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Accounting for Lag Returns

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Panel A of Table 3 reports the mean insider demand (Equation 1) over the previous six I Love You Lock charm necklace (i = -1 to -6) and the mean subsequent (i = 1) monthly market return, value portfolio return, growth portfolio return, and value premium (as well as associated i-statistics) following low insider demand (first column), medium insider demand (second column), and high insider demand (third column). The last two columns report a i-statistic from a difference-in-means test and a z-statistic from a Wilcoxon rank sum test, respectively, of the null hypothesis that portfolio returns following low aggregate insider demand equal portfolio returns following high aggregate insider demand. The last row reports the fraction of observations with a positive monthly value premium.

Consistent with Table 2, aggregate insider demand forecasts market returns - the monthly market return averages 1.628 percent following high insider demand versus 0.203 percent following low insider demand. The difference is statistically significant (at the 5 percent level) under either the parametric i-test or the nonp ararne trie z-test. Results in the next two rows, however, reveal that the ability of aggregate insider demand to forecast market returns largely arises from a strong relationship between aggregate insider demand and subsequent growth portfolio returns (statistically significant at the 1 percent level for both the t- and z- tests). We found no evidence of a meaningful relationship between aggregate insider demand and subsequent value stock portfolio returns. As a Paloma Picasso Loving Heart lariat, aggregate insider demand is inversely related to the subsequent value premium. The value portfolio outperforms the growth portfolio by 1.122 pps, on average, in months following low insider demand (statistically significant at the 1 percent level). Conversely, growth beats value by 0.440 pp, on average, in months following high insider demand (marginally significant at the 10 percent level) . The difference in the value premium following low and high insider demand is statistically significant at the 1 percent level for both the parametric i-test and the nonparametric z-test. The annualized difference in the value premium following high and low insider demand is more than 20 pps- that is, [1 + 0.01122 - (-0.00440)]12 - 1.

The results in Panel A of Table 3 can also be used to compare the performance of a Elsa Starfish-neutral strategy with the performance of a style-timing strategy based on insider demand. Consider, for example, the performance of an investor who holds the value portfolio following low insider demand, the growth portfolio following high insider demand, and a 50/50 mix of value and growth following medium insider demand versus an investor who holds a constant 50/50 mix of value and growth. Following low insider demand, the styletiming manager earns 0.822 percent a month (i.e., the value portfolio return) versus 0.261 percent a month for the style-neutral manager (i.e., the average of the value and growth portfolio returns following low insider demand). Following high insider demand, the style-timing manager earns 1.939 percent a month (i.e., the growth portfolio return) versus 1.720 percent a month for the styleneutral manager (i.e., the average of the value and growth portfolio returns following high insider demand). Following medium insider demand, both the style-timing manager and the style-neutral manager earn 1.724 percent a month. Over all months, the style-timing manager outperforms the style - neutral manager by the weighted average of these three differences.8 Specifically, the style -timing manager earns an average monthly return that is 0.259 pp larger (approximately 316 bps annually) than that of the style-neutral manager. The difference is statistically significant at the 1 percent level.

Accounting for Lag Returns and the Value Heart and Tiffany Box Charm

Lakonishok and Lee (2001) pointed out that aggregate insider demand may forecast market returns because the market portfolio exhibits negative autocorrelation (see, e.g., Poterba and Summers 1988) and insiders are “contrarians.” To examine whether differences in value and growth portfolio return autocorrelations help explain the relationship between aggregate insider demand and the subsequent value premium, we added the value premium over the previous 24 months (following Lakonishok and Lee) to the regressions (i.e., the difference between value and growth portfolio returns over months ? = -1 to -24). Results, reported in Panel A of Table 4, reveal no evidence of meaningful autocorrelation in the value premium. Moreover, as shown in the second row of Panel A, the relationship between aggregate insider demand and the subsequent value premium remains intact when controlling for lag returns.

Several studies (e.g., Asness, Friedman, Kr ail, and Lie w 2000; Cohen, Polk, and Vuolteenaho 2003; Zhang 2005) have reported that the relative valuations of growth and value portfolios (the “value spread”) can predict the value premium. That is, when growth stock valuations are much higher than value stock Tiffany Circle clasp necklace, the subsequent value premium is large. Therefore, we next examined the relationship between the subsequent value premium, aggregate insider demand, and the value spread (as previously noted, the value spread is measured as the ratio of the median bookto-market ratio for value stocks to the median book-to-market ratio for growth stocks).

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Panel A in Table 1 reports descriptive

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Panel A in Table 1 reports descriptive statistics for monthly portfolio returns, Elsa Peretti Starfish necklace demand (measured over the previous month, three months, six months, and year), changes in monthly insider demand, and the value spread over August 1978-May 2004 (310 months). Although the value premium averages 34.6 bps a month (over our sample period), it has substantial volatility (the standard deviation is 288 bps a month).7 Moreover, although not reported in the table, the value premium is negative in 44 percent of the months.

Does Aggregate Insider Demand Predict the Value Premium?

