ARTICLE: How I Miss William F. Buckley and Coherent Conservatism
He was never provoked by hate but guided by intelligence
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I watched an episode of PBS’s American Masters this week that touched my heart. “The Incomparable William F. Buckley, Jr.” was a languid and refreshing journey through my own past as I remembered how Buckley first inspired me as a boy to be not just a conservative but a thinking conservative.
The documentary was not without its faults, especially when it attempted to tether Buckley to some vague strain of white supremacism because his mother was Southern or because he opposed the state forcibly rectifying the error of racism through potentially unconstitutional means. If you have any doubts about Bucklely’s commitment to racial equality, just watch him interview and castigate Alabama Gov. George Wallace when the noted segregationist was running as an independent candidate for president in 1968.
But this did not mar the overall experience for me as I remembered how I was initially made aware of Buckley on an episode of 60 Minutes that featured a Mike Wallace interview with Buckley and his wife. Just as much, I recall my mother commenting on why she liked Buckley — he was not just a conservative but a conservative who could tell you exactly why he believed what he believed; why he ascribed to an ideology that most in academia and the media deemed as evanescent and almost quaintly out of tune with the then-current obsession with modernity.
I soon went out an began finding his books — starting with his first, God and Man at Yale — and then reaching for Up From Liberalism, which I would still classify as a de rigeur reading for anyone who is weary of the state telling you what to believe, how to behave and what to say.
I soon became one of the younger subscribes to his magazine, National Review and found his — even then — long-running program Firing Line. It wasn’t long after embracing Buckley as my long-distance mentor that I also discovered Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who was not only a close friend of Buckley but was the political force and ideological phenomenon that conservatives had been searching for since the defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
It was no wonder that Reagan was so enormously and viscerally popular with young voters — especially university students who just a decade earlier had been firmly ensconced on the left-wing of American politics. Reagan inspired a generation with a positive conservativism that took all the negative passion of the 1970s and channeled it into a vision of freedom and prosperity that motivated an electorate that had just survived the economic and social decline of a decade that might just as well be characterized by a notable scene from the 1978 film Network, in which actor Peter Finch playing broadcaster Howard Beale encapsulates the anger and angst of people who were ready to walk to their open windows and shout, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”
Buckley provided the intellectual foundation of the Reagan Revolution as we all termed it in those days. With his unshakeable faith in the human intellect and a powerhouse vocabulary that stymied the best that the liberal academic establishment could offer, Buckley eviscerated the Left with not just an ease that was apparent but with a joy and verve that was electrifying to witness.
But he delivered his sardonic and withering blasts of criticism with a wry smile on his face that betrayed just how much he enjoyed doing this. And he never shouted, raged, went beyond the pale in personal attacks — and most importantly — he eschewed profanity.
It wasn’t just that the networks banned swearing on primetime news programming in those days — we knew that Buckley was above such things and didn’t need to harangue guests with foul language.
With his unshakeable faith in the human intellect and a powerhouse vocabulary that stymied the best that the liberal academic establishment could offer, Buckley eviscerated the Left with not just an ease that was apparent but with a joy and verve that was electrifying to witness.
I can’t be sure how Buckley would respond to the media world that we live in today — where the legacy media are either dying or dependent upon government subsidies and are being replaced with “new media” or independent media.
I think he would have thrived in the same way that Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have succeeded on YouTube and Rumble. But I think he would have raised the bar considerably in terms of online discourse. Though I think Carlson is perhaps — intentionally or unintentionally — achieving the closest approximation of what Buckley achieved on Firing Line, a lot of the social media landscape is unfortunately dominated by charlatans, half-wits, dullards, quacks and ignoramuses who may possess the right to tell you how to think and vote but do so without the requisite credentials or experience.
And this level of debate that defines both commentators on the Right and the Left has also consumed the political process. Without getting into just how violent the woke Left is, replete with massive riots that have neither respect for property rights nor the lives of its targeted citizens — we shall discuss this phenomenon in another column — just examine the rhetoric of President Joe Biden and his frankly insane insistence that MAGA Republicans pose a security threat to America or that white supremacy is the greatest terrorism threat. Biden is a walking political pathogen who is not only an affront to civil discourse and a buffoon who cannot find the men’s room but a chronic liar who pretends he was a civil rights leader when in fact he was a staunch supporter of segregation and a man who once proclaimed Jim Crow laws as a “source of black pride.”
But we need to do better on the Right as well. Far too often, former President Donald Trump resembles a back-alley brawler who cannot envision the America he wants to create as the one he wants to destroy. We need to hear about that “city on a hill” that Reagan described; we need to hear that there is enough of America still worth saving that it need not be consigned to the same dustbin of history where the Soviet Union now resides.
If Trump is advocating a scorched earth policy, then it he had better be clear about what will still be standing after the destruction is over.
It may well be too late. The political discourse has for so long been an exchange of ad hominin insults, flagrant hyperbole and extremist yet unnegotiable positions that there might be no road back to a positive and rational debate.
Biden is a walking political pathogen who is not only an affront to civil discourse and a buffoon who cannot find the men’s room but a chronic liar who pretends he was a civil rights leader when in fact he was a staunch supporter of segregation …
Certainly, with America occupying the contradictory position of being a police state that cannot secure its southern border; with America strangling free speech while it is obsessed with disinformation; with America so focused on Ukraine and the Middle East it has utterly failed to confront the opioid crisis, radical change is necessary.
But we had that radical change in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan: we were just able to transition away from one disaster without creating another.
Of course the Cold War helped to make the conservative message coherent and comprehensible. We stood for liberty; the communists wanted to enslave us. We didn’t worry about Islamic revolutionaries only insofar as they offered a means of subverting Soviet expansionism. The insanity of gender ideology and the ever expanding absurdity of the LGBTQ+ alphabet swamp was not even imagined in our darkest moments.
It was so much easier to agree on what a conservative was in those times which is why I am in no way retreating to an effete and defeatist NeverTrumpism that will doom the United States to the totalitarianism of the current Democratic Party. As much as I admire the courage and conviction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to defend free speech and defeat COVID mandates, I don’t think he can win. Trump is clearly the alternative to a Biden whose dementia has made him even more dangerous because he is now subject to the whims and fads of his woke handlers and staffers, who, unlike Biden, are deeply committed to their left-wing agenda.
This is is merely a plea to stop demonizing our opponents instead of inviting them to join a brighter future that will only seem possible and tangible when we begin to talk about it with greater frequency.
It may seem that America is finished and needs to be replaced, so appallingly incompetent has been its governance under Biden and the Democrats and so wounded has it been by woke ideology that actually believes a 12-year-old having a sex change should be called “gender-affirming surgery.”
But perhaps the glass is half-full and the insanity of the Left can be replaced not with the fury of the Right but by the rational dialogue, sound thinking and efficacious policies of conservatives and liberaltarians.
History is replete with examples of violent revolutions gone awry.
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