Bill Buckley’s Monster

When he died late last month, William F. Buckley Jr. had lived long enough to see — if not to admit — that the movement he is credited with creating, post-WWII American conservatism, had become a monster.
In 1955, when Buckley used his father’s money to create the National Review, he

claimed to be addressing “disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order” through a magazine that “stands athwart history yelling Stop.”
Any thinking person might imagine that the concept of calling history to a halt should have been D.O.A.. After all, American conservatism had been utterly discredited by the Great Depression and World War II, the disastrous results of laissez-faire capitalism and a schizoid, neocolonial-isolationist foreign policy. Unmitigated capitalism, colonialism, racism, segregationism, sexism: If the Atlantic Charter, the Four Freedoms and other statements of Allied intent meant anything, then these old “isms” and many more had to be challenged. The centuries-long hegemony of wealthy white males was in retreat from Little Rock to Dien Bien Phu.
Young Buckley wasn’t intimidated by the fact that conservatism’s essential ideas were buried or brain-dead. In this sense, his reinvention of conservatism was similar to Victor Frankenstein’s ambition: to assemble a better entity by raising assorted bits from the grave.
His first book, “God and Man at Yale” (1951), protested against the allegedly “liberal” faculty’s attempt to undermine students’ self-flattering theological certainties. The book’s essential subtext is that Yale is where God prefers to recruit Skull and Bones men and teach them how to rule the lesser peoples of His world.
Encouraged by this book’s reception, Buckley embarked on a career as a sort of Tory Oscar Wilde, wittily attacking anything that challenged the “organic moral order” he saw reflected in his mirror.

With the founding of the Review, he recreated conservatism as an alleged system of thought, mostly by stitching together ideas already decomposed to the point of blatant rot. The litany of putrid causes he championed is a roll call of crimes against democracy and humanity: A staunch supporter of McCarthyism, he followed through with decades of polarizing exaggeration of “the communist threat.” He stood foursquare for a segregated South, never backing down from his assertion that whites were and are “the advanced race.” He defended an ever-escalating nuclear arms race, the Vietnam War, the CIA overthrow of democratically elected regimes around the world, social and legislative restriction of women’s rights and roles, FBI and CIA spying on Americans at home, Nixonian dirty tricks, and corporations’ right to poison people and the environment.
The difference between Buckley and successors such as Rush Limbaugh was mostly a matter of manners. Charming and funny in ways Rush will never be, Buckley upheld the same vicious values in a loftier tone, and so imagined himself speaking to better purpose. Yet he is as responsible as Karl Rove for the triumph of a conservatism that decries “big government” but, when in power, bloats bureaucracy out of all recognition, eliminating services to citizens while bankrupting their future to feed defense contractors. Through the decades from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Dubya, Buckley rolled out the red carpet for a conservatism that reimagines the Constitution to support a “Christian nation,” a “unitary executive,” detention without trial, “presidential signings,” regime change and other travesties.
If there was ever any substantive distinction between Buckley and the monster his movement has become, it was his ability, on rare occasions, to say, “I was wrong.” Of course, he only apologized to himself. For example, when George W. Bush’s disasters became so odious that even Buckley’s Dartmouth cohort, Jeffrey Hart, backed away from the rising stink, Buckley, too, tried to distinguish between what he had wrought and Dubya’s fiscal, military and constitutional carnage. The distinction he drew — “Bush is conservative, but he is not a conservative” — was faint, to most observers, but apparently auto-exonerating. And last year, after smoking killed his wife and crippled him, Buckley forswore the decades of pro-tobacco claptrap he’d written while millions of other people sickened and died, declaring that he would support a ban on smoking.
“A conservative,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.” Buckley only stumbled forward when reality shoved him from behind. Otherwise, insulated by his wealth, connections and self-affirming solipsisms, he lived the life of a public intellectual without ever troubling himself to do an intellectual’s essential chores. These are the same mental and spiritual labors to which his “liberal” Yale instructors were urging him, more than 50 years ago: to wonder why things are the way they are; to question his own assumptions; to think.

Victor Frankenstein made the same mistake. He, too, knew better than his lower-caste professors and their “liberal” science. He, too, brought forth a being of unexpected strength and absolute amorality. In each case, the monster’s destructiveness revealed the brutal essence of its maker’s elegant argument. We can only hope that, like Frankenstein’s monster, William F. Buckley’s reanimated conservatism will toss itself on its maker’s pyre.

— — HistoryBuff