Two years after his death, William F. Buckley’s message lives on
Rich Trzupek at Big Journalism wrote an interesting piece about William F. Buckley, who died two years ago.
As Trzupek notes in his piece, Buckley spawned and inspired a new generation of conservative and libertarian thought.
As a teenager growing up in South Philadelphia, I read Buckley’s books and his magazine, National Review, and watched his TV show Firing Line, all of which served as a good counter-balance to the overwhelming liberal view I was exposed to in school, on TV, and in newspapers and other magazines.
Buckley also wrote a good series of spy thrillers, which featured the CIA and the American military as the good guys. In the series, Buckley infused Cold War history and politics and employed historical figures as his heroes and villains.
I was pleased that I was able to review his last thriller, Last Call for Blackford Oakes, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. I hope that Buckley read my favorable review.
I also reviewed Buckley’s last book, The Reagan I Knew, for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
I learned a good bit from Buckley and today’s political pundits – on the left as well as the right – can still learn from William F. Buckley.
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I just started reading “Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription”. I really miss the guy. In addition to agreeing with much of his content, I enjoy his style much more than that which dominates political conversations.
In the annals of political slogans and manifestos, there has rarely been one as inane and meaningless as Buckley’s call to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.” As if anyone could do that. And if they could, it would mean Death. Less insubstantial (unfortunately), but infinitely more deplorable, was his defense of bigotry and white supremacy. While he may not himself have been a bigot, he tried to give bigotry a gloss of intellectuality. He said “the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically. . . .because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” This is shameful. He urged the creation of a federal law that would deviously allow Southern businesses to discriminate against blacks. This is shameful. He would not consider the conservative commentator David Brooks for editorship of the National Review because one of the “intellectual” legs of Buckley’s conservatism was Christian piety and Brooks is Jewish. This is shameful. He wrote a book sympathetic to the witch-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy. This is shameful. He might have been hard on communism, but he was definitely soft on fascism, calling Spain’s General Franco, for instance, “an authentic national hero.” This is shameful. He even excoriated libertarians, who normally would be his intellectual comrades, if they happened to be atheists. He should have been ashamed of himself, but apparently he was not.