William F. Buckley, Jr., RIP

Just a few thoughts on the passing of William F. Buckley.  Though I’ve not read him in years, he was instrumental in my development as a conservative.  His philosophical defense of the West in his classics  Up From Liberalism  his defense of anti-communism in  The Committee and Its Critics,  and also his collection  Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking?  all were important works that helped find my way at a relatively early age.

In addition to being a writer, he formed within me a certain respect for education, high culture, and the trappings of aristocracy . . . some of which I have since rejected as youthful affectation.  But better affected high culture than the provincialism and parochialism and nihilistic style that has infected the entire society, including conservatives, today.  His WASP manners and cultural literacy were notable features of his PBS show “Firing Line.”

He introduced me to Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Eric Vogelin, Leo Strauss, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn, Robert Nisbet, Frank Meyer, George Nash, Albert Jay Nock, Menkin, Ludwig von Mises, and the other titans of mid-20th Century conservative philosophy.  These writers in turn led me to my hero Edmund Burke, de Maistre, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Irving Babbitt.  Most importantly, his writings and the authors he introduced me to were instrumental in my return to the True Church.

He was a revolutionary figure when he appeared in the 1950s.  We think of the 1950s as a conservative time, but the liberalism of FDR, Keynes, and Margaret Mead was the dominant philosophy of the day.  Politicians then were as afraid of being called conservative as they are today of being called liberal.  A vaguely socialist outlook, softness on crime, ambivalence about the Soviet Union, and credulity about the new “science” of psychology characterized the times.  Buckley rescued polite discourse from the charge that all reasonable debates were among different shades of liberal and that all conservatives were uneducated.  No one could maintain such a position in his presence. 

In the late 1980s, Buckley had changed.  He in many ways  supervised the shift of conservatism to one that was more accommodating to the more and more omnipresent liberalism that characterizes our age.  He was responsible for moving National Review away from its early stalwarts, such as Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, John O’Sullivan, Peter Brimelow and other nationalist and anti-immigration authors.  He was largely silent during the gross attacks on Mel Bradford by Norman Podhoretz and his crew when Bradford was nominated by Reagan to head the NEH in 1980.  He publicly attacked Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran in the book-length screed,  In Search of Anti-Semitism. 

In these episodes, Buckley’s genteel, Ivy League concern for fitting in always seemed to triumph over his more pugnacious (and ethnic) peers like Sam Francis, Sobran, and the entire gang that went on to form the American Conservative and Chronicles. 

Worse than merely moderating its conservatism, Buckley allowed National Review in the 90s to become the voice of unadulterated, bellicose neoconservatism.  Gone were the Catholic “just war” theorists uneasy with contemporary “total war.”  Gone was any intelligent criticism of Israel.  Gone too was any intellectual criticism of our steady reinvention as a nation through sustained non-European immigration.  To mention the latter fact in particular became taboo, even though, National Review as late as the 1970s openly opposed less dramatic social engineering initiatives like school bussing and the ERA.

Buckley can’t be personally blamed for all of these trends in the magazine he founded.  His editorial role declined as he became older.  The battlefields of conservatism changed greatly after 9/11, and he, like most conservatives, defended an appropriate military response to radical Islam.  Finally, numerous positive additions like John Derbyshire and Heather MacDonald have been brought on board in the meantime. 

I think it’s more sad than anything else that Buckley did not continue as the standard bearer of idiosyncratic conservatism.  And I am uneasy and disappointed when I reflect on his treatment of old friends like Sobran and Francis.  These men were useful to the movement, had interesting things to say, and, even though often didn’t agree with them, they should have been kept in the mainstream by National Review.  The success of websites like Vdare.com and the American Conservative testify about the extent to which NR has lost its core audience.  Buckley once understood, but seemed ultimately to forget, that liberals should never get to set the boundaries of respectability.

I still thank and honor Buckley, however, for doing what he did in founding National Review and in writing eloquently as a philosophical conservative, standing against the tide of  history “yelling Stop!” . . . if only for a time. 

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