I remember the Buckley-Rangel debate well. It was one of the moments when I began to realize the Right are not always the bad guys and the Left are not always the good guys. Of course, today I would say I am both beyond left and right. I would claim both Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine as proto-anarchists. In the tradition of Nietzsche (anarchist of the right) and Stirner (egoist anarchist), I’ve also moved beyond the concept of good and evil toward moral skepticism.
By Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic
Nearly 30 years ago, the PBS program Firing Line convened a debate about the War on Drugs, which has contributed more than any other criminal-justice policy to deadly street violence in Black neighborhoods and the police harassment, arrest, and mass incarceration of Black Americans. Revisiting the debate helps clarify what it will take to end that ongoing policy mistake.
Congressman Charlie Rangel led one side in the 1991 clash. Born in 1930, Rangel served in the Korean War, provided legal assistance to 1960s civil-rights activists, participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and represented Harlem for 46 years as a Democrat in the House. He was once arrested while participating in an anti-apartheid rally. Opposing him was William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative intellectual who founded National Review in 1955 and took the wrong side in some of the most significant racial-justice controversies of his day. In an infamous 1957 editorial, Buckley justified the imposition of white-supremacist racial segregation in the American South. He opposed federal civil-rights legislation in the 1960s. And he was an apologist for South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1980s.