1. Really good thread on how fundamental anti-monarchism is to USA political culture & how odd it is that American right has now embraced the crown. But that also has roots worth thinking about.https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1373274373868650497 …
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2. Buckley up people, we're doing an old style Jeet tweetstorm. Some thoughts on American monarchism, William F. Buckley's spanking fantasies involving the Queen of England, Spanish dynastic politics, fascism, George Wallace and Jack Kirby.
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3. So, the praise of the British monarchy from American sources like National Review & Heritage Foundation has struck many people as strange. Aside from long-standing USA anti-monarchism, the American right has long had a powerful anglophobe strain.
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4. Pat Buchanan is maybe the sole surviving example of the older right-wing Anglophobia. Of German-Irish descent, Buchanan still writes Lindberghian books blaming Brits for snookering USA into fighting WWI and WWII.
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5. In contrast to Buchanan, William F. Buckley shows how USA right gave up anglophobia as part of embrace of American led global hegemony. Nora Ephron summed up this evolution by saying of Buckley, "give an Irishman a horse and he'll vote Tory."
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6. Like his father, William F. Buckley was originally an isolationist. The family had a yacht called "Sweet Isolation." In 1930s when he was 7 or 8 the young squire wrote an indignant letter to the King of England demanding that America's war debts be repaid.
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7. Buckley shifted from isolationism to internationalism after WWII, a process hastened not just by Cold War but Buckley joining the CIA and becoming indoctrinated in the need for USA global hegemony.
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8. The psychic trauma of Buckley's shift from anglophobic isolationism to anglophilic internationalism is played out in his spy novel Saving the Queen (1976), where Buckley's alter-ego spanks and fucks the Queen.pic.twitter.com/gw4csuEk5Q
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Replying to @HeerJeet
My goodness, I never knew that such interesting things happened in Buckley novels
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I think only the hard-core fans read them, which is a shame because there is a lot going on in them. One is a kind portrait of James Jesus Angleton, another about Elvis.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Interestingly, my college boyfriend was a huge Bill Buckley fan despite being mostly a leftist! (He was actually a DSA member, though this was the '80s DSA.) He gave me one of his thrillers. I read it but can't remember a thing. Definitely not this one.
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