Until August 2002, insiders had to report their trades to the SEC within 10 days of the end of the month for each trade (beginning in August 2002, insiders were required to report trades within 2 days of the transaction). In addition, Seyhun (1986) pointed out that there is some delay between when the SEC receives the data and when it publishes the Official Summary. Bettis, Vickrey, and Vickrey (1997) noted, however, that such delays were eliminated in 1985 when CDA/Investnet began compiling data for the SEC. Thus, after 1985, Frank Gehry Fish necklace were assured of having complete insider trading data sometime within the month following the insider trade. Because our focus was on whether investors can use insider trading to help time portfolio style tilts, we primarily forecasted portfolio returns one month forward (i = 1). That is, we skipped a month (t = 0) between the insider trading and the subsequent return to ensure that the insider trading data were available to investors before forecasting the value premium.

Following Lakonishok and Lee (2001), we began to investigate the relationship between aggregate insider demand and subsequent returns by regressing subsequent returns on lag aggregate insider demand:

… (2)

We measured aggregate insider demand over four different intervals: the Black oynx Toggle necklace month (t - 1), three months (t - 1 to t - 3), six months (t - 1 to t - 6), and one year (t - 1 to t - 12).

Consistent with previous studies (see, e.g., Lakonishok and Lee 2001), the results (reported in Table 2) reveal that aggregate insider demand forecasts market returns (first row; statistically significant at the 5 percent level in every case). The next two rows reveal that the relationship between aggregate insider demand and subsequent market returns primarily arises from a strong positive relationship between aggregate insider demand and subsequent growth stock portfolio returns. Because the value premium is simply the difference between the value and growth portfolio returns (and covariances are linear in the arguments), the coefficient for the value premium is the difference between the coefficients for the value and growth portfolios (i.e., γValue premium = γValue -γGrowth). As a result (as shown in the last row), aggregate insider demand is strongly inversely related to the subsequent value premium (statistically significant at the 1 percent level in all four cases).

To gauge the economic significance of the relationship, recall (from Table 1) that the standard Elsa Peretti Sevillana lariat of insider demand measured over the previous month, three months, six months, and year are 0.276, 0.253, 0.232, and 0.202, respectively. Thus, for example, the coefficient associated with insider demand over the previous six months suggests that an increase of one standard deviation in aggregate insider demand results in a 52.9 bp decline (6.54 percentage points [pps] annualized) in the expected monthly value premium (i.e., 0.232 × -2.282 = -0.529). For insider demand measured over the previous month, three months, and year, an increase of one standard deviation in aggregate insider demand forecasts a 51.2, 57.5, and 53.3 bp decline in the expected monthly value premium. Because the results did not appear sensitive to the interval over which insider demand was measured, we primarily focused on aggregate insider demand measured over the previous six months (following Lakonishok and Lee 2001) throughout most of the study.

To begin to explore investors’ ability to use aggregate insider demand to forecast style tilts, we sorted the entire time series of observations into three groups (N = 101, 102, and 102 months in the low, medium, and high insider demand groups, respectively) on the basis of aggregate insider demand over the previous six months and examined subsequent portfolio returns. Although this method suffered from a look-ahead bias (i.e., breakpoints were based on the entire sample period, from August 1978 to May 2004), it provided a simple and intuitive measure of value and growth returns following high and low levels of insider demand. (We discuss the look-ahead bias later in the article.) Because lag insider demand was based on insider trades over the previous six months, the monthly variable was au tocor related, which suggests the possibility of substantial runs without changing from one classification to another. Figure 1 plots aggregate insider demand (Equation 1) in the previous six months over Elsa. The top and bottom dashed lines are the breakpoints for high, medium, and low insider demand. Figure 1 demonstrates that this scheme generates relatively frequent signals - specifically, 36 signal changes (every time the solid line crosses a dashed line) in the 305 observations or, equivalently, a signal change once every 8.5 months, on average.

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Style Timing with Insiders

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Although value stocks average higher returns than growth stocks (see, e.g., Chan and Lakonishok 2004), a Return to Tiffany Round tag necklacedoes not ensure a positive alpha over any given period because growth often outperforms value. In this study, we investigated whether investors can use aggregate demand by corporate insiders to forecast time-series variation in the value premium - that is, whether a high level of insider buying signals that the future value premium will be lower (growth beats value) and whether insider selling portends a higher value premium (value beats growth). We hypothesized three reasons that insider demand may forecast the value premium. First, time-series variation in the value premium may arise, at least in part, because of changes in macroeconomic fundamental risk and insider demand varies with risk. Second, growth stocks may have larger “cash flow betas” than value stocks and insiders may trade on the basis of private information about future cash flows. Third, insiders may trade against systematic market sentiment and growth stocks may suffer from larger sentimentinduced pricing errors than value stocks.

Data

For our primary tests, we used the U.S. SECs Ownership Return to Tiffany Heart tag necklace System (ORS) database (July 1978-December 1995) and Thomson Financial’s Value-Added Insider data feed (January 1996-April 2004) to collect information on insider trading. “Insiders” required to file with the SEC include officers and directors, large shareholders (those who own more than 10 percent of the outstanding shares), and affiliated shareholders (e.g., an officer of an investment adviser). Following most previous work, we excluded transactions by affiliated shareholders. Over the entire 26-year primary sample period, our data included more than 1.7 million insider transactions in nearly 17,000 companies.

