All those UMass liberals who love to hate me for my deeply held right-wing views have one man to thank or blame. William F. Buckley is the reason why I am a political person, the reason why I am a conservative and undoubtedly the reason why I lead the UMass Republican Club. He was an intellectual dynamo: intelligent and witty on-camera and off. He was a conservative’s conservative and a liberal debater’s most terrifying intellectual nightmare. His views, and more importantly, his electrifying articulation of what it meant to be a conservative, transcended intellectual history and are chiefly to thank for ushering in the Reagan Revolution and the three terms in presidential office of two men named Bush.
His intelligence and conviction made it intellectually feasible and defensible to be a conservative at a time in American life when there purportedly wasn’t anything worth conserving. For so many on the right, he was an intellectual and ideological giant who could say what they were thinking, and in a way that they couldn’t quite say it. Over the course of many decades, his persuasive writing and compelling commentary unleashed a political and intellectual fury on the left, from which it has yet to fully recover.
He was indeed so many of these things and so much more to a legion of adoring fans, admiring readers, employees and coworkers at National Review, and politicians and intellectuals across the globe. To the intellectual detriment of friend and foe alike, William F. Buckley passed away at age 82 last Wednesday.
Buckley became prominent on the national political scene in his mid-twenties with the publication of “God and Man at Yale” in 1951. In the book Buckley, a devout Roman Catholic and Yale graduate, aggressively challenged the liberal secular education that Yale University imparted. The book threw liberal elite academia, and its burgeoning love affair with collectivism, into a frenzy – it was a perspicacious and intellectually overwhelming rejection of everything elite academia was becoming. The book propelled the young writer into political superstardom in many conservative circles.
Then there was his founding of the publication that did more to amalgamate the disparate forces of the right-wing than any other, The National Review. According to Buckley, in the face of prevailing political, cultural and social liberalism in the 1950s, “National Review would stand athwart history, yelling: stop!”
Buckley, who founded National Review in 1955 at age 29, said in the landmark magazine’s first issue: “NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation.”
With his famously inimitable wit, Buckley continued, “For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of PhDs in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.”
To all those who watched him rise to intellectual stardom in the 1950s and 1960s after many debates with paragons of the left such as Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky, Buckley’s social and political impact over the course of his accomplished adult life was not at all surprising. These observers knew early on that there was something remarkable about the man. His copious literary output (Yale University itself owns writings of his that weigh seven tons) spread across multiple genres. His brilliance was as apparent in print as it was on his television talk show “Firing Line” – the longest-running show in TV history with one host.
Despite his impressive intellectual accomplishments, Buckley’s greatest gift may have been his ability to befriend his ideological enemies, who were simultaneously confounded by his arguments and taken by his gentlemanly nature. Ever the gracious victor in debate and in his writings, Buckley denounced Bill O’Reilly of Fox News and other in-your-face conservatives as “bullies.”
Breaking from many in the Republican Party late in his life, Buckley opposed the Iraq War’s management from the start, and labeled the war’s objective “failed.” He was openly critical of the presidential administrations of George H.W. Bush and his son, and especially negative on the topic of the latter’s lack of oratory brilliance.
Despite this, President Bush remarked on Wednesday that “America has lost one of its finest writers and thinkers.” Presidential-hopeful John McCain, writing on the Web version of National Review said “Buckley was a man of tremendous vision and big ideas.”
When my Club hosted National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg last semester, I asked him what Buckley had meant to the conservative movement. He flatly answered that there would have been no modern conservative movement or Reagan Revolution if Buckley hadn’t so articulately expressed his ideas in the National Review.
To so many conservatives Buckley is, was, and always will be the greatest articulator of our beloved worldview. For all he did to awaken the intellect of so many young conservatives, and for so much else, Bill Buckley will be dearly missed. May he rest in peace.
Brad DeFlumeri is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
