Alas, WFB one More Time
My next to the last posting, which was an obituary on William F. Buckley, occasioned so many responses that I must disappoint those who thought I would never again say anything about my deceased subject. Contrary to the opinion of some critics, my obit was not intended to belittle someone who had betrayed the Old Right. Larry Auster got it right when he expressed surprise on View from the Right that despite my reputation as a “bitter paleo outsider,” I had written with obvious respect and even a tad of affection about a onetime nemesis. But since I had not known Buckley as intimately as Joe Sobran (nor had I suffered or benefited from his person as much as Joe), I could not express the same deep emotions in my comments on the deceased. I therefore stressed my impressions of Buckley, mostly as an outsider who had learned a great deal from reading him but whom he had harmed albeit less ruinously than other who have criticized him.
Since I take Buckley’s critics more seriously than those who have praised him dishonestly or on the basis of invincible ignorance, like the perpetually clueless Jay Nordlinger, I would like to caution his despisers against excess. Although WFB behaved badly during the second half of his career, he wrote many wonderful things during the first half. Now that he is gone, it may be helpful to note his considerable accomplishments as well as his darker side. The reason so many people I respect are so angry at Buckley is that he disappointed our expectations. Certainly none of us would be angry at Richard Lowry or John Pod for the same reason.
Equally important, we should not blame Buckley for developments he had ceased to control, long after he had contributed to their happening. My past commentaries have outlined his misdeeds, and particularly his role in injuring the career of his trusting friend M.E. Bradford, at the behest of his neoconservative dinner companions. Most of us have learned about other regrettable acts of his that hurt some of the onetime contributors to National Review. Moreover, no one who has read me, David Gordon, or Justin Raimondo would be ignorant of Buckley’s activities as a revisionist of the history of his own movement and career. His contributions to neoconservative fictions unfortunately live on in the national press.
But Buckley was by no means directly responsible for everything readers of this website would disapprove of either at National Review or in the conservative movement. From the 1990s onward, he was less and less directly involved with the magazine he had founded; and he may not have been directly complicit in the decision to cease soliciting contributions from me and other paleoconservatives whom the neoconservatives had come to distrust. That decision may well have come from John O’Sullivan during his time as editor, in order to secure his position with the neoconservatives, who were then funding National Review. John thereafter tacked right and joined his far gutsier fellow-Brit Peter Brimelow in a frontal assault on the immigration lobby. For this John was ousted from his editorial post, but he came back to assume a less controversial profile in the movement. On February 21, for example, John published in Jonah Goldberg’s NROnline a ringing endorsement of Obama for president. John and presumably his sponsors, who may be straining equally to reach out, believe that Obama’s election “would be the climax of the long policy of fully integrating blacks and minority Americans into the nation.”
Although Buckley contributed to a chain of events leading toward our current denatured Right, he was not its only cause. The degradation of the Right has resulted from political and cultural processes that are affecting Canada, Western Europe, and Australia as well as the US. This transformational process has featured a managerial regime linked to a multicultural ideology and transnational corporations, and it would be unfolding even if Bill Buckley had never lived. Although his career took a disappointing turn, it was not the major reason that the Western world is now in the grips of a post-Marxist leftist system. World historical forces would still be operating to our detriment even if (let us think counterfactually) Bill Buckley had made better decisions twenty-five years ago.
