skippy the bush kangaroo: rip william f. buckley, jr.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

rip william f. buckley, jr.

the last true conservative has passed at the age of 82. nytimes:

mr. buckley suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son christopher said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. he was found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. “he might have been working on a column,” mr. buckley said.

william buckley, with his winningly capricious personality, his use of ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare to an anteater’s, was the popular host of one of television’s longest-running programs, “firing line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine “national review.”

he also found time to write more than 50 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to dissertations on harpsichord fingering to celebrations of his own dashing daily life. he edited at least five more.

we detested mr. buckley's politics but we admired his committment to stay true to his ideals over his need to win an argument, a trait which usually helped him win arguments.

rick perlstein, unabashed liberal, waxes:

why did i love wfb? because he never would have asked such a silly question. the game of politics is to win over american institutions to our way of seeing things using whatever coalition, necessarily temporary, that we can muster to win our majority, however contingent—and if we lose, and we are again in the minority, live to fight another day, even ruthlessly, while respecting our adversaries' legitimacy to govern in the meantime, while never pulling back in offering our strong opinions about their failures, in the meantime. this was buckleyism—even more so than any particular doctrines about "conservatism."

jesse at groupnewsblog said:

i didn't agree with william f. buckley's politics, but i admired his spirit. he was a genuine conservative, a person unafraid to disagree with you politically, without needing to attack you personally, threaten your family, or resort to name-calling or insults.

we concur. buckley constantly reverted to using ideas over invective, logic over lambast, and over reason over ridicule. we wish his gentlemanliness had rubbed off on his heir apparents.

addendum: others point out buckley's on-the-record racism. but like senator byrd, he rounced his youthful embracing of hatred in his later years. national post:

yet buckley did in fact change and renounce racism by the mid-1960s, in part because of his horror at the terrorist tactics used by white supremacists to fight the civil rights movement; and in part because of the moral witness of friends such as garry wills, who confronted buckley with the amorality of his politics...

there are a host of other issues on which buckley moderated his politics. in the 1980s, he said that if he were a black south african he would probably support the african national congress, a statement that shocked fellow conservatives. this independence of mind continued to the end of his life. not too long ago, he admitted that the iraq war was a ghastly mistake, again annoying his intellectual fellow travellers. he was learning until his last days.

Labels: conservatives, passings

posted by skippy at 8:30 PM |

4 Comments:

Well done, skippy. There have been numerous instances of gloating and malice over Buckley's death in the so called progressive blogosphere today. Very distasteful...somehow I assumed (incorrectly) we still had some class.

Your post is respectful. Thank you.

commented by

The Culture Ghost, 10:23 PM PST

i grew up watching buckley. he had no intellectual equal, and that's one reason his brand of conservatism didn't need the strawmen, logical fallacies and false dichotomies so loved by goldberg, et. al, today.

he came from a time (as do i) when you could hate a man's politics and still respect the man.

commented by

skippy, 11:00 PM PST

This is the guy who once stated that all those diagnosed with AIDS should be branded or tattooed on their asses so homosexual men would know what they were dealing with.

He was somewhat better than the frothing at the mouth loons, but an eloquent, loquacious prick is still a prick.

commented by

sean on li, 8:09 AM PST

Thank you sean on li. I've been busy pointing out Buckley’s hatred of AIDS sufferers, Nelson Mandela, and assorted democratically elected governments the CIA saw fit to overthrow in numerous blogs and am just too damned tired to go to bat yet again. Please read and think about sean on li's last sentence.
Oh, and Culture Ghost - Buckley lived in the public eye and was a leader in the political movement that led directly to Iraq, Gitmo and waterboarding. Sorry if some of us don't want to look the other way while this malicious sonuvabitch is praised, but thems the breaks.
Bob

commented by

Anonymous, 4:25 PM PST

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