While an undergraduate at Yale, William F. Buckley, Jr. found an ideological soulmate and debating partner in the red-headed L. Brent Bozell, Jr. from Nebraska. The two were unbeatable in tournaments with Buckley’s devastating wit and Bozell’s earnest oratory. Bozell would eventually become Buckley’s brother-in-law and his co-author on the book McCarthy and His Enemies. He would find his greatest success as the ghostwriter of one of the most famous texts of American conservatism, Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, which sold in the millions.
But while Buckley’s star would continue to rise and he would become a kind of policeman of the boundaries of conservative legitimacy, Bozell would take his family to Spain where he launched the ultra-montane Catholic journal Triumph and slowly descended into a discouraging marginalization. During those years, Bozell proclaimed the greatest problem facing the West was “the Gnostic heresy.”
While Bozell didn’t get far in convincing the world of the 1970s of the Gnostic problem, it seems he may have been ahead of his time just as he was with his impassioned advocacy of the pro-life movement. But we may be seeing something that brings the idea back to mind in recent years. The Democratic organization “Third Way” is trying to separate the left from its fascination with the development of obscure, ideological, and technical language because of the alienating effect it can have on ordinary voters.
Observers of cultural elites will recognize such language. Think of words and phrases such as “othering,” “holding space,” “unhoused,” “triggering,” “microaggression,” “birthing person,” “chest feeding,” “deadnaming,” “heteronormative,” and “Latinx.” (Despite holding four degrees, the first time I saw “Latinx” I thought it was pronounced “Lateenks” to rhyme with sphinx, instead of “Latin X.” I had to be in the right room at a university to get a clue.) There are many other such examples, which together constitute a kind of secret language and knowledge (an idea associated with Gnosticism), which is fluently exchanged by practitioners of the art but can leave others bewildered and isolated.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)