William F. Buckley Exits Stage Right

America is, by and large, a nation hostile to the very idea of an intelligentsia. Public thinkers are just not considered important. However, William F. Buckley, Jr. was an exceedingly important man in the intellectual and political life of America in the second half of the twentieth century. His death earlier this week marked the end of an era.

In reviving the intellectual fortunes of the right both in America and around the world, Mr. Buckley served as the Karl Marx to Ronald Reagan’s Lenin (a comparison both men would have loathed). It is fair to say that, had it not been for Mr. Buckley, his National Review magazine, his weekly syndicated column “On the Right,” and his TV program “Firing Line,” Ronald Reagan would probably best be remembered as the guy Jane Wyman divorced.

John Stuart Mill, in a letter to Sir John Pakinton, MP, wrote, “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.” Well, Mr. Buckley may have been a great many things, but stupid was not on the list.

His command of the American version of the English language was second to none and spoken with a prep school accent that he shared with the late George Plimpton and few others. His ability to argue coherently and with wit and charm might have been without equal. And according to Mona Charen, “in a small group, it was always Bill who rushed to get a chair for the person left standing. It was always Bill who reached to fill your glass. It was always Bill who volunteered to give you a lift wherever you were going, insisting it was on his way.” The word for that is gentleman.

The country owes Mr. Buckley a debt of gratitude, not so much for reviving the philosophical underpinnings of the right (that may actually have been a mistake), but rather for undertaking the role of intellectual so publicly. In a nation where someone interested in policy is known as a “wonk,” his legacy is less “standing athwart history yelling ‘stop,’ and more “standing up in public yelling ‘think’.”

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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