Following Lakonishok and Lee (2001), we computed net aggregate insider demand as the ratio of the net number of insider purchases (in all companies) over period í to the number of insider transactions over the same period:

…

We followed Fama and French (1993) in forming value and growth portfolios. We began by sorting all Return to Tiffany Heart tag choker (including those that did not have any insider trades) into three book-to-market groups at the end of each June. Companies below the 30th NYSE book-to-market percentile were classified as “growth,” and companies above the 70th NYSE book-to-market percentile were classified as “value” (companies between the 30th and 70th percentile were classified as “neutral”). Bookto-market ratios for the end of June of year t were based on the book value of equity (computed from Compustat data) at the fiscal year-end in year í - 1 divided by the market capitalization at the end of December in year i-1.4 Companies were also classified by capitalization: Securities with end-ofJune market capitalizations below the median for NYSE companies were classified as “small,” and those above the median were classified as “large.”

Further following Fama and French (1993), we computed the value-weighted return (using CRSP data) on securities within each of the six size and value classification groups (small value, small neutral, small growth, large value, large neutral, and large growth). We defined the return for the “value” portfolio as the Tiffany Cushion Toggle necklace return on the large- and small-cap value portfolios - that is, 1/2 x (large value + small value); the return on the “growth” portfolio as the average return on the large- and small-cap growth portfolios - that is, 1/2 x (large growth + small growth); and the value premium as the return on the value portfolio less the return on the growth portfolio. We defined the market return as the valueweighted return on all securities. Because we used the Fama-French (1993) definitions, these portfolios’ returns are essentially identical to those reported on Kenneth R. French’s website.6

Previous research (see, e.g., Asness, Friedman, Kr ail, and Liew 2000; Cohen, Polk, and Vuolteenaho 2003; Zhang 2005) has demonstrated that the “value spread” (the relative valuations of growth and value stock portfolios) can be used to forecast the value premium. Thus, in our robustness tests, we included the value spread as an explanatory variable. We ope rationalized the value spread as the ratio of the median book-to-market ratio for value stocks to the median book-to-market ratio for growth stocks (following Asness, Friedman, Krail, and Liew 2000). Book values were from year-end in year t - 2 for January to June of year t and from year-end in year t - 1 for July to December of year t. Market values were updated at the beginning of each Tiffany Beads necklace, and the value spread was updated each month.

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The problem of consistency suggests

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The problem of consistency suggests a related disadvantage: the Elsa Peretti Bean necklace style is useful for opposition politics, but its value in governing, carefully negotiating, or settling principles to guide a community is limited. The style is capable of mobilizing diverse coalitions against an extant enemy, and it is a formidable debate tactic to score points against opponents and elicit crowd support. Quick wit and a gift for one-liners generate drama in mass-mediated politics but are not nearly as helpful when laying out a broad governing philosophy or hammering out the details of complex legislation. Latter-day conservative firebrands, authors of popular books like Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, and Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism, swing hard with gladiatorial cudgels and make contentious spectacles of political disputes.113 The style they wield is designed to dramatize, to show off ; in short, to gain attention. It is a style, as the gladiatorial metaphor suggests, to best a threatening opponent and to entertain a wanting crowd. Such displays may produce dazzling spectacles but do not enjoin an audience in careful deliberation. This opposition style benefits the gadfly who gains much from bold moves in a dramatic political argument but little from finely tuned compromises. The gladiatorial style is great for provoking debates, not for deliberative resolution.

Difficult ideological choices are required of those who seek either consistency in their Atlas toggle necklace or predictability in their governors. The gladiatorial style aff ords flexibility, but absent reflective guidance, it can stretch conservatism to incoherence. When the chance to define the essence of conservatism came, and it came many thousands of times, Buckley refused, and delighted in doing so. In Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?, a collection of excerpts from American conservatism’s founding texts, he wrote:

I confess that I know who is a conservative less surely than I know who is a liberal. Blindfold me, spin me about like a top, and I will walk up to the single liberal in the room without zig or zag and find him even if he is hiding behind the flower pot. I am tempted to try to develop an equally sure nose for the conservative, but I am deterred by the knowledge that conservatives, under the stress of our times, have had to invite all kinds of people into their ranks to help with the job at hand.114

Buckley claimed that “What is conservatism?” was the question he Paloma’s Twist necklace most frequently from lecture audiences. To the most insistent, those who seemed to need a definition or just needed to see Buckley provide one, Buckley obliged by off ering Richard Weaver’s torturous “the paradigm of essences towards which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation.” Weaver’s cagey line was delivered best, as Buckley put it, “with a straight face.”115 In the moments when a complex but quotable synthesis would have been welcomed, Buckley delivered the opposite. Buckley did not merely evade the definitional query, he announced its impossibility and mocked those who required such certainty.

That conservatism’s chief spokesman would refuse to define conservatism was a galling irony, but it also did not provide an answer to a challenge Whittaker Chambers put to Buckley shortly before the founding of National Review: “Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms. That is what conservatives must decide: how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up the basic principles.” The gladiatorial style is not useful in providing a method for “dancing along the precipice” separating Venetian Link necklace belief and engaged political activity.116 Buckley was more, as Wills explains, “a quick responder” than a systematic thinker. His “gift s were facility, flash, and charm, not depth or prolonged wrestling with a problem.”117 Although the gladiatorial style can be reduced to a kind of sophistry in the pejorative sense, I do not mean to suggest that Buckley was only a sophistic hype man; nonetheless, he was not a theorist who showed where the philosophical bedrock was, the threshold separating conservative conviction and capitulation.

