Up From Liberalism

Conservatively speaking, the life of William F. Buckley Jr. seems wildly improbable. One man is rarely granted his range of gifts: He was at once an essayist, editor, impresario, controversialist, critic, novelist, sportsman and bon vivant. He was the captain of a publication that, as he once famously put it, stood "athwart History, yelling Stop," yet he personally lived in relentless forward motion. When liberalism was dominant but hidebound in the second half of the last century, he pioneered a new direction that transformed American politics.

William Francis Buckley Jr. died Wednesday morning in Stamford, Connecticut, at age 82. Appropriately enough, he was working on a column. His death is the severing of the last remaining link between contemporary American conservatism and its founding generation.

William F. Buckley Jr.

In 1950, the literary critic Lionel Trilling could assert "the plain fact" that there were no conservative ideas "in general circulation." That confidence would be ground away. In 1951, Bill Buckley made his name with "God and Man at Yale," which critiqued his alma mater for its hostilities to capitalism and religion. Four years later, Buckley founded National Review. He was 29.

In its fecund early period in the 1950s and '60s, National Review helped introduce a modern conservatism into American political life. Buckley and his talented stable of editors and contributors gave coherence and shape to what he called "a fusion" of traditionalism, anti-Communist internationalism and free-market economics. Equally important, the magazine worked to discredit fringe elements like the John Birchers, the Jew-haters and the Lindbergh isolationists.

This coalition served as the intellectual foundation for the rising architecture of the conservative movement. In 1964, Barry Goldwater defeated the Eastern establishment's Nelson Rockefeller for the Republican Presidential nomination. Though Goldwater badly lost, the ideas that animated his candidacy continued to gain support, and the 1980s saw the Presidency of Ronald Reagan and its fruits, a revolution in domestic economic policy and the undoing of the Soviet empire.

These achievements might not have happened without Buckley, who was uniquely suited to preside over the often-feuding factions of the early political right. He liked arguments over principle, but he also had an uncommon talent for adjudicating disputes and building coalitions. And though Buckley had bedrock beliefs, he had a conservative's distrust for systems and grand theories; his politics were pragmatic. His thinking and prose were governed by a critical-deliberative style that emphasized contingency and complexity. More than anything else, Buckley wanted to promulgate what he often referred to as "a thoughtful conservatism."

He seemed to embody it. WFB was a public intellectual in the best sense of the term: His wit, learning, civility, his sophistication—all these hugely contributed to the respectability of the conservative cause. Buckley was also a tireless popularizer and political combatant. By the time his television program "Firing Line" closed down in 1999, he had filmed 1,429 episodes. He edited NR for 35 years, gave 70 speeches a year over four decades, and filed a syndicated column until the end of his life. He wrote more than 50 books. He said he had "a cognate aversion to boredom."

Throughout, Buckley was rarely angry or grim. A famous debate in 1978 with the Gipper on the Panama Canal included the following exchange: Reagan: "Well, Bill, my first question is why haven't you already rushed across the room here to tell me that you've seen the light?" Buckley: "I'm afraid that if I came any closer to you the force of my illumination would blind you."

WFB found joy in everything, even in politics. "I have always held in high esteem the genial tradition," he wrote. This approach is now faded, and more in need in public life than ever. Several generations of conservatives grew up (in more than one sense) with Bill Buckley. Now they have—well, there is no one like him.

In his last years, Buckley grew discouraged about what he considered the drifts of the American right. In an interview with this page in 2005, he noted that "I think conservatism has become a little bit slothful." In private, his contempt was more acute. Part of it, he believed, was that what used to be living ideas had become mummified doctrines to many in the conservative political class. At the Yale Political Union in November 2006—Buckley's last public audience—he called for a "sacred release from the old rigidities" and "a repristinated vision." It was a bracing reminder that American conservatives must adapt eternal principles to new realities.

Buckley himself never lost his faith—in God, his country, the obligation to engage in the controversies of the age, and the wonders of the mind. His half-century at the center of the American scene was a model of thoughtfulness and political creativity that remains as relevant today, perhaps more so. Ave atque vale.