The passing of William F. Buckley Jr. this week means that America has lost a charismatic and revolutionary intellectual. The impact Buckley had on conservatism as an intellectual movement can only be described as monumental. Emerging in an era where the face of conservatism was a drunkard named Joe McCarthy and the Republican president Eisenhower was considered so moderate that it was briefly suggested the Democrats run him as their candidate in 1956 too, Buckley, as he famously remarked in the first issue of his National Review, stood “athwart history yelling, ‘Stop.’”
America came to know Buckley through his television appearances, primarily on his twice-weekly PBS program, “Firing Line,” which ran from 1966 to 1999. He would engage in debate with the left-wing intellectuals of the day, including Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky, with his characteristic erudite vocabulary and seemingly infinite knowledge of nearly every detail of every issue. Through National Review he provided a vessel for the great conservative minds to transmit the ideas of free markets, anti-communism and small government to educated America, but it was the Bill Buckley that Americans saw on television that solidified his status as a man that changed the way people thought about the relationship between the individual and the state.
In losing Buckley, we lose a great teacher of conservatism. As Rush Limbaugh reiterates nearly every day on his radio program, conservatism is a philosophy that must be taught and re-taught to successive generations. The liberalism entrenched in our educational, entertainment and media cultures threatens the conservative movement through its near-monopoly, and only by winning the intellectual battle can the teachings of Buckley continue to thrive.
Indeed, Buckley was part of a very select group of the most influential conservatives in the second half of the 20th century; his most logical counterpart in this group was his good friend, Ronald Reagan. The movement lost Reagan to Alzheimer’s 14 years ago. Now, with Buckley gone as well, the state of the conservative movement can be placed in an interesting perspective. In Reagan, it had a political leader and in Buckley, an intellectual one. Both challenged the liberal establishment in these respective fields, and in doing so brought millions of Americans into the fold. Today, Limbaugh serves as a media leader, using his skill and genius as a broadcaster to challenge this establishment in what he calls the “Drive-By Media.”
Even with the legacy of Reagan and Buckley and the continued success of Limbaugh, conservatism is starved for leadership. Movement conservatives are disillusioned with the Republican Party in Washington, where the small-government contingent has nearly disappeared. The Republican primaries illustrated this hunger, with Fred Thompson and eventually Mitt Romney trying harder than any other candidate to be that conservative leader in the political arena.
We conservatives would be wise to turn back to the Buckley-Reagan paradigm as a guide. Before Reagan spoke at the 1964 Republican National Convention about a “rendezvous with destiny,” Buckley had already sown the seeds of the thought movement. After his alarmingly revealing tome, “God and Man at Yale,” the success of National Review and his role in familiarizing America with a radically different alternative to the wave of progressivism after World War II, Buckley had ensured that a national electorate would be informed enough to elect a new kind of political leader.
Now, with the threat of Islamofascism providing a more dangerous and sinister parallel to the Communist threat of the past and a collectivist political class with more fervor than it had 20 years ago, conservatism needs a new intellectual leader in the vein of Buckley. This leader shouldn’t be a Buckley clone or reincarnation; rather, he must continue the fight WFB began.
Why can’t conservatives seem to find this new leader? Circumstances are different in 2008 than they were in 1951, with a certain level of cynicism aimed at those involved in any aspect of a political ideological movement. Political analysis has become a profitable entertainment form, a fact with which I have no problem. Nevertheless, for the ideas of conservatives to ignite the public once again, we need a leader to rise above it all and start teaching (and re-teaching) the rest of us.
