William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008):
The AP reports that National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. died this morning at the age of 82. Kathryn Lopez has an initial comment on NRO here. the NYT obit is here.
Related Posts (on one page):
- William F. Buckley and American Conservatism:
- William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008):
For Murray Kempton, one of his many friends on the left, the Buckley press conference style called up “an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus.”
Newspapers almost always do, tho I seem to recall that a few were brought up short by Diana's death.
Virginia Woolf wrote Thomas Hardy's obit for the Times, and found herself having to update it over a good 20 years or so as he persisted in not only living, but continuing to publish.
"To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot little house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling of Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, and who had the capacity to admit he had been wrong."
I wonder if you'll even find anyone like that today under 40 -- an erudite, well-spoken, personable, and bold conservative thinker and writer. And I wonder if the absence of such a person is a sign of the conservative movement having been taken over by evangelicals, who -- aside from sometimes being personable -- generally do not possess any of the traits just identified -- or even consider some of them worthwhile.
It seems like too many conservatives today view the highest echelons of education, writing, and speaking as something to be suspicious of, not celebrated. That is equal parts a shame, an embarrassment, and a cause for concern. And it is one of the reasons I read the VC: it seems like one of the few places where you'll still find intellectual, reasoned conservatives challenging both the status quo and the reigning orthodoxy (liberal or conservative) with effective, thoughtful arguments. It seems to be a dying breed... or am I being too pessimistic?
Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul makes similar points, which holding himself forth as an exception to the trend.
There are many places where "...you'll still find intellectual, reasoned conservatives challenging both the status quo and the reigning orthodoxy (liberal or conservative) with effective, thoughtful arguments," just not at most humanities and social science departments in universities.
Well, don't keep us all in suspense.
Lordy, Lordy. I keep seeing this meme. Is it coming from the same place that assigns George W. Bush -- a lifelong Methodist -- to the evangelical movement?
No there are not any Buckleys on the horizon in conservative intellectual thought today, any more than there is a Buckley of the left. What he accomplished was to create from scratch the conservative intellectual movement. You can't do that a second time.
wow. That was a lot of commie-Jewish-anti-Jewish-neocon-American-Euro-socialist inside baseball.
It truly could have been written in the Daily Worker. How boring.
So, you guys used to be Trotskyites and now you're conservative and sometimes work for the administration. Big whoop.
Seriously. Mr. Buckley’s death, while only marginally affecting events (due to his relegation to the sidelines recently, alas), has a tremendous symbolic effect. End of an Era sort of thing.
The team brandishing the label “conservative” nowadays (NRO, WND, RedState, Rush, etc. etc. etc.) need to come up with a new word for their philosophy. Just make one up. (I like “Freeperism,” myself).
And I would love to know what was on his desk when he died. Was it Liberal Fascism? I will choose to believe so, and that reading it killed him.
No, I'm in fact referring to higher education itself, and the derivative effects of higher education. There is a tendency in conservatism -- at least, today's conservatism -- to denigrate the "know-it-all" and champion the ignoramus. There is a trend toward treating the former as a blowhard/wonk and treating the latter as being more in tune with the "common man." Mike Huckabee scores points with a significant portion of today's conservatives for being a "miracles guy, not a math guy." This is not simply suspicion at particular institutions of higher education -- it's suspicion at the concept of higher education and, more broadly, erudition in the first place.
Please, name them. I'm happy to start reading some of them and determine whether they're (a) actually marshaling thoughtful arguments in a manner that will gain broader support; or, instead, (b) simply serving as think-tank hacks for warmed-over ideas that have had 25 years to gain traction but have failed to do so.
NYT article, I think you meant? The NRO link for me just takes me to a tiny blog post that has to be under 100 words. Plus NRO is hardly "Daily Worker" fare. Much closer to "Daily Supervisor" and even closer to "Daily Owner."
That's not what I said; that's how another commenter characterized what I said. Buckley was just as hostile to Yale (as an institution) as some of today's conservative commentators are. My point is that many of today's conservative commentators are quick to deride not just the institution (often, by the way, in the absence of the coherent, cohesive, intellectual argument Buckley offered -- but rather just prima facie), but also the very concept that erudition and intellectualism are concepts that are not only worthwhile but valuable assets in debating policy differences and marshaling forcible arguments.
