By E. J. Dionne Jr.
It is time that I confess to an illicit love. I am now, and have been almost all my life, an admirer of William F. Buckley Jr.
| I've liked Buckley for years, too, ever since I discovered National Review, back in the Paleolithic. |
The skeptical conservative might say it's easy for a liberal to like this elitist Yale grad who uses big words, hangs with the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and has led a rather glamorous life. I'll admit to admiring Buckley's love of life, to enjoying his novels and to sharing his respect for Galbraith. But I'm not a fan of big words, Yale grads, glamour or elitism.
| I guess its my inate conservatism that makes me enjoy genuine erudition, well-reasoned argument, and occasional rapier wit. Liberals don't seem to do well with any of them. |
And it's not easy for any liberal to agree with Buckley's support long ago for Joe McCarthy. (His novel about McCarthy was better).
| I happen to harbor strong feelings of apathy about McCarthy, myself. Since I was a mere tad at the time he was posturing and fulminating, I missed the show. As I've grown older, many of the accusations he made while rolling his eyes and foaming at the mouth and browbeating innocent Hollywood innalecks seem to have turned out to be true. So the messenger may have been scuzzy, but the message seems to have been accurate. Which do you go for? Truth? Or palatability? |
It's hard to credit his views in the civil rights era or to identify with his many knocks on that courageous liberal Republican, former senator Lowell Weicker.
| Actually, I don't recall Buckley's views in the civil rights era. I have an old copy of The Jeweller's Eye on my bookshelf, written in the late 60s, so I suppose I can look them up. Somehow I can't see him in a sheet, cavorting with people named Festus and Puling, but I can certainly picture him looking askance as the opportunists took a good idea and turned it into careers. And Weicker's long forgotten by most of us; Buckley's not. What's that tell you? |
Still, I will always respect this columnist, editor, novelist, lecturer and organizer because he undertook a mission and carried it out with real genius. He knew conservatism needed a serious intellectual life if conservative ideas were to be considered by those outside the right's faithful remnant. That's why he founded National Review magazine, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
| That was back in the days when liberals were chock full of ideas and Republicans hung around the country club. Problem was, the ideas the liberals were chock full of had all been developed in the Roosevelt era, though the Pubs were worse, being stuck in 1928... |
He knew cranks were bad for the movement. He knew that deep splits among conservatives -- between internationalists and isolationists, libertarians and traditionalists -- had to be resolved.
| Not necessarily resolved. It's arguing the points that makes for new syntheses. If the conservative end of the political spectrum ever reaches total agreement we're in large trouble... |
Buckley felt no compunction about challenging liberal elites on their own ground. He fired plenty of shots at liberal dominance of academe, beginning with his first book, "God and Man at Yale." In the process, he pioneered the most effective form of conservative jujitsu: a movement devoted to the interests of the wealthy and powerful casting itself as a collection of populists challenging liberal snobbery.
| I'd take issue with the idea that conservatism is devoted to the interests of the wealthy and powerful. In fact, I'd go so far as to call it a fallacy. It's the reason libs are now moribund. Anyone — immigrants, factory workers, coal miners, bums on the street — has the opportunity to make a decent life for him/her/itself, given a stable society and working laws. You don't need to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and you sure as hell don't need block coordinators enforcing "unity in the community." |
Buckley was determined to rid the right of the wing nuts. He was, to his everlasting credit, the scourge of an anti-Semitism that once had a hold on significant parts of the right. He also blasted the strange conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society.
| The conspiracy theorists then went on to become Democrats... |
But most important were Buckley's efforts during the 1950s to resolve conservatism's contradictions. These exertions made it possible for Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan to turn the remnant into a mighty political force. Buckley dumped isolationism, not so hard since many former isolationists were happy with an aggressive American foreign policy as long as the enemy was Soviet communism.
| Soviet communism... Soviet communism?... Oh, yes. I remember it now. It was a political movement that lasted until about 20 years ago. It enforced a totalitarian form of government on much of Eastern Europe and it was intent on world domination. Certainly no reason to have an aggressive foreign policy... |
More difficult was resolving the contradiction between anti-government libertarians -- their primary love was individual freedom -- and the traditionalists who believed in government's role as a promoter of virtue and community. One of National Review's primary tasks was dealing with this doctrinal conundrum. Frank Meyer, Buckley's friend and magazine colleague, came up with what is known as "fusionism." It was an attempt to fuse the two forms of conservatism into one. Libertarians needed to learn that the freedom they revered was insecure absent the cultivation of personal virtue and a moral order hospitable to liberty. Traditionalists were not to confuse the legitimate authority of tradition with the illegitimate power of big government. The United States was fundamentally a conservative society, the theory went, so our country was a place in which liberty was conducive to a reverence for tradition.
| Being conservative involves not giving up elements of society that are valuable for the sake of mere change. Since the country was founded on the concept of personal liberty, it should be the absolute last thing we're willing to give up. Libertarianism (with a small "L") is an overlay, a separate stream of thought, that mostly comes under the intellectual umbrella of Republicanism. The small-L libertarian is smart enough to realize that the ultimate, illogical extension of libertarianism is anarchy. Unlike anarchists, they don't consider that a good thing. So individual liberty continues to involve tradeoffs — your right to swing your fist, my right not to be punched in the mush. Trading off those rights in the authoritarian nanny state direction gives us a hyperconcern about offending the easily offended: Moose limbs, but also whatever racial or ethnic group's looking to make a little money this month. Going the other direction gives you Somalia, or at least Seattle during a demonstration. |
Fusionism, brilliant though it was, never fully cohered. Contemporary conservatism always threatens to fly apart, as it seems to be doing now.
| Contemporary conservatism spends a lot of time discussing, occasionally arguing. With a strong libertarian undercurrent, we're not real big on uniformity of thought. |
Conservatism's goals are a combustible mix: an expansive and expensive foreign policy, low taxes, support for government intervention in the personal sphere (to promote a conservative vision of virtue) but not in the economic sphere. For some of us, the mix makes little sense.
| To others of us, it's eminently sensible. An expansive and expensive foreign policy? How about "to provide for the common defense"? Teddy Roosevelt could understand it, why can't today's libs? Low taxes? It's our money. We'll contribute to running the nation — there are legitimate areas where government should provide — but we don't like shoveling money down ratholes without seeing results. Support for government intervention in the personal sphere? To liberals, that mostly means abortion, since everything else seems to be fair game for intervention: guns, curriculum content, business regulation, what's advertised, what we eat and drink, how many miles per gallon our cars get, and a thousand other things. I'd like to see the libertarian wing of the Republican party swing a little more weight in this respect, but I'll take the conservative approach over the liberal approach any time. |
But if liberals are to exercise power again, they need to come to terms with Buckley's genius in understanding how ideas interact with the day-to-day needs of politics.
| If libs are to exercise power again they need to start arguing and disagreeing, instead of giving each other group hugs and back rubs. |
Buckley was more intellectual than most practical politicians, and more practical than most intellectuals.
| As well as being smarter than most liberals. Don't forget that part. |
Last week, in the middle of the conservative meltdown over President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, a White House event in honor of Buckley's coming 80th birthday and his magazine's anniversary created a brief moment of civility between Bush and the harshest critics of the Miers pick. That every kind of conservative showed up for Buckley was a momentary triumph of fusionism.
| Not momentary at all. It's a feature, not a bug. |
My main criticism of Buckley is that he was far too effective on behalf of a movement that I think should be driven from power. And if you read that as a compliment, you're right.
| My main criticism of Buckley is that he never sent me bus fare to come and meet him. There aren't many people I can think of with whom I'd rather spend an afternoon. |
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