(Pat’s post below about Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Barack Obama is the source material for what follows…The truth about Buckley being “sacked” from National Review can be found here.) 

Long ago, P.G. Wodehouse set himself the task of satirizing the historical tail end of the British hereditary aristocracy.  He did it  in the Jeeves and Wooster series, and the Blandings Castle saga.  Wodehouse’s male characters, when not plainly sinister like the fascist Roderick Spode, were a certain type of affable, facile, rich and well-educated, obtuse dopes, like Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Noddle.

Orwell complained that Wodehouse’s creations made the British upper-classes seem nicer than they actually were, which was true.  P.G.’s toffs would trip over a chalk-line in the grass, fumble every ball and get every issue wrong.  But they were rarely of the mean and brainless species which includes men like John Kerry and, now, a few chattering -class conservatives like The New York Times token “conservative” David Brooks, and the gadly Christopher Buckley.  Brookes recently opined that Sarah Palin is a “cancer on the Republican Party”,  ignoring the auto-immune diseases killing the Republican Party without the help of a malignancy.     

Both the fictional and actual groups populated by Wooster, Brooks and Buckley seem to be governed mainly by matters of class and style.  Convinced  that their social milieu and status are permanent, they’re stupidly complicit with, even bemused by, their mortal enemies, and deaf to the winds of change howling around them. 

The broad scorn for Sarah Palin destroys William Buckley’s long-ago remark about preferring government by the first 500 names in the Boston phone directory rather than the faculty of Harvard.  Buckley retailed the progressive infatuation with The Common Man, but this was probably just an ideological festoon .  W.F. Buckley didn’t believe it, and neither does his son, Christopher.  

Wodehouse’s male characters gathered at The Drone’s Club, to hammer themselves silly with champagne and to rough-house in games of cricket played with wheat buns in panelled halls. Imagine a version of this ritual  with David Brooks pitching canapes to Christopher Buckley, and you get the picture.      

Buckley derides McCain for being “inauthentic”.  The masthead photo we see of Buckley, authentically fitted out for the chilly wilderness of Greenwich, in his fedora and dark coat, nibbling the stem of his tortoise-shell frame spectacles is of a man who prides authenticity?  His smug, leering self-satisfaction  is that of a man who’s just taken down two grouse with one shot of his new Purdy shotgun.  He has the authenticity of Ronald McDonald. 

He tells us he’s supporting Obama because Obama is Ivy League (ignore his caveats), and because Obama has a “first-class temperment”.  This is the quality that Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode would have called “breeding”; the standard by which clowns like Christopher Buckley would also judge horses, dogs and “gentlemen”. 

Scrape off the suede and gilt crust of Christopher Buckley’s political socialization and you don’t find Everyman, you find a buffoon wallowing in the cash and cachet of his forebears.  Note to Chris:  After 2500 years of counter-factual evidence, we’ve ditched the idea of a Philosopher King.    Especially of the Obama kind.