Love the man, hate his politics

When I first arrived in the West, the US to be exact, the salient features of the intellectual landscape (at least the part of it that attracted me) were debates between William F. Buckley and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Buckley was the editor of National Review, then an intelligent, cultured and urbane conservative publication. WFB himself was a prodigious writer of articles, books and even thrillers, and the charming and witty host of Firing Line, a PBS chat show, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere.

His magazine and he personally had a formative effect on the re-emergence of American conservatism as a political force. Buckley was instrumental in the rise of his friend and, some will say, disciple Ronald Reagan. Both men joked about that relationship: when he was elected president, Reagan asked Buckley what job he’d like to have in his administration. “Ventriloquist,” quipped WFB, and Reagan guffawed in his contagious manner.

Buckley himself described his views as conservative with a libertarian tilt. The second adjective reflected his unwavering commitment to laissez-faire economics, something that appealed to me somewhat more unequivocally in those days than it does now.

It didn’t appeal to the neo-Keynesian economist Galbraith at all. In common with many leftish economists, he was more keenly interested in income distribution than in income creation. He favoured wide, though not wholesale, nationalisation, which made Buckley suggest that “Perhaps we should start by nationalising Professor Galbraith”.

Thomas Sowell called Galbraith a “teflon prophet”, meaning that his reputation remained undamaged even though his economic predictions were thoroughly debunked empirically.

One spectacular example of Galbraith’s letting his convictions triumph over the facts was his insistence that in the current economic climate it was impossible for an ambitious entrepreneur to create a powerful company. Excuse me, objected Sowell. Jobs? Gates? Musk? Would the good professor care to revise his statement? Galbraith wouldn’t. He never did.

Anyway, my intention today is neither to demonise Galbraith nor to sanctify Buckley: the former was no more diabolical than the latter was saintly. Still, in those early days, I watched their verbal jousts, soaking up every word, especially Buckley’s.

But then I found out something about those two men that seemed inconceivable to me. For all the divergence of their politics, they were close personal friends. They spent their holidays skiing together at Gstaad, where both owned chalets. They often had dinners out or in their homes. And above all, they invariably defended their diametrically opposite views in the spirit of bonhomie and chuckling good humour.

That’s what amazed me more than anything else in America. My new American friends always wanted to know about my initial cultural shocks. Not wishing to disappoint them, I gave the answers they wanted to hear: cars, supermarkets, abundance of everything, that sort of thing. But I wasn’t being frank: I had only a limited interest in such matters then and even less now.

In any case, I had known all that about the US before emigrating there. What I hadn’t expected to see was the fundamental civility that underpinned arguments between American antipodes, something unheard of where I came from.

In Russia, political differences ineluctably led to personal hostility. A chap professing loyalty to communism wasn’t just someone I disagreed with. He was my enemy, and I was his. Arguments between us tended to end in a two-way torrent of epithets and possibly fisticuffs. Friendship or even friendliness were out of the question.

That wasn’t necessarily the people’s fault, not entirely so. After all, the communists had killed millions of anti-communists in the 30 years before I graced the world with my appearance. Even in my generation, political differences were still often settled with denunciations and subsequent arrests.

That created a social and intellectual atmosphere that was hardly conducive to amicable exchanges of opinion. It was natural to treat one’s opponent as one’s enemy because as often as not that’s exactly what he was.

That’s why many years later I turned down my publisher’s suggestion that I meet the Trotskyist ‘philosopher’ Eric Hobsbawm who sat on his advisory board. “I’d refuse to shake his hand,” I said, and the publisher thought I was unreasonably immoderate.

In fact, a few years earlier the literary editor Miriam Gross had similarly declined Hobsbawm’s invitation to lunch. “I’m not going to have lunch with you, Eric,” she said. “Because if the situation were different, you’d kill me.”

That confirmed the sensible limits to civility for me. It didn’t apply as categorically to communists and fascists, extremists who harboured murderous enmity to people like me and the civilisation we cherished.

However, political rancour wasn’t the sole reason for the unspeakable rudeness with which the Russians treat one another in private and in public. Nor did political moderation wholly explain the ubiquitous politeness that so impressed me in America and everywhere else in the West all those years ago.

It probably had more to do with the residual Christian spirit that still permeated Western polity and has since largely evaporated. Love the sinner, hate the sin, Christians are taught. Surely the same teaching can – should – be extended to political differences?

They shouldn’t eliminate the basic civilities of life because we are supposed to love not only our friends but also our enemies. That doesn’t mean we should respect their views. But it does mean we must offer them personal respect to which all human beings are entitled simply because they are indeed human.

However, this line of reasoning came to me much later. In those early days it was Buckley and Galbraith who made me widen my field of vision. I saw teenagers at my tennis club opening the gate for each other, saying ‘good shot’ when an opponent hit a winner and in general always being respectful towards one another.

How different, I thought, how very different from the sporting contests of my Soviet youth. There the air was thick, and also blue, with the foulest obscenities the opponents levelled at one another (Anglo-Saxon equivalents aren’t really equivalent: Russian swearwords have no equally robust analogues in English). Fights were common, not to say ubiquitous.

Civility was nowhere in evidence. Only after coming to America did I realise that ‘civility’ and ‘civilisation’ were closely related not only in etymology but also in meaning. Civility is perhaps the most telling marker of civilisation; its lack, a hallmark of barbarism.

My fond recollections go back half a century, and how things have changed since then, not just in America but also in Britain. Civility, which caused my greatest culture shock back in 1973, is no longer a prominent feature of the political or social landscape. America is beginning to resemble the Moscow of my youth with its sharp, irreconcilable distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

To name one example, back in the old days Reagan and Mondale, much as their proposed policies differed, weren’t ‘us’ and ‘them’. They were both ‘us’ who happened to disagree on how best to make the lives of ‘us’ better.

Can you say the same about Biden and Trump or their supporters? Can you imagine, say, Mike Johnson being friends or even friendly with Ocasio-Cortez? I can’t.

It’s fashionable to blame the growing polarisation on Trump, and his personality does lend itself to such accusations. But Trump’s barbarism is matched, often outdone, by his opponents’. Much dirt is being flung both ways, and loudmouthed invective has become the common currency of political debate.

Trump, AOC et al. are the symptoms, not the disease. The disease is the accelerating evaporation of the spirit that used to permeate the West, but doesn’t any longer, not to the same extent. And eroding form betokens rotting content, as it always does.

Observing American politics from afar, I feel sad about its tone more even than about its substance. Perhaps today’s politicians and commentators could do worse than look up those old issues of Firing Line on YouTube. They just might find something that seems to be lost.