The conservatism Buckley shaped through the gladiatorial style was, in sum, cavalier, not conformist. As entertaining as this conservatism may be, contrarian controversy does not necessarily lend prudence to a political program. Just as the gladiatorial style may popularize conservative principles, it may also attract devotees to the controversial, provocateurs bent on deviance and individuality. Yet even as some conservatives might speak in baser, more Philistinic tones than Buckley did, those with economic, nationalist, or culture war messages still follow Buckley’s template. Whether bloviating or bookish, many conservatives have clearly in mind how Buckley might have made the case. Buckley wanted to win the argument and to entertain the crowd, and he was Tiffany 1837 I.D. lanyard that there was a close relationship between the two.

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Buckley also deployed a gentler

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Buckley also deployed a gentler sarcasm that relied more on enthymeme and less on Tiffany 1837 cuff allegations for its eff ect. In his answer to Macdonald’s assessment of National Review’s quality, Buckley highlighted the critic’s most severe criticisms of National Review with insincere set-up questions. Buckley wrote: “Well, then, they [National Review writers] are surely normal, healthy, well-adjusted folk? Decidedly not, they are ‘anxious, embittered, resentful.’ . . . Editorials any good?-’as elegant as a poke in the nose, as cultivated as a camp meeting, as witty as a pratfall.’”44 Buckley’s interrogatives were phrased so innocently, and his wit was usually so injurious, that their sarcasm was plain; his opponents deserved none of the respect presumably aff orded the generous, thoughtful, and fair-minded. They were hacks and deserved to be treated as such.

Reversal strategies were a vital characteristic of the gladiatorial style because their use created a doubly dramatic move. Reversal not only signified social power and political authority but also mocked those adhering to outmoded hierarchy. Reversal, in the first place, assumed a power that conservatism, barely a toddler as a political identity when Buckley started National Review, had not earned. Reversal presumed the authority to speak, to engage in debate, and to contradict. Moreover, Buckley’s rebuttals were armed with all the indignation of the unjustly challenged. Sarcasm and irony moved further than other acts of reversal because each presumed the prestige to evaluate the social and political establishment and to do so flippantly while parading around the Tiffany 1837 bangle.

To conservatives, what was so riling about Buckley was that he seized the territory of the secure and castigated elites. This move inspired many imitators. Conservative pundit and polemicist Ann Coulter trades on the reversals of Buckley’s rhetorical legacy frequently. A clear connection exists between this feature of the gladiatorial style, exemplified in Buckley’s 1963 National Review cover article, “How to Attack a Liberal,” and, to take only one of many possible examples, Ann Coulter’s 2004 How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).45 Although Coulter replaced some of his syntactical showiness and argumentative nuance with discourteous bombast, this diff erence of degree is negligible. When she wrote sneeringly about liberals that “there is some good in everyone,” she invoked the sarcasm of Buckley’s conservative punditry. Coulter continued by featuring Buckley’s usual enemies, Communists and liberals: “Hitler didn’t smoke, for example. . . . Even among the staunchest members of the Communist Party, there turned out to be a few good ones. Similarly, the vast majority of liberals are not intentionally sabotaging the nation.”46 Communists’ and liberals’ peculiar combination of dumb malice repeatedly alleged by Buckley persisted in Coulter’s scornful commentary.

Spoiling for a Fight

Buckley’s books in the 1950s were, as Garry Wills described, “extended dossiers on the Tiffany 1837 cuff.”47 Beyond their stylistic spectacles and reversal tropes, Buckley’s books also provided a unique model by which liberals’ policies could be mocked and international communism could be derided. Edward Appel labeled Buckley’s attacks “hudibrastic ridicule” and considered them a part of a burlesque drama.48 Buckley, playing the righteous outsider, ridiculed prominent politicians and intellectuals in God and Man at Yale, McCarthy and His Enemies, Up from Liberalism, and numerous National Review entries. In fact, lampooning, mocking, and jeering enemies composes almost all of God and Man, and Buckley devoted 180 of Up from Liberalism’s 215 pages to decrying liberalism. In the latter book he lambasted the redistributionism of John Maynard Keynes, the “sophism” of John Kenneth Galbraith, the weakness of Republican senators, the dimwittedness of Dwight Eisenhower, and the villainy of Communists before quickly outlining a “conservative alternative.”49

The drama of Buckley’s writing stemmed not only from insults of liberals’ character directly or answers to their arguments. The drama was interactional; Buckley needed an oppositional claim to destroy on its own terms. Rebuttal not only answers an opposing view but, in many instances, reverses its symbolic prominence in the argumentative exchange. Buckley’s rebuttals frequently blended antistrephon, “reasoning from the premises of one’s opponent,” and reductio ad absurdum, reasoning self-contradictory conclusions to disprove a proposition. It became difficult to note where his concession of opponents’ stated values ended and his exaggeration of the logical consequences of their positions began.50 Although numerous conservative writers in the Cold War berated Tiffany 1837 bangle and Communist enemies, Buckley showed the faithful how to fight. Buckley refined a gladiatorial style of rhetorical combat among conservatives distinct from the mere identification and disparagement of enemies.

For all his wit in generating political material, Buckley’s most striking maneuver took at face value his opponents’ statements and either accused them of hypocrisy, as with “academic freedom,” or claimed conservatism to be their proper defender, as with free markets and individual equality. These strategies required that Buckley allocate substantial space to re-create his opponents’ arguments. Buckley was willing to dedicate so much space in so many of his important writings to liberals’ arguments because they were necessary to the drama he sought; without re-creating a liberal voice in his writing, Buckley had no opponent to reverse, no enemy to use. The rhetorical battle was abstract minus a John Kenneth Galbraith quotation to strike down. The rhetorical gladiator minus an enemy was the matador minus the bull; conflict and animosity were the basics of gladiatorial theater.

