I had always felt politically out of step with many of my contemporaries. I came of age in the late 1960s, but instead of going to college I headed for a recruiting office. After a tour in Vietnam I ended up in Boulder, Colo. — a 21-year-old freshman on a campus dominated by radicals.
Soon enough I was pounding out stories for the campus paper in a cluttered newsroom that had walls covered with leftist posters, all done in slashing, dramatic colors. I recall the editor earnestly explaining to me one day why he believed a revolution, violent if necessary, was precisely what this country needed.
I liked the guy, whose name was Kirk. He had always been fair to my copy. But I thought Kirk, you’re freakin’ nuts.
The other staffers called me the “token fascist,” but I didn’t really know where I was politically. All I knew was that I wasn’t for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, which was the great polarizing issue of the time. And while my position on that question implied a great deal about my temperament and outlook, I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.
I knew of Buckley, of course. But my interest in his work would come much later. My main portal to the ideas of the right was through The Way the World Works, Jude Wanniski’s famous explication of supply-side economics, published in the late 1970s. And instead of subscribing to Buckley’s National Review, I favored the more outrageous American Spectator.
Even then, Buckley seemed a remote and austere figure. But when I ran across American Conservative Thought in a used book store, I thought, why not? And as I worked through it my impression changed.
His notion of what constituted American conservative thought was broader than I had expected. I found his thought engaging and free of dogma, even on the subject of religion.
“Can you be a conservative and believe in God?” he wrote. “Obviously. Can you be a conservative and not believe in God? This is an empirical essay, and so the answer is, as obviously, yes. Can you be a conservative and despise God and feel contempt for those who believe in Him? I would say no.”
Buckley even confessed that at times he wondered whether he was a true conservative. He felt qualified spiritually and philosophically, but not temperamentally — which isn’t surprising given the breakneck life he led.
He described how National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955, came to exclude from conservatism both the extreme anti-statism of Ayn Rand and similarly disposed libertarians, and the extreme anti-communism of the John Birch Society. These exclusions proved critical in making conservative ideas respectable.
The Randians, Buckley wrote, were guilty of a “hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding dogmatism” — a habit of mind incompatible with the conservative’s resistance to closed systems “whose every star and planet is given in a master book of coordinates …”
As for the Birchers, their error was to infer subjective motives from objective outcomes. Thus, as Buckley wrote, “if the West loses as much ground as demonstrably it has lost during the past twenty years to the enemy (this was written during the Cold War), it can only be because those who made policy for the West were the enemy’s agents.” Reasoning in this way led the Birchers to their absurd conclusion that President Eisenhower was a communist.
Other than these and a few other exceptions, Buckley said the “freeway” of conservatism remained “large enough to accommodate a wide variety of players.” In that vein, he embraced the neo-conservatives — many of whom were former liberals and leftists — who brought to conservatism a greater interest and expertise in the social sciences.
It’s no exaggeration to say the country would be much different had Buckley, the father of modern conservatism, never existed. Buckley provided a platform for ideas that otherwise would have found little circulation, and the movement he nurtured branched out to encompass a solid popular and institutional base. His welcoming spirit will be missed.
Join the discussion
Share your observations and experiences about news. Lively, open debate is the goal, but please refrain from personal attacks or comments that are racist, vulgar or otherwise inappropriate. If you see an inappropriate comment, please click the "Report as violation" link to notify a KansasCity.com editor. Thanks for your feedback.