Buckley And His Legacy-Will It Die WIth Him?

My favorite saying of the late William F. Buckley, which I paraphrase here-

Even if you took the rhetoric of the marijuana prohibitionists at face value, prohibition of marijuana has still caused far more damage to far more people and to the country than marijuana ever would or could.

Buckley was not a god, of course, but this was one of a number of issues where he was, as far as I‘m concerned, right on. Of course, he was a thoughtful man who happened to be right far more often than he was wrong. On the Iraq War, he was correct to note that it was the correct thing to do to invade and overthrow Saddam. He was also right when he said, more or less, that the endeavor had fallen apart and we were losing the war. Then, he was right to support the Surge.

Some people in the early days thought he was an incendiary bigot and race baiter, as he made it clear that he understood the concerns of white southerners, and others, owing to the potential effects of miscegenation, and the likely turmoil that would come about as a result of forced desegregation.

He had some points in regards to the obvious culture clash, the heavy-handed tactics of the federal government, and the potential long term consequences of social engineering, though he was wrong in other regards about what he trumpeted as the basic immorality of blacks.

No, he wasn’t perfect. For proof of that, take into account the fact that he not only supported John McCain, but donated money to him. He was, however, perhaps one of the first architects of the on-going Republican takeover in the South, something that, when he began his career, could never have been foreseen.

Yet, he was not only an economic and foreign policy conservative, he was, as a devout Catholic, a social conservative as well. William F. Buckley did not just build the three-legged stool. He crafted it in his own image.

He founded the National Review, and was in fact one of the founding fathers of modern conservatism, along with Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and of course Ronald Reagan. When he retired, he handed the reins of the National Review over to Neo-con William Kristol-which was not a good choice, in my opinion. Of course, to be fair, I am only a part-time conservative. Buckley personified the movement.

Now, at his death at the age of eighty-two, that movement that he founded has fallen into disarray and seems in danger of itself passing on. One wonders if he would have noted the irony.

Although Buckley came across to many as an elitist, he distrusted elites, declaring famously he would trust the first one hundred names in the Boston phone directory before he would the faculty of Harvard. It has been well over forty years since he spoke this line, and as far as I know he never repeated it. Well, after all, those first one hundred names in the Boston phone directory probably voted for Ted Kennedy by a two-to-one margin.