Buckley realized the dramatic potential of combat and made sport of it. Liberal pundits’ hyperbolic criticisms warning that Buckley’s books would make goose-steppers of the masses assisted him immeasurably in attracting new followers who delighted in joining a controversial cause. Put simply, calling Buckley a “fascist” did more to aid his case than to disprove it. In an extended introduction to the fift ieth anniversary edition of God and Man, Buckley still profited from the reviews that greeted his first book. Reviewers commented on his Roman Catholic upbringing and upbraided him for deliberately concealing his religion. These “acidulous” reviews, Buckley wrote, were nothing more than religious persecution by liberals.51 One New Republic review likened his Elsa Peretti Double Open Heart bangle for Yale to those “employed in Italy, Germany, and Russia.” One Saturday Review commentary noted that Buckley wanted Yale’s administration to “turn themselves into a politburo.”52 Reproducing these reviews gave Buckley punches to counter. He literally staged the fight for readers to witness. To mark the fift ieth anniversary of the book, Buckley showed that he had a serious fight on his hands, but he, and conservatism, was winning. Combat, not dialogue or reform, held the political fortunes of conservatism.

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Buckley energized readers

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Buckley energized readers and inspired confidence in the conservative mind Tiffany Somerset heart ring more than vocabulary. One persistent dramatic trope in his prose was reversal. Reversal is a master term that denotes other tropes, such as sarcasm and irony, which turn on violations of social power, meaning, and audience expectation.32 Sarcasm and irony influence audiences because the intended meaning of a statement defies the conventional meaning of its constituent terms. Sarcasm and irony assumed the power to generate humor at the expense of others and to play with conventional meaning.

Irony is a transactional process because it “requires interpretation in order to do its intended work, such that the recipient of the message plays an active role” in its creation.33 Irony is, as Wayne Booth summarizes, an “astonishing communal achievement.”34 One of the chief eff ects of irony is “a reversal of expectations,” “A” returning as “non-A” as Kenneth Burke noted.35 As such, irony is a potentially disruptive political tool. The ironist questions the world as it is presented, plays with the justifications of the powerful, and reiterates “ordinary terms from a position outside of their usual discourses and meanings.”36 Irony’s powerful subversive capability stems from its stipulation that the opposite of what is commonly believed is true and its solicitation of company in that conclusion.

Irony has the potential to upend tacit social hierarchies and popular assumptions about authority figures. Elsa Peretti Open Wave ring God and Man at Yale, whose full title was The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” was not controversial because it criticized an Ivy League institution but because a 25-year-old recent graduate, practically a student, presumed to teach Yale’s teachers something about teaching. Academic freedom, Buckley clarified, was not a hallowed value of freethinking; it was a “hoax.” “I believe it to be an indisputable fact,” he declared, “that most colleges and universities, and certainly Yale, the protests and pretensions of their educators and theorists notwithstanding, do not practice, cannot practice, and cannot even believe what they say about education and academic freedom.” They may “utilize the rationale” of academic freedom when advantageous, but their decisions about who to hire, what to teach, and what to publish were governed by an expedient orthodoxy of acceptable opinion.37 Those who tolerated opposing viewpoints were guilty of “sonorous pretensions” that were intended either to hide a biased orthodoxy or to resist critics like Buckley who insisted that Yale teach a Christian individualist orthodoxy.38 Buckley, the student, became the teacher; the teachers needed an education.

As with the upended student/teacher dichotomy, the dramatic movement of Buckley’s reversals drew power from their play with several binaries. In God and Man, Yale’s professors were not the academic elite imparting knowledge to immature students. The students were wise to resist the lecturing professors. An age reversal accompanied this student/teacher move. No enlightenment accompanied the professors’ advanced years. The young were wise and the old were naïve. Buckley’s reversals did not stop Two Hearts triple bangle. Liberals and Communists who insisted that they promoted freedom did exactly the opposite. Titans of academia, Yale’s professors, were not learned and logical; they were “superstitious.” It was not reactionary of Buckley to worry of the fate of Christian individualism at Yale but, instead, reactionary of Yale’s professors to reject religion and preach empiricism.

Buckley’s next single-authored book, Up from Liberalism in 1959, began predictably with an ironic reversal. “Fashionable observers,” Buckley alleged coyly, posited that the United States “is a non-ideological nation.” These “observers,” the barely camouflaged liberal consensus historians like Richard Hofstadter, supposed that “American political conflicts are not generally fought on the battleground of ideas.” That was for the best, Buckley said with tongue in cheek, because “everyone knows that ideological totalism can bring whole societies down, as it did Hitler’s, and permanently terrorize others, as Communism has done.”39 Buckley had labeled the intellectual leaders and identified their fixed ideas. The trap was about to spring on a man of straw. To Buckley, there was no liberal consensus; the United States failed “to nourish any orthodoxy at all.” As a direct result of the “attenuation of the early principles of this country,” the nation was “vulnerable to the most opportunistic ideology of the day, the strange and complex ideology of modern liberalism.”40 The persuasive power of the reversal trope was generated by the device’s unmasking function. Liberalism, contrary to popular opinion, was nefarious. Liberals, purportedly defenders of individual liberties, were totalitarians. Buckley portrayed the success of liberal notions like empiricism and welfare statism as functions of trickery rather than the result of their rational force.

