The End of an Era

William F. Buckley, the majestic patriarch of modern American conservatism, died yesterday at the genteel old age of 82. He was one of the last truly charismatic public intellectuals—and in this sense his passing should be lamented by anyone nostalgic for those days when ideas and the “life-of-the-mind” still mattered. Buckley was certainly an artifact of this dwindling era: He famously lost his temper on national television and blustered, in his droll blue-blood Connecticut brogue, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

The target of his wrath was, on this occasion and for many years to come, Gore Vidal, an equally dazzling writer and social critic. Watching their strangely genteel 1968 scuffle on YouTube, we are reminded of the sorry spectacle that intellectual life has become today, polluted by such loutish mediocrities as Christopher Hitchens and Ann Coulter. Unlike the latter, Buckley had a unique talent for making even bigotry seem courteous.

Although English was his third language—he picked up French and Spanish early in his continent-hopping cosmopolitan childhood—he was renowned for his erudite, highly refined, and idiosyncratic prose, often ridiculed by detractors as “sesquipedalian.” The son of an oil-baron millionaire, he attended posh private schools in Paris, London, and New York, and graduated from Yale a talented and ambitious young writer.

His vaulting academic pedigree notwithstanding, he popularized among conservatives a polished and somehow posturing anti-intellectualism, caricaturizing his leftist opponents as effete and overly-cerebral nincompoops, and succeeding at it. He famously declared that he would “rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

But while Buckley’s anti-elitism was charming because of its element of ironic self-awareness, today’s conservatives, admittedly attempting to follow his lead, have lapsed either into a reflexive philistinism or George Will’s poseurish pomposity. Buckley only could maintain this balance because he understood that one must first have the benefit of intelligence before maligning the intelligent. As for elitism, he was an aristocrat par excellence, fond of Bach and sailing, and is rumored to have taken his yacht outside of U.S. waters so that he could smoke pot while preserving a proper conservative’s deference to the law.

As the founder of the National Review, Buckley lent an intellectual conscience and a new energy to a conservative movement that had long been wallowing in dour irrelevance. His greatest achievement was to serve as the demiurgic force behind the emerging conservative coalition of the 1960s and 70s, unifying Goldwater libertarianism with ardent anti-communism and the remnants of the conservative old guard. The crowning achievement of his project, of course, was the messianic rise and eventual election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.

There is no doubt that Buckley deserves much of the credit for the right-wing ascendancy of the past thirty years. Yet in spite of being a seminal presence in modern American history, he launched his career with a much different conception of the National Review’s purpose: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” That Buckley was dead wrong on pretty much every major historical issue of his time—McCarthyism, civil rights, Vietnam—seems to matter little to his swooning acolytes. The National Review has floundered some in recent years, but what holds it together is an almost cultish devotion to the personality of its founding father—whether or not this was Buckley’s intention at all. Such were his charms. Similarly, while conservatism erodes today as a practical governing philosophy, a shell of the monolith that Bill built, it is alive and well for its faithful, who were always drawn to it more as a cultural religion than an active political ideology.

Indeed, Buckley was in a sense mummified in his later years, retiring from the National Review in 2004, looming avuncular above the fray while the internecine policy battles raged, at that point primarily over Iraq. His movement, he seemed to understand with a certain melancholy resignation, had dissipated, had lost the exuberance and intellectual vitality of his storied youth. Increasingly feeble, he gave occasional speeches, delivered with his signature wit but devoid of his former rancor. In the end, it seemed, all the pater familias really wanted was a little peace for his family.

David L. Golding ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is an English and American literature and language concentrator in Dunster House.