The NY Times today pays way too much respect for a man that does the world a whole lot of good dead than alive.
William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate
conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died at 82.
Breathes the first sentence of Buckley’s obituary. Described as the “sesquipedalian spark of the right”, Douglas Martin credits Buckley as the architect of U.S. conservatism, the one that transcended and dominated this country’s political discourse post-WW II.
Liberals ruled this country since the FDR’s New Deal, so that,
Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Thanks to Buckley, neoliberals had an ideology that married right wing libertarianism, free market economy, and anti-communism. How did the bourgeois scion of an oil tycoon author an ideology that was to so captivate the white working class, and usher Reagan and the Bush family into the White House? Continue reading