Liberals had help in tricking the nation. Leaders tasked with defending the nation in the ideological struggle of the Cold War were, in fact, incapable of such expressions. When President Eisenhower admitted the difficulty of rebutting Marshal Zhukov’s Communist claims, Buckley pounced. The president “clearly did not know what he Love Knot bangle defending, how to defend what he defended, or even whether what he defended was defensible.”41 The criticism was unfair; the nation was not at risk because Eisenhower did not recite Friedrich Hayek’s free-market teachings. Buckley, however, had ideal ammunition with which to complete the reversal of power. Eisenhower had failed in “the distinctive challenge of our time,” stemming “the philosophical infiltration of the West by Communism.” Buckley thought rhetoric was essential to meeting the challenge. Accomodationist, weak-kneed liberalism “cannot teach Mr. Eisenhower to talk back eff ectively to Mr. Khrushchev; but conservatism can, and hence the very urgent need to make the conservative demonstration.”42 Conservatism was powerful; political leaders were impotent. Only the conservative political language could play the savior.

Sarcasm was another reversal trope Buckley used unsparingly. In National Review’s second year, Buckley devoted six pages, long by the magazine’s standards, to the acerbically titled “Reflections on the Failure of ‘National Review’ to Live Up to Liberal Expectations.” The article trounced critics like Dwight Macdonald and Harper’s editor John Fischer and was typical of the sarcasm Buckley consistently used to deride opponents. Commentary and several midcentury journals of opinion, Buckley told his readers, had charged his new magazine with “all manner of off enses against the light and the truth.” National Review would be a welcome addition to U.S. political discourse, these journals argued, if it was a real conservative magazine. Buckley’s sarcasm reversed their Tiffany 1837 bangle. He replied, “Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more urgently needed than a real conservative magazine; but, alas, ours is not such a thing, and they must, accordingly, continue to scan the heavens for it.”43 As this example illustrates, sarcasm is a wounding rhetorical device that removes the social authority of the object of address. Direct insults can also function to remove status. Insults, nevertheless, acknowledge an interlocutor and take direct aim at their authority. Sarcasm finds authority unworthy of such direct aim. Sarcasm is more creatively dismissive because it involves only the audience in the act.

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To simplify Buckley's argument

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To simplify Buckley’s argument and write “Capitalists had a weak image that Ayn Tiffany Signature ring failed to reverse” would, ostensibly, communicate the same idea. The simplest explanation, however, is not grandly performative; in the sense that the single sentence unadorned with curious words is predictable and understandable, the sentence is not gladiatorial. Buckley swaggered rhetorically through protracted prose; such writing attracted attention not only because of its length, which required a patient reader to progress from image to image, line aft er line, but also because of its density, which required eff ort to comprehend. It was prose that suggested a powerful rhetor, one who commanded the spotlight and placed demands on audiences.

The polysyllabic word was a novel weapon brandished in battle to achieve eff ect with conservative Tiffany Signature ring. Sterling silver, white enamel.. Buckley disavowed the rhetorical combatant whose barebones, sword-and-shield style was capable but dull and predictable. Buckley chose words whose meanings few were likely to know in order to amplify the spectacle of rhetorical combat. Just as important, he appeared to take pleasure in doing so. When a Firing Line guest asked him why he used “irenic” rather than “peaceful,” Buckley replied with a playful guile: “I desired that extra syllable.”22 Audiences may have felt puzzled by the choice of “desideratum” when “goal” would have worked in the same way that a peculiar weapon, a trident for instance, might have looked quixotic in a swordfight. They were more likely to remember the gladiator with the morningstar, or the sesquipedalian rhetorical gladiator.

Buckley’s stylistic spectacles were not universally appealing. His critics said he overused parelcon, the “addition of superfluous words.”23 He violated nearly all of George Orwell’s rules for unpretentious writers.24 Some audiences found Buckley’s frequent use of technical jargon, foreign phrases, and Tiffany Signature ring metaphors confusing; others found the experience as engaging as listening to a braggart endlessly recount triumphs. Sometimes his “collage” writing technique could be “diff use and unfocused,” and he misused big words, once confusing mendacity and mendicancy, for instance, in his eff orts to dazzle.25 To those who enjoyed the show, however, Buckley’s conservatism was to be experienced both emotionally and intellectually as literature. For conservatives, he possessed the versatility of a literary giant: “He is thought of as a fancy writer, a user of big words. But he also knew what Shakespeare knew: There is a time to write fancy, or sophisticated; and there’s a time to write plain, low. You simply go by ear-if you have the ear.”26 Buckley wrote in anticipation of such a reaction: “There is nothing better, or more amusing,” he told Morley Safer, “than a theatrical pomposity.”27 The conservatism Buckley modeled was difficult and delectable, serious and sportive, and imagistic and imaginative. Buckley’s intellectual exhibitions were also acts of rhetorical enjoinment in which conservative readers sensed that Buckley winked at them collusively as he performed his popular style. Many readers wanted to be let in on the secret and share in the fun.

