Posted on 06/09/2010 9:58:59 AM PDT by bs9021
What Would Buckley Do?
Malcolm A. Kline, June 9, 2010
Two years after his death, William F. Buckley, Jr., the ultimate conservative man of letters, still has a lot to teach the young and the rightward. In turn, there is no better person to pass on these lessons than the man who has become the preeminent historian of the conservative movement—Lee Edwards.
Edwards, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, relays the insights that can be gleaned from the National Review founder’s life and work in his invaluable new book, William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Maker Of A Movement. For one thing, the much-noted current disarray of the Conservative movement is nothing new.
“But after twenty often frustrating years of building a conservative alternative to the liberal establishment, Buckley could not help wondering what there was to lead,” Edwards writes of his subject in the 1970s. “In a November 1975 interview, a saturnine Buckley said: ‘As of this moment [the movement] is going nowhere.’”
“Buckley described in detail the leftward tilt of Western civilization, led by American capitalists ‘fleeing into the protective arms of the government at the least hint of commercial difficulty.’” The eerie parallels to today’s economy also jump off the page at you.
When the sage of Sharon passed away, liberal pundits rushed into print to proclaim Buckley as a model of civility that modern-day conservatives should emulate. To be sure, by all accounts, Buckley’s innate graciousness and decency was apparent in all he said and did.
Nonetheless, Buckley pulled no punches in making political points. “Henry Wallace’s third-party 1948 campaign for the presidency inspired him to take direct political action,” Edwards informs us...
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
can we clone Buckley? I cannot believe such a brilliant mind has gone from us.
Buckley was a genuinely good man — and a testament to his faith, his country, and his political ideology. He is one of a very few people I hope to meet when my time here is done.
SnakeDoc
His only son seems to have been a complete waste of genetic material. And I say that in the kindest possible way, of course.
First he would slap the snot out of his poofter liberal son.
LLS
So was little ronnie reagan and his pink tutu.
LLS
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