In closing I should cite something that John Derbyshire said to me several years ago about how Bill Buckley had viewed his role as a leader of the conservative movement. According to John, “in his own mind, Bill sees himself as protecting American conservatism against extremists. You may not view him that way, but that’s how he sees himself.” John was of course absolutely correct. Bill was a more serious thinker than the people he came to associate with; and no matter what “tergiversations” he allowed himself, he undoubtedly believed he had acted correctly by acting as he did. He was like that extraordinary litterateur Charles Maurras who had never ceased to justify his support for Marshall Petain’s government during World War Two. Maurras had argued even after his longtime disciple Charles deGaulle was liberating France from foreign occupation that continued collaboration with Nazi Germany would save his country from destruction. (Admittedly Maurras and Petain had faced a more terrifying threat than the fear of social exclusion, which had motivated Buckley.) But I’m sure Buckley, who from all accounts was morally scrupulous, tried to convince himself that he had acted out of high principle when he abandoned old friends for more powerful ones. He had done exactly the opposite, but he worked hard to believe otherwise. Most people of my acquaintance do not seem to have particularly well developed moral senses. Buckley was different; and therefore he had to toil to rationalize his questionable conduct.
Comments
Buckley once wrote a column about the demise of Moise Tshombe in which he noted that conservatives do not retrieve their dead. That was essentially his modus operandi. Once a man or a position lost popularity with a certain class of people (liberals and neo-cons), Buckley moved on. “To live is to maneuver” is an aphorism by Whittaker Chambers that he quoted often.
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Very thoughtful essay,I was reader of National review and finacial suporter of the magazine for over 40 years.Mr Buckley had many fine points in his early career.His publication used to carry many points of view on the right and even a lefty once and awhile.As his arteries narrowed with age, so did the diversity of National Review.No one would be mad at Mr.Buckley if this nasty purging hadn’t happened.
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I heartily concur with Paul’s distinction between the wisdom of the early Buckley and the imprudence of the later WFB. With all due respect to critics like Rothbard, WFB’s support for an interventionist “big government” regime with which to fight the Cold War can be justified on rational grounds. What is less justifiable is to hang onto this state apparatus in a post-Cold War era, when no threat comparable to that of the old USSR is present. This historical change has been lost on the neocons, who think we are always facing potential world wars.
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Thank you very much for your article. I feel so much better about my cancellation of NR in 1992 after the attack on Sobran and Buchanan. Buckley really declined after 1990, and that is the subject of a good book, yet to be written.
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I think Buckley always understood that the purpose of a Conservative Journal was to bring conservative policy to bear on policy. That is, to produce actual conservative governmenance. For instance, Ronald Reagan was not a conservative intellectual. He was a conservative politician who believed in conservative principles and tried to apply them however imperfectly and sporadically to the governance of our Republic.
Buckley went wrong in mistaking the Neoconservatives, with their masterful focus on the inside game of gaining and controlling organizations, with politicians who could lead our nation.
They cannot be good politicians because they fundamentally don’t share the culture of the American people. They aren’t conservatives so much as merchandisers of conservatism in the service of their own careers and goals.
What is needed is (dare I say it?) a ruling class with some semblance of respect and affection for the people they lead.
I believe Professor Gottfried alludes to this in his comments on similar ills in Europe and the white Commonwealth. It’s perplexing to view the cultural/spiritual decline of the west and spirit of fatalism that it engenders. The professor is right, the neocons are more a symptom than a cause; An opportunistic infection if you will. And Bill Buckley didn’t invent them he just mistook them for patriots and leaders.
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Lord Acton was a conservative. Bill Buckley was a state-[g]eist. Since the “reformation”..."liberty" has been exclusively about property preceeding personality, being and spirit. America was always conceived as Empire( well before the Declaration & Constitution...see Franklin). This was shared by the entire ruling “property class” regardless, no exceptions. Mr Buckley suffered no confusions or experienced any disettling compunctions on these “fundamental” governing premises.
Lord Action was an intellectual.He attempted to order. Bill Buckley was an “agent provocateur”. He attempted to organized. Acton’s language revealed reality clearly. Acton communicated. Buckley’s language obscured reality. Buckley enchanted. Acton intended to inform. Buckley intended to divert. Acton was a genuine mentor. Buckley was a masking minstrel.
If one were to “subtract” Brent Bozell from Bill Buckley...all that would be left would be Pat Buckley. In spite of WFB’s extraordinary tongue....he was never able to reach Lord Acton’s ass.