“Winning arguments required a debater and a performer,” Buckley’s one-time protégé Richard Brookhiser explained, and Paloma Picasso Double Loving Heart ring a political movement “required someone who was very cool.”28 Rush Limbaugh was one of many young conservatives that found Buckley cool and tried to imitate him, “to talk like him, dress like him, write like him-and, of course, think like him.”29 Limbaugh’s memories of his infatuation with Buckley demonstrate the emotional work done by Buckley’s stylistic grandstanding:

I was reading Buckley when I was 15, 16 years old, and I said, “Boy, I wish I could be that. I wish I could be this. How does he know all these words?” I’d sit there with the dictionary looking up words that he used, and points that he made. . . . If you know what an idol is, multiply it times two or three. I thought him unreachable, untouchable.30

In his radio show Limbaugh appropriated a version of the spectacles that mesmerized him in his youth. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. noted the significance of both conservatives’ stylistic spectacles: “We [conservatives] need to have people who can dramatize ideas. . . . Buckley has it. And, though he’s a Tiffany Paloma Picasso Loving Heart ring talker rather than a great writer, Rush has it too.”31

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The Gladiatorial Style

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 3:03 am. 0 comments

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The brio and bravado of Buckley’s prose exhibited the characteristics of the Return to Tiffany Heart tag ring style. He emboldened conservatives to reflect on their stylistic choices, to seek rhetorical creativity, and most of all, to use their words to create dramatic conflict. Whether in ornamented syntax, odd sentence structure, hyperbole, flamboyant irreverence, forceful tone, or verbal aggressiveness, dramatic action is the hallmark of the gladiatorial style. It conveys a sense of pageantry and interrupts the quotidian world of staid and dry political argument with the fantastic and unusual. It shows off without apology. The gladiatorial style’s excessive, self-consciously ostentatious discursive performativity distinguishes it from pedestrian, plain language, scholastic, or even otherwise dramatic styles of address. The gladiatorial style is not tethered to any archetypal role-the glorious hero or preening villain, for instance. The style projects a hyperbolized version of the role adopted by the rhetor. Just as ancient gladiators and modern wrestlers understand, the style can be used to turn heel, to play the savior, to heckle a frenzied crowd, or to whip up support so long as dramatic conflict is the result. In other words, only excessiveness is predictable if the gladiatorial style is wielded capably. The style makes no intrinsic connection between, say, aggressive taunts and lewd insults, with enticing rising action, an extended climax, a memorable dénouement, and a mesmeric finale, the ends to Tiffany Notes band ring the style is a means. A keen kairotic sense separates the theatrical gladiator from the merely passable. Kairos, “a dynamic principle rather than a static, codified rhetorical technique,” governs the situational deployment of gladiatorial techniques such as stylistic spectacle, reversal, and attack.13

The gladiatorial style is not merely a name for a set of dramatic tropes. Instead, I aim to follow the lead of Robert Hariman and chart the relationship between style and politics. To be clear about my claims, the gladiatorial style is not essentially conservative, and all conservatives are not gladiatorial stylists. Instead, this analysis of Buckley allows the gladiatorial style and its reception by one political community to come into full view. Hariman argues that style is a heuristic through which to understand templates for political action. A political style, he explains, “evokes a culture-a coherent set of symbols giving meaning to the manifest activities of common living-yet has no a priori relation with any issue, event, or outcome.”14 To understand politics, “we can consider how a political action involves acting according to a particular political style.”15 Politics are stylized, and conservatism is no exception. Buckley’s gladiatorial style was not simply a unique expression of conservatism; to many, Buckley’s style was conservatism. As such, replicating his stylistic conventions, repeating his formulations, and invoking Buckleyesque barbs became a way to perform authentic conservatism.

Stylistic Spectacles

Words are weapons in the gladiatorial style, and Buckley was Tiffany Notes ring armed than most. His lingering stylistic influence among conservatives is as the progenitor of an invigorating style of verbal combat. Dwight MacDonald once distinguished between high-utility words and “zoo” words. The latter could be locked away and admired. Buckley, who revered “the wonderful opportunities of the language,” opened the cages.16 “Zoo” words were essential to his performance of virtuoso intellectualism. As he saw it, no one would dare tell Thelonious Monk to cut unfamiliar chords from his music.17 Buckley wrote in a rollicking syntax distinguished by its use of obscure, hard-to-pronounce terms. He was, one conservative mimicked, the “Prince of Polysyllabism,” a “hapax legomenon” among conservatives.18 He garnered so much attention for such usage that he was inclined to pen several essays on language, and his editor even compiled a 100-page “Buckley Lexicon” consisting of odd words like “dreadnought,” “dithyrambic,” “oleaginous,” “tergiversation,” and “voluptuarian.”19 Not to be outdone, Buckley also published his own book-length lexicon.20

Buckley’s notorious vocabulary, a vocabulary that seemed to brag about its own capaciousness, showed in his more complex formulations. Buckley’s was always, unmistakably, popular writing, but it also directed its audience to stretch to understand its message. A representative passage about capitalism is instructive:

