Whether one embraced or rejected his ideas, few had the impact on modern political thought of William F. Buckley Jr., who died at his home last night.
William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right’s post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82. […]
Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of “Firing Line,” harpsichordist, trans-oceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor’s race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.
Yet on the platform he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent’s discomfort with wide-eyed glee.
“I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition,” he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. “I asked myself the other day, `Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?’ I couldn’t think of anyone.”
I would, of course, quibble with such an assessment, though I would gladly concede that few were as influential serving as a mentor to generations of conservative thinkers. Buckley was, when it came to modern political thought, a true leader.
What’s more, to his enormous credit, there was never anything even remotely hackish about Buckley’s work. Too often, there are those who start with the answer and work backwards. Buckley always seemed to find that intellectually lazy, and continued to think politics and policy through, even in his twilight.
TNR pointed to this fine piece from Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, on Buckley during the Bush years.
The war that has unhinged so many has curiously revitalized Buckley, not as the administration’s most eloquent defender but as perhaps its most forceful in-house critic. Untethered to the Bush team–the only insider he knew was Donald Rumsfeld, whom Buckley suggested should consider resigning following the Abu Ghraib scandal–he is also detached from its outer ring of ideologues and flacks. He is, instead, a party of one, who thinks and writes with newfound freedom. While others, left and right, have staked out positions and then fortified them, week after week, Buckley has been thinking his way through events as they have unfolded, looking for new angles of approach, new ways of understanding, drawing on his matchless knowledge of modern conservatism and on his 50-year immersion in the American political scene. It is one of those late-period efflorescences that major figures sometimes enjoy–and, in Buckley’s case, it is marked by an unexpected austerity. Like Wallace Stevens’s snow man, he has developed a “mind of winter” and, as he scans the bleak vista of the Iraq disaster, “beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” And it has been instructive to observe.
And Rick Perlstein’s thoughts today were also worth reading.
He did the honor of respecting his ideological adversaries, without covering up the adversarial nature of the relationship in false bonhommie. A remarkable quality, all too rare in an era of the false fetishization of “post-partisanship” and Broderism and go-along-to-get-along. He was friends with those he fought. He fought with friends. These are the highest civic ideals to which an American patriot can aspire. […]
The game of politics is to win over American institutions to our way of seeing things using whatever coalition, necessarily temporary, that we can muster to win our majority, however contingent—and if we lose, and we are again in the minority, live to fight another day, even ruthlessly, while respecting our adversaries’ legitimacy to govern in the meantime, while never pulling back in offering our strong opinions about their failures, in the meantime. This was Buckleyism — even more so than any particular doctrines about “conservatism.”
Buckley’s place in history is secure. My condolences to his friends and family.