Mind you, I’m no fan of his Father, Evelyn, but the elder Waugh did have a fantastic wit. His son, Auberon Waugh, called “Bron,” was a spunky paleoconservative, who apparently inherited Dad’s talent for purposeful vituperation. Waugh the younger, was recently profiled by Neil Clark in The American Conservative. We can use more men like this with a gift for deflating the fatuous rhetoric of the new right — as well as of the left.
Excerpt:
He rejected the notion that Western leaders—because they had nice smiles and wore nice suits and had come to power through democratic elections—were necessarily more virtuous than the heads of other nations. “The main trouble with our limited democracy is the scope it gives to the power maniacs in society to impose their bossy urges and fatuous opinions,” he wrote. “It may be lovely for bossy people who like deciding how the rest of us should live, but it is hell for those at the receiving end.”
The basic problem, according to Waugh, was that politics attracts all the wrong people. “Politics is for social and emotional misfits. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome their feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.” By contrast, the people who would make the best leaders have no interest in public office—they are far too nice and modest to think they should have authority over others.
Although strongly opposed to what he labeled “the socialism,” Waugh was no fan of modern globalized capitalism either, holding that it led to a world of “noise, smell, dirt and accompanying moral pollution.”
