Buckley and Hef

I've been commenting over at The American Catholic. My comment was in response to Paul Zummo posting a post that Mike Potemra had put up at The Corner earlier today. The point of the both posts was that it is odd that both Playboy and National Review went on to have significant cultural impacts. That it is odd both in the sense that no one would have predicted it but also odd in that the two magazines represented opposing forces in American culture.

That was where I disagreed:

What I wonder is whether the two are nearly as contradictory as they seem. I don’t know if William F Buckley ever went to the Playboy mansion in the 1960s but it wouldn’t surprise to learn that he had. The two men had a lot in common.

It took me only four seconds after I'd clicked "submit" to determine that Buckley had indeed visited the Playboy Mansion.

The two men shared a lot. At the risk of offending everyone at one stroke, neither man was terribly deep. They didn't read nearly as much as they liked to let on and what they did read, they didn't read very deeply. As intellectuals, both men were utter frauds. (As long as I'm offending people, this was a quality they shared with a lot of figures of the period such as JFK and Pierre Trudeau. Unlike JFK and Trudeau, both Buckley and Hefner could laugh at themselves and didn't mind lapsing into self-parody.)

They weren't really cosmopolitan sophisticates either although that is closer to the mark. Dare I say that they were playboys? That isn't completely fair to Buckley but it's not completely wrong either.

What Buckley and Hefner had in common was that they recognized that most of us don't want to have to listen to a lot of moralizing prudes. Buckley famously said he'd preferred to be governed by the first hundred names from the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard and Hefner might just as easily have said he'd rather answer to the moral standards of those hundred people than to The League of Decency.

Both those designations are meant to represent larger groups: college-educated liberal intellectuals and culturally conservative Christians respectively. The thing is that both Buckley and Hefner made good bets. Most of us tend to think that those two groups are hungry for cultural and political influence far beyond what their numbers warrant and most of us fear that they may succeed. Both groups still haven't gotten it yet having, as the famous quip about the Bourbons had it, learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

This is probably redundant at this point, but I think both men had more positive impact than negative on our culture.