W.F. Buckley v. Chomsky. Re-imagine this debate in today’s context — O’Reilly in Buckley’s chair; or Chomsky via Skype from his MIT office, Buckley via satellite from an in-home studio in Connecticut, some overmatched moderator in NYC — and think about just how fast it would have devolved into something worthless.
What is keeping things barely on the right side of civility here? These men are sharing a stage for an extended interval in close proximity to one another without a referee. They could yell and bully and pile interruption atop interruption and refuse to stand down to let the other man be heard, but they would look so stupid so fast. They are forced to deal with one other. At points, they don’t look especially happy about that. There’s a reason.
These men are trying to obliterate each other’s ideas. To do so, they are not above pushing the debate to the ultimate extreme, into the mud pit of trying to show that one’s adversary’s ideas would have helped the Nazis or excused the Nazis. Upon realizing this, I am marginally less nostalgic than when I began this post. But I’d still take this Buckley-Chomsky showdown over any five-minute shriekfest on cable news.