The NRO article that Anderson linked was 2207 words long and just as I described it.
It's the slow morphing of the Republican party into the old Democratic party.
And it's what happens when the political sphere transits philosophical and intellectual spheres, casting its dark shadow on the surfaces of those fragile worlds.
Contra Cornellian: Ann Coulter is not in the line of descent from WFB. The latter chain is epitomized by Charles Krauthammer, and following him a good helping of under-30 university journalists. I hope.
Coulter is in the line of Westbrook Pegler, descending through the Joe McCarthy fan-club (the people who gave anti-communism a bad name.) She will have her followers, too. There's good money in it.
When he was under 40, how many of "an erudite, well-spoken, personable, and bold conservative thinker and writer" were there? I think he was unique.
FWIW, I thoroughly enjoyed his book, Miles Gone By which I got on Audible.com, and was read by himself. It was illuminating to hear the humor in his voice that I sometimes missed in his writing. It changed the way I read him, that is for sure.
If you knew anything about conservativism, you'd realize that there IS no distinction between the "common man" and "wisdom. There is an extreme distaste in conservativism for detached intellectialusm. Detached intellectualism is the same thing as the God of Reason that gave us the horrors of the French Revolution, Communism &Socialism. But that doesn't mean that conservatives don't appreciate or admire wit or intelligence. They only dislike the notion that intelligence should be separated from the values and traditions of Western civilization. Buckley was right in saying that he'd rather be ruled by the first 200 people in the phone book than the professors at Yale, because intellectual power detached from culture and morality is worthless, and in fact, is a prescription for Evil.
In any event, what makes you think that there's a "tendency" at all that conservativism champions stupidity? Perhaps you don't understand the point about detached intellectualism, but there are plenty of Right-leaning think tanks that are busy pushing new ideas all the time. That you're unaware of them perhaps means that YOU are the ignoramus.
I wonder if the unexpected death of his wife several months back contributed to WFB's death. The loss of hope and meaning that sometimes follows a spouse's death can have such an effect.
Ummmm ...
[National Review] proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying blacks should be denied the vote. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should not be allowed to vote.
(From the NYT obit.) "Common man," indeed.
What, no irony?
Ummmm...
If you think I'm going to believe the NYT, you're fooling yourself. I have no idea if that summary was from an article that was satirical or whatever. Note the lack of any quoted reference.
He DID work for the CIA, after all.
I suspect that, like many men who survive their spouses, he found that only have of him remained.
Rest in peace.
apologies.
- Anderson
Yes, the morons of this earth are not the common man. The common man has a basic education, and works for a living. This excludes those who don't work (non-workers tend to occupy both ends of the economic spectrum). You should see the appeal to both capitalists and Trotskyites here...
Personally, I do not believe the government should look after the lazy or stupid, but rather should serve only for the common needs (not the broader term 'good'), and as a safety net for the workers. Similarly, I fear a government run by elitist snobs (which I admit would include a gov't of my own clones!), since, as explained in my favorite quote from CS Lewis:
The world is a slightly less intelligent, less witty, less smiling place than it was yesterday.
I hope that Bill and Pat are holding hands and that he is telling her a joke.
RIP
I'm not sure about that. I've always thought that Coulter was trying to emulate WFB in some of her rants. Buckley wasn't always the calm erudite speaker that as he is parodied as. He's the guy who answered the letters to the editor part of NR with witty, ill tempered, and often crude comebacks. He's also the guy who called Gore Vidal a God Damn Faggot on national TV while covering the 1986 Republican convention.
Where Coulter gets it wrong is not realizing the outrageous comeback works better when it's framed by the classic New England layered argumentation. Several strata of logic punctuated by the very occasional outrageous works: Outrageousness from a knockout blonde is a good try, but rarely works.
Well, Coulter is scarcely in a position to try it, but perhaps a knockout blonde could do so.
WFB had been growing rather morbid for some time now. I recall him telling an interviewer in 2004 that this was the last presidential cycle he would witness. Not even said as a prediction, but rather as a simple statement of fact. He would drop similar lines into his columns every now and again. He reminded me of my dad in this--and only in this--respect: A devout Irish Catholic who knew for some time that his body was failing, but whose strong faith reconciled him to his own death.
