Jonah Goldberg takes note of the alleged nostalgia for William F. Buckley among many people – an alleged desire, it is claimed, for a more urbane and reasonable right – and what is wrong with that picture:
…Buckley, Kristol and Neuhaus (and Reagan and Goldwater) understood and appreciated the hurly-burly of American democracy. Buckley famously insisted he’d rather be governed by 2,000 random names in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard. He passionately defended Joseph McCarthy, and he admired J. Bracken Lee, the 1950s Utah governor who makes Sarah Palin look like Sandra Day O’Connor on Ambien. Oh, and he was a Rush Limbaugh dittohead. Kristol was an admirer of the Christian right and a supporter of the populist tax revolts of the 1970s. Neuhaus was a leading champion of the religious revival on the right…
I don’t think that any of us over 40 can conceive of being conservative without the influence of Bill Buckley. Back in 1980, when I first started to take a serious interest in politics, there was Buckley’s National Review and there was Buckley’s Firing Line on PBS, and that was the lion’s share of conservative media. So, Buckley was a hero of mine – the first person I came across who consistently stood against what I increasingly perceived as what is wrong with America.
But he was also of his time. And, I think, towards the end he began to misunderstand just what it was he had helped mid-wife in to American politics. Buckley was the Cold Warrior, anti-New Deal crusader – which was fine in its place, but he never made that leap past the Cold War and in to the real battles which were emerging starting around 1990. The torch, in a real sense, was passed when National Review had a cover picture of Rush Limbaugh as “Leader of the Opposition” – the torch, that is, being passed from a man who was of one time, to a man of a different time. And with different concerns confronting us, it was a necessity.
Starting in the mid-90’s it was no more about destroying liberals in the realm of ideas; Buckley and others had already done that. What was necessary was destroying liberalism in power – and for this, different leaders had to emerge. They did; they carried the ball – and now the next, logical step is being taken. In the TEA Party movement is the uprising of the people against the liberal Super-state which was always and ever the only means of conservative victory. In a very real sense, the anger shown at town halls and the tens of thousands who carry banners at TEA Party events were implicit the moment Bill Buckley wrote that he was going to stand athwart history and shout, “stop” – because you can’t really stop, eventually, something had to be done.
In later years when we write the histories of our times and erect monuments to those who led the way back to liberty, we’ll have to find a suitable monument to William F. Buckley, Jr. – some plinth near Philadelphia’s Independence Hall would be appropriate, I think, for a statue to the man who first re-awakened our fierce desire for liberty. But let us not pretend that things were some how better when he turned the lights on and went to work. They are better, now; and will continue to get better as we fulfill the promise of conservatism.
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