Savouring Brazenly in Sparing

I found the Buckley video I was looking for, which I’d referenced the other day.  I had searched and searched a few days back and sifted through some forty- eight old episodes of Firing Line only to come up short.  The name of the guest I was looking for, was, as these things tend to be, just beyond the mind’s reach.  Monahan?  Pirogue?  Mac Mullen?  I left it alone for a day and when I returned to it I felt cautiously optimistic that I should search for “Minogue.”  I was right.  Kenneth Minogue.  Indeed I was pretty damn close if I’d only searched for that name and doubted it, a few days back.

The London School of Economics professor, Kenneth Minogue was there discussing his then, new book. “Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology” (1985).  This is the sort of bit where I think Buckley is at his best, where he is struggling to keep up with a guest and you can watch his gymnastic mind, twist and spin about.  This could be someone who irritates him like Chomsky or Vidal.  It might be someone he is cautious about prodding like Muhammad Ali, it certainly is not someone like Norman  Mailer or Huey Newton or William Kuntsler, whom he merely tolerates, but generally he is unassailably confident, savouring brazenly in sparing and in the intellectual take-down of his adversary.  

With Minogue, he’ older, certainly.  I’ve done the math and I’d place him at sixty years of age.  “Still young!” says the fifty year old.  But William starting to show it.  He’s slower with the rapier.  With Minogue, Buckley isn’t in for the kill and he wouldn’t dare be flippant. Rather, he needs to be careful and he ends up treating the Australian who’s five years his junior, like a professor. 

What is most interesting to me, and there had better be at least something interesting here as I watched the entire hour-long episode when I should have been working, is that I had caught a bit of this exchange a few year back.  Was it ten years ago?  Five?  I can’t recall.  But I had posited Minogue as a Marxist theorist when he is in fact a more conservative political thinker.  I thought this because, watching only the first twenty minutes or so, it had been clear he knew Marx extremely well, pivots his discussion around ideology with Marx in a seminal role.  He repeatedly refers to Karl Marx as a “genius.” 

So I coveted this exchange, as I’d originally imagined that Buckley was a bit out of his depth with this Marxist academician when it fact, it was a kindred spirit whole he admired and had invited there to the “Yale Young Republicans Club” as it were, to safe ground.  Certainly Minogue is a bit above the fray in this exchange, committed merely to the analysis of this idea of ”ideology.”  Buckley pushes to explore different implications of the idea:  communism, feminism, Black Nationalism as perhaps all ideologically driven.  But Minogue isn’t interested in scoring points or even settling for much humor.  Rather he seems to want to truly explain how it is that ideology functions.  That his confidence in this is completely unassailable by Buckley, gives him a certain air of great power.