William F. Buckley
I suppose it says something about my own strange politics that both Buckley and Gore Vidal are men who have had a tremendous influence on my own political thinking.
I was lucky enough to see Buckley in Vancouver thirty or so years ago. I was a Firing Line fan and constantly impressed at Buckley’s willingness to take on what even then seemed like the basic sophistries of the Left. At the same time he was, for all his erudition and the sheer grace of his style, unsympathetic to my own sense of how American, World and personal politics worked. While I could delight in his crushing of the Birchers I was much less able to stomach his largely unreconstructed view of Blacks. I admired his fierce and principled anti-Communism but it often seemed to me that his vision of America had a similarly totalitarian implication.
In the famous Buckley/Vidal exchange Buckley calls Vidal a queer and Vidal calls Buckley a crypto-Nazi (perhaps that’s where Kinsella got the term). Both, in a sense, were right. While Vidal to this day does not accept the term homosexual, much less queer, his own autobiography and life make his essential sexual preference quite clear. Buckley was most assuredly not a Nazi; but his strong sense of social order, his long term rejection of racial equality and his willingness to tolerate a national security state suggested Buckley might well harbour secret longings for “the strong man with the right ideas”.
Buckley was, I think, far too sophisticated and far too urbane to be that strong man. Instead he managed to create a conservative movement in the United States which intelligent people could accept. It is certainly true that until Buckley the notion of conservatism in American politics was subsumed under the “know nothing”, expressly racist, boosterish Babbitry which, a generation before, H.L. Mencken so marvelously lampooned. Buckley made room for an intelligent conservatism and, in time, caught up with the idea that racial equality did not threaten such an enterprise.
Conservatives are sometimes accused of wanting a better yesterday tomorrow and, I suspect, Buckley might well fall into that category. At the same time, Buckley was clear eyed about the fact the world had indeed moved on. His writing was in the moment and he rarely waxed elegiac.
In most of the Buckley I have read I have been struck at how unwilling he is to ascribe bad motives to the political and cultural actors he so effectively lambastes. Ignorance, certainly; but rarely malice or greed. In this, and many other senses, Buckley was both a romantic and an idealist. His media appointed nemesis, Gore Vidal, is exactly the opposite. For him realism demanded that he recognize that venality and corruption are simply “The American Way”.
Both men loved their country; but Buckley saw her as a naive young girl unused to the ways of the world and in need of a guiding, sometimes firm, hand. Vidal saw her as fallen, sometimes a slut, sometimes a whore, always in need of the strictest reformation. Oddly, the libertine Vidal turned out to be the political Puritan while Buckley eschewed political Calvinism and saw his nation as, I think, he saw all the many people he knew - as sinners like himself whose only hope was grace and redemption.
I trust he will find his own grace and redemption even as we miss him.
Written by jay on February 28th, 2008 with
6 comments.
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john begley
jay
#1. February 29th, 2008, at 6:03 AM.
Buckley claimed he went to finishing school with God so most of what he says has “celectial reasoning” attached to it…I don’t know if Buckley was just an eastern establishment fop spewing middle class reasoning to placate some guilt over his birth right or whether he was truly inspired and deeply concerned with the plight of middle America…in any event, I will always remember him as being the first pundit to observe the mutation of the American left into statist corporatism.