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“This transformational process has featured a managerial regime linked to a multicultural ideology and transnational corporations, and it would be unfolding even if Bill Buckley had never lived.”
Perhaps the issue is: Republic or Empire? For in so choosing Empire, our elites have implemented all the anti-American policies we so detest. For an Empire consists of multi-nationalities, and therefore, “diversity” writ large is the aim of all domestic policies.
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I think Grant Havers is correct that once the Cold War was over, the fact that WFB hung on to his Cold War liberal friends (i.e., the Neocons) was intellectually unjustified. The reason would appear to be that WFB had made his bed with those Cold War liberals, and by that time both his social and his professional requirements would not permit his tacking back to the right. The attempts to do so under John O’Sullivan resulted in a backlash from the Neocons, who demanded that WFB clean house at NR of all those to the right of the Neocon’s social democratic positions and WFB complied.
One historical footnote regarding the above is to note how ill prepared NR and WFB were for the end of the Cold War. In 1990, with the writing on the Berlin Wall having come down, a cover of NR had in huge print the question: WHAT NOW?
That would appear to be the question today even more. It is a final irony of the heritage of WFB’s search for respectability that those WFB chose to side with are in fact the less respectable and more fanatical Neocons, whose bloodthirsty policies have made mainstream “conservatives” unrespectable. The damage done by the Neocons, not to themselves of course, but to the non-Neocon mainstream “conservatives”, is likely irreparable.
Thus the final irony is that it is the other “extremists”, those WFB sought to purge, who will move to the forefront of the political debate if the trajectory of America continues in the downward direction of a Weimar-like Republic as it appears to be moving.
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Conservatives must come to terms with the reality....that there is NO conflict between Mercantilism & Marxism( all elemental principles of central state control are shared, pursued)...as Russel Jacoby points out in his work, “The Dialectic of Defeatism”....Marxism is simply an extension of Mercantilism...or, a re-formatting of fuedalism....i.e. the intermediating “middling” class is removed...allowing a direct “capturing” of their social market production....and a subsequent “re-folding” back into the previous “noble” ownership & control of material production & distribution....The nightmare of power...is diffusion....Eventually,the middle class would make any & all non-economic political power(subsidized privilege), toast. Buckley’s sad career was dedicated to preventing such a development...you know, God, Country & Yale.
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My comment has engendered so many thoughtful and learned responses that that despite my
longtime acquaintance with the American conservative movement, I have benefited
from you my readers. Thank you for all the perceptive observations about WFB and his
role in both building and harming the American Right.Peter Brimelow once remarked that
Buckley remains an intriguing enigma. He created an intellectually fascinating
counterforce to the Left, which he dominated for decades with his wit, literary verve,
and elegant manners. He then threw away much of what he had fashioned- in return for
relatively little.
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There will be two eulogies given at WFB’s funeral(?)//(memorial(?) at St Patrick’s....one will be given by his only child, Christopher...the other by his only godfather, Henry Kissinger.
Those of you who continue to apologize for this man.... you must be made of titanium. God Bless!
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Great post and comments.
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WFB - RIP
A man who grovelled before the Jews apologizing for the anti-Semitism of his father and his Church, who dishonored “the graves of his fathers and the altars of his gods” has finally gone to his reward. May God have mercy on him.
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Sam Spade wrote: “One historical footnote regarding the above is to note how ill prepared NR and WFB were for the end of the Cold War. In 1990, with the writing on the Berlin Wall having come down, a cover of NR had in huge print the question: WHAT NOW?”
This is a very interesting point. WFB was at his best fighting the Cold War. I wonder how much his worldview relied on having a military enemy to face? He always seemed more at home railing against the Communists than he did talking about social policy and questions of personal morality. Maybe that helps to explain the direction NR went in after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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Mr. Havers, was the interventionist big government regime really justified even given communism? A case could be made that it was not.
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