Will Bralick
Executive Director
The Buckley Foundation
for Communications
The purpose of our Foundation is to help educate citizens in the cognitive skills required to sustain or advance in a position, while promoting the moral and intellectual competence necessary to survive and to excel in the Republic.
As Reid Buckley has written, a republican government requires an “uncommon civility and a generous, yet disciplined, habit of mind in order to debate public issues and come to a wise and amiable reconciliation.”
Popular government is neither for the uncivilized nor the uneducated. The vote when exercised by the uncivilized and the uneducated amounts to little more than a “reality television show” -- Survivor: Demagogue Island. Or the political equivalent of American Idol.
We are swimming upstream. Political discourse in America is no longer anything more than dueling marketing campaigns. Debate in our country now means hosts interrupting and talking over their guests who are interrupting and talking over each other in a disorderly cacaphonous clamoring for attention.
In the television age, Marshall MacLuhan pointed out that “The Medium is the Message” and Neil Postman that we are “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Now, in the Internet age, virtual realities and viral videos further blur distinctions between the real world and the fictional world - accelerating our descent into incivility. Mortimer Adler proposed that one of the three purposes for education in America was the preparation for discharging the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. It is the abysmal ignorance and lack of training in the skills necessary for men and women to be effective citizens that brought us to this point.
The mission of our Foundation is to keep America in the first rank by disciplined thinking, inspired writing and eloquent speech. America and Western Civilization hang in the balance.