William F. Buckley Jr Dies
Feb 27th, 2008 by Mark
William F. Buckley teaching at the New School — NYT
This is sad. William F. Buckley Jr. dies.
Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, “National Review.”
Another giant of the conservative movement is gone.
Who will replace him
Is there anyone left to take his place? I am not so sure.
The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation (with honors) from the university.
Many, like Rush Limbaugh have sat on the sidelines and done nothing other than talk and become wealthy while the movement languishes. It has led to a weakness in the media, that may be too late to fix.
To Mr. Buckley’s enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, termed him “the scourge of liberalism.”
The current crop of “intellectuals” is … well weak in my opinion.
Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
The NYT still confuses Conservatives with the Bushes.
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Tags: william f buckley, conservative, yale, new york times, new school