material about Nazis and so forth.

It's got to hurt to be so marginalized now that Obama is President.

ADDED: I see some boring bloggers linking here and writing witless attacks on me. May I recommend that you read this post from April 4th and put some effort into understanding The Mind of Althouse before you wallow in your shallowness any longer? I know you won't, but I just felt like saying that.

"What is government if words have no meaning?" — Jared Loughner's question to Gabrielle Giffords is " the stuff, not just of right-wing suspicion of government, or of radical left-wing suspicion of same, but of scores of Hollywood movies."

Writes Lee Siegel:

... from Taxi Driver and Three Days of the Condor, to Guilty by Suspicion and Mercury Rising, to The Sentinel and Syriana, and, well, I can't keep up. For at least half a century, our movies, from simple to complex, have been driven by the idea that official words have no meaning and that government is either criminal or a sham.

If you haven't seen the movies:

...you have probably read the standard texts of advanced American attitudes. Thus you have absorbed throughout college, like any number of Hollywood screenwriters and American tastemakers, the idea — from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein to Foucault to Derrida to Chomsky to Stanley Fish — that the words used by any type of official, political entity, like a government, are nonsense. "What is government if words have no meaning?" That could be the motto of The Daily Show.

If we're soaking in a culture of nihilism, why are most of us holding up so well?

William F. Buckley, Jr. has died.

The NYT obit:

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn....

Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, National Review.....

The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation (with honors) from the university.

“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in the National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”

Lots of commentary at the National Review blog, The Corner.

I remember watching Buckley on "Firing Line" in the 1960s, before I went to college and learned that he was to be considered poison. What a great character with a great talk show. I should try to find some old video clips and add them to this post.

ADDED: Here he is interviewing Noam Chomsky in 1969: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. Now that's television!

AND: More video. What election commentary was like in 1969: "And yet always there is a strange seriousness, something in the system that warns us, warns us that America had better strike out on a different course, rather than face another 4 years of asphixiation by liberal premises.... No, Nixon won't bring paradise, but he could bring a little more air to breathe."

Inborn morality.

Does this idea bother you?

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, ... propose[s] that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.

People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously....

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

If this idea bothers you, is it because you want to be proud of your own morality or because it undermines religion? But maybe your need to feel proud of your morality and your sense that God is involved in the process of making you moral are just more things that evolution wired into your brain.

IN THE COMMENTS: This passage from the writings of St. Paul is found relevant and discussed;

(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)

Romans 2:14-15 (New International Version)

More on that right wing meme.

I really like this take -- by Fiona de Londras -- on my "great artists are essentially right wing" meme. She seems to get what I'm talking about. Read the whole thing, especially the part about why, in this analysis, Noam Chomsky would be distinctly right wing. That's not an argument against my concept, but a recognition of the usefulness of the concept.

"A Democratic president would have been at most a year behind the Bush Administration’s track in the War on Terror."

So writes Austin Bay. What do you think? If Gore had won in '00, would he not have gone on the offensive the way Bush did? And all you people who despise Bush, what would you be saying now if Gore had been President all these years and had taken the same approach to national security? If you can perform this mental exercise honestly and see that you would approve of the things you now disapprove, you ought to consider yourself too partisan. I'd certainly say you are.

If you think I'm just jerking you around and being a Republican political partisan, remember that I voted for Gore in 2000. I've thought all along that Gore would have done basically the same thing Bush did.

Bay's piece is commenting on this interview with Christopher Hitchens. An excerpt:

Q - Your much-discussed separation from the American left began shortly after the September 11 attacks. What prompted your displeasure with the left?

A - The September 11 attacks were one of those rare historical moments, like 1933 in Germany or 1936 in Spain or 1968, when you are put in a position to take a strong stand for what is right. The left failed this test. Instead of strongly standing against these nihilistic murderers, people on the left, such as Noam Chomsky, began to make excuses for these murderers, openly saying that Bin ladin was, however crude in his methods, in some ways voicing a liberation theology. This is simply a moral and political collapse.

But its not only that. It’s a missed opportunity for the left. Think of it this way: If a group of theocratic nihilists drive planes full of human beings into buildings full of human beings announcing nothing by way of a program except their nihilism and if they turn out to have been sheltered by two regimes favored by the United States and the national security establishment, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to be precise, two of only three countries to recognize the Taliban, and if Republicans were totally taken by surprise by this and if the working class of New York had to step forward and become the shield of society in the person of the fire and police brigades, it seemed to me that this would have been a good opportunity for the left to demand a general revision of all the assumptions we carried about the post cold war world. We were attacked by a religious dictatorship and the working class were pushed into defending elites by the total failure of our leadership and total failure of our intelligence. The attack emanated partly from the failure of regimes supported by that same elite national security establishment– Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. If the left can’t take advantage of a moment like that: whats it for? whats its secularism for? Whats its internationalism, class attitude, democracy for?

That's brilliantly well put. Much more at the link.

"Real Time."

I hope you got the chance to see this week's "Real Time," the Bill Maher show on HBO. Not only did Andrew Sullivan passionately revile Noam Chomsky, but former Senator Alan Simpson went all Zell Miller on Bill Maher. And why didn't the "Real Time" producers edit out Sullivan very conspicuously and embarrassingly scratching himself? (It happens during the closing credits sequence.) I can only conclude that they deliberately decided to humiliate him!

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has an extended recount of the show. He makes fun of Susan Sarandon, who really was awful.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Slate's Dana Stevens can't say enough about Sullivan's scratching himself. Sullivan is duly irked. Stevens manages to completely miss what Simpson and Sullivan were arguing with Maher about.