I don't agree with the statement that Fundamentalists have taken over the conservative movement and led it into an intellectual desert. But such a statement *does* hit upon a significant insight. Buckley's Catholicism was a significant force in shaping his thinking; it gave him a very old and rich intellectual/artistic tradition from which to draw. He had moorings, to use one of his favorite metaphores.
Perhaps part of what people perceive to be missing in today's conservatism is a result of the simple fact that those of us who were born in the '60s or later know only the post-Vat II Church. We are culturally *extremely* cut-off from what George Will has called the "stained-glass mind" of, in this case, the pre-Concillar Church. I'm not a critic of Vat II when it comes to theology. But I think we--the first Vat II generation of American Catholics-- are intellectually indistinguishable from much of Protestant America.
So, perhaps there cannot be another Buckley.
So, gee, stop maligning the guy for things he didn't say.
AntonK, re the Huffington Post, did you read some of the comments on this blog re the death of Tom Lantos? Bad taste has no political boundaries.
It wasn't in 1986, and not that it makes it okay, but it was after Vidal called him a crypo-fascists or a Nazi or something of the like.
They have all shifted to libertarian intellectuals.
Long time passing
Where have all the conservative intellectuals gone?
Long time ago . . .
I'm still waiting for some examples...
Bueller...
Alvin Plantinga
Robert P. George
Joseph Ratzinger
Francis Beckwith
Peter Kreeft
I might even include Alasdair MacIntyre as some form of conservative. Mind you, I believe that all of these men (possibly with the exception of Plantinga) are Catholics...which might explain something about their relationship with Buckley.
MacIntyre is a communitarian, and has never quite given up on his youthful Marxism. So I have given up trying to figure out how he might vote. (To be honest, I don't even know his citizenship.)
But you're right in that he has a great appeal to the sort of people I was hinting at in my long-ish post above; that is, those of us who lean conservative, but come from the Catholic intellectual tradition. Who thus can't call ourselves economic libertarians, and who have some theoretical and pragmatic reservations about the sufficeincy of Liberalism.
I keep "After Virtue" on display in my office, and when students ask, I lend them a copy. (My colleagues never want to borrow it, and I think they fear some sort of contaigion.)
I find it hard to disagree with his conclusion that intellectual rationalism is merely emotivism--at seveal degrees of remove. Also that post-modern intellectual skepticism has made it impossible for rationalists to find solid epistemological grounding. He is probably right, too, in thinking that the only moral reasoning that has not been dissolved in the PoMo solvent is a form of Thomistic Catholicism, in part because it provides a means of interpreting "texts" that has not been "problematized" by Po Mo. (At least not *yet*.) One finds this in Ratzinger, too, of course. So I don't mean to imply that MacIntyre is a lone Voice in the Wilderness.
His approach to philosophizing is also very congenial to those of us who lean conservative. He is very easy to understand, and for reasons that conservatives appreciate: He always grounds his thinking in concrete life experience. His writing teaches through narrative, and forces one to think about the way his ideas would affect real lives of real people who are struggling to do the right thing.
He makes me wish that I were not a *lapsed* Catholic.
I find it hard to describe a doctrine that simultaneously believes in the mutually contradictory concepts of predestination and free will/moral responsibility as "rationalist." Interesting thoughts on MacIntyre, however. I actually think he's a kind of Nietzschean rather than a Marxist, in that he seems to believe in philosophy by conquest/absorption rather than persuasion (see Three Rival Versions). His linguistic dissolution in After Virtue of the concept of natural rights, which he holds is one with ghosts and fairies (one might add God), is of a piece with the Genealogy of Morality.
Oh, I don't know. Let's try a few on for size, shall we?
Invading countries under false premises
Violating law by torturing people
Violating civil rights and then granting immunity to those who do
Opposing civil rights for blacks
Opposing civil rights for gays
Spending our country into debt
Isolating ourselves from our allies as well as our enemies
Name calling of our allies
Passing laws to prevent Mr. Shaivo from pulling the plug on his wife
I could go on, but at what point does tendencies become a trend?
Okay, so I'm talking a cheap shot. But when people like Michal B. claim that the left has become filled with ideological fundatmentalists, what else is there to do?
If you can provide any support for this notion, please supply it.