Reagan Was Wrong | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com

Reagan Was Wrong | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com:  Quoting from the middle of the article as enticement for you to follow the link, "During the 1980 Republican convention, he wrote a column for The Washington Post describing the delegates as members of the "booboisie" once mocked by H. L. Mencken, by which Fairlie meant they were: "Narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious." William F. Buckley replied with a column attacking Fairlie for being an English interloper, a bad grammarian and a snob. When Buckley included the column in an essay collection five years later, Fairlie panned the book in The New Republic, dissing Buckley as unconservative, overexposed and "the quintessential Common Man of our time." This so incensed Buckley that he bought a full-page ad in a subsequent issue of the magazine to reprint his original attack on Fairlie.

When I first read Fairlie's column about the convention, it seemed overheated. Then I watched Sarah Palin speak. Fairlie's disgust at the GOP's impulse toward small-minded demagoguery anticipated the day when it would reach its fullest expression—when the movement would have no farther to fall."