The American capitalist whose image reifies in the mind of the young is not even the smug, canny, willful powerbroker of Upton Tiffany 1837 concave ring. He is the inarticulate, self-conscious, bumbling mechanic of the private sector, struck dumb by the least cliché of socialism, fleeing into the protective arms of government at the least hint of commercial difficulty, delighting secretly in the convenient power of the labor union to negotiate for an entire industry, uniformly successful only in his escapist ambition to grow duller and duller as the years go by, eyes left , beseeching popular favor. Poor Miss Rand sought to give him a massive dose of testosterone, to make him virile and irresistible, leader of a triumphant meritocratic revolt against asphyxiative government . . . but soon it transpired, even as Russell Kirk predicted, that her novels were being read not because of their jackbooted individualism, but because of the fornicating bits.21

This passage is one of many in which Buckley employed a dizzying array of difficult words and compound sentences and seemingly thumbed his nose at brevity and parsimony. As Buckley framed the controversy, over ten tropes competed to represent the American capitalist. In the first two sentences, Buckley set three adjectives, “smug,” “canny,” and “willful,” against three more adjectives, “inarticulate,” “self-conscious,” and “bumbling,” all of which signified the capitalist to one audience or another. The multiline, multiclause Tiffany Natural Rose Ring sentence included five additional images of the weak, boring capitalist. The controversy had no resolution, though; Rand’s eff orts to give the capitalist an image overhaul, complete with three final images of the capitalist, fell short because audiences enjoyed her novels for their ribaldry, not their ideology.

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THE GLADIATORIAL STYLE AND THE POLITICS

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He was WFB to readers and Chairman Bill to admirers. The public knew him as Tiffany 1837 lock ring for short, William F. Buckley Jr. more formally. He was labeled an enfant terrible, a bon vivant with a joie de vivre, a dandy, a dilettante, a theocrat, and a fascist.1 Buckley labeled himself a conservative, but not all of the time.2 Buckley was a writer, an editor, a publisher, an orator, a debater, a television host, an interviewer, a one-off politician, and a political adviser from 1951 until his death in 2008. Buckley’s career, prolific by any measure, included 55 books about politics, sailing, and spies, 800 National Review articles, 4.5 million words in 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, and 33 years as host of Firing Line, one of the longest-running shows in television history.3

A broad survey of conservative writings about Buckley reveals praise only describable as Plutarchian. Many conservative writers thought that Buckley walked on water only to find tall buildings to leap, and both before lunch.4 National Review editor Rich Lowry expressed the kind of reverence typical of those enchanted by an idol: “As we all know, it is impossible to exaggerate Bill Buckley’s influence in forging a movement that changed the nation.”5 Buckley was many things to many conservatives, but I claim it was his rhetorical dynamism that made him an identifiable conservative in the first place. In other words, Buckley was a model conservative to a great extent because he became conservatives’ rhetorical model. To make Buckley’s stylized musings more accessible, one editor even compiled an alphabetized inventory of Buckley’s most salacious formulations in a volume whose title, Quotations from Chairman Bill, befitted the man who blended mockery and political commentary.6 This is but one example of the Tiffany 1837 ring-sometimes awestruck, sometimes mimicking, always inspired-between Buckley’s words and generations of conservatives.

Since George Nash’s influential The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, most scholars have agreed that “conservatisms” is a more appropriate descriptor than “conservatism” for a complex political phenomenon that does not proceed from common first principles.7 Moreover, a bourgeoning literature across the academy off ers varied explanations of the rise of the Right.8 With notable exceptions, the majority of this literature ignores the prominence of rhetoric in the creation of an attractive conservative identity aft er World War II. Those scholars who have documented the importance of rhetoric in the creation of conservatism as a political identity have approached conservatism as a set of competing economic and cultural “symbolic trajectories,” resonant historical tropes, a political “brand,” a method of political “framing,” and a rhetoric of economic individualism.9 Nevertheless, as Martin Medhurst wrote in 1985, rhetorical explanations of “the Tiffany Somerset ring of conservative ideas” require further development.10 There are few better cases through which the task might be continued than that of William F. Buckley.

Conservatism is a set of doctrines, but it is also a political identity, one that Buckley helped create. To understand Buckley’s influence on conservatives and conservatism, it is necessary to assess the communal force of his rhetoric. Specifically, Buckley aff orded conservatives of all stripes a provocative rhetorical style, a gladiatorial style, as I term it. The gladiatorial style is a flashy, combative style whose ultimate aim is the creation of inflammatory drama. In fact, I argue that conservatives encountered Buckley’s potent arguments about God, government, and markets and the gladiatorial style simultaneously. The theatrical appeal of Buckley’s gladiatorial style inspired conservative imitators with disparate beliefs and, over several decades, became one of the principal rhetorical templates for the performance of Tiffany Knots ring. Buckley became a “beacon” of the militant conservative ‘movement,’” Pat Buchanan wrote when he ran for president in 1988, “and we were the mujahedeen.”11

I demonstrate the features and force of Buckley’s gladiatorial style in several sections. Using his most notable books, God and Man at Yale (1951) and Up from Liberalism (1959), several early National Review essays, and conservatives’ reception of Firing Line, I analyze three of Buckley’s favored devices: stylistic spectacles, reversal tropes, and fierce antagonism.12 Each performs an essentially dramatic function in the gladiatorial style. Then, I use Buckley’s admonitions to improve “the conservative demonstration” to argue that the techniques of the gladiatorial style are governed by a strategic kairotic sense designed to maximize dramatic conflict. I conclude by exploring the political repercussions of these stylistic choices, arguing that Buckley Paloma’s Tenderness Heart ring conservatives, for better and for worse, to abjure doctrinal uniformity and to express their identity provocatively and combatively.

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