Buckley: The movement he left behind

It’s almost impossible to exaggerate William F. Buckley Jr.’s impact on America’s political life, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Barely 50 years ago, American conservatism was a fringe movement, splintered among libertarians, nativists, and other marginal elements. But championing what he called “a thoughtful conservatism,” Buckley, who died last week at 82, changed all that. (See Obituaries, Page 38.) With the magazine he founded, National Review, he fused inchoate strands of anti-communism, free-market economics, and other traditional tenets into a forceful alternative to the era’s “dominant but hidebound” liberalism. By essentially purging conservatism of “John Birchers, Jew-haters, Lindberg isolationists,” and other crackpots, he forged a movement that spawned the election of Ronald Reagan and the mainstreaming of conservative ideas. Lest there be any doubt that Buckley’s legacy lives on, said Mark Steyn in National Review Online, consider this one statistic: More Americans today identify themselves as “conservatives” than as “liberals.” That very notion would have struck the elites of mid-20th- century America as completely “preposterous.”

Yet Buckley’s ideology bears “little resemblance to the modern day, Bush-era ‘conservative’ movement,” said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. In fact, in recent years, “he began to make his opposition to it more explicit.” Most dramatically, Buckley opposed the war in Iraq, which he saw as a reflection of what he termed a “neoconservative hubris” that assumes the U.S. can remake the world in its own image. He also was mortified by the huge increase in federal spending during the Bush years, and his libertarian streak clashed with the administration’s aggressive use of wiretapping and other tactics in the “war on terror,” which Buckley considered a vague and overblown concept. Of course, none of this is preventing today’s conservatives from using Buckley as “a symbolic prop.”

The post-Buckley era in conservatism has been going on for some time, said Jacob Heilbrunn in the Los Angeles Times. But his passing drives home just how far it has strayed from Buckley’s style of civil discourse and thoughtful argument. These days, it’s the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh who set the tone for a movement that considers itself “at war” with liberalism. “But they are bargain-basement Buckleys,” spewing “personal venom” where Buckley employed wit and reason. Conservatism these days seems “marooned,” as the various factions that Buckley helped unite desperately try to hold on to power. “Perhaps his memory can serve as a beacon for the movement he once guided to return to the solid shores of his—dare one say it?—liberal conception of conservatism.”

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