William F. Buckley was a dangerous and fascinating man. He was a ubiquitous presence on my TV when I was growing up and his mannerisms and verbosity were easily and endlessly parodied. The new American Masters episode about him on PBS is a time capsule from another age. On the hand there's no reason to mourn the genteel monied class that once formed the intellectual base of this country's right wing. They were powerful, insidious, and vile. Buckley himself made his reputation railing against a certain kind of well-mannered secular elite and claimed to feel empathy with the working class voter that would eventually take over the Republican Party and form the Reagan landslide.  But what struck me most was that he built an entire career from the debate stage. His TV show was probably the last of its kind in America - one-on-one intellectual combat. While many of his moral positions were extremely dubious (especially regarding race) he forced his opponents and detractors to come prepared with ironclad defenses for their viewpoints lest they become horribly exposed. The way the national discourse has devolved into shouting matches and smirking meme battles is never more apparent than during the section about the famous Oxford debate between  Buckley and James Baldwin.  It's a high watershed for public intellectualism - one from which we have fallen further and faster than anyone might have imagined.