Buckley Revisited, Again

A critique of Bill Buckley by Paul Gottfried that praises Buckley's early role in creating the post WWII conservative movement but which also recognizes his later collaboration with neoconservatism.

Buckley was gatekeeping and containment on the genuinely conservative voices that described where we were going in the 1990s.

Buchanan, Sobran, Francis, Derbyshire all cancelled by the “conservatives” led by Buckley for being skeptical of the Iraq War, mass immigration, globalization, hedge fund economics, NeoCon wars, NATO expansion.

All positions turned out to be totally true, while conventional Regime “conservatism” led the West to disaster.

Libertarian. Died in 2008 when Bush lost the party. Then Tim Russet died in August that year. An honest liberal who would have at least held Obama’s feet to the fire. He was out of the way when November came. .

Part of his legacy must be the preponderantly Catholic right side of the Supreme Court.

truth !!

except that WFB did seriously question W’s wars

yep, Jesuit no less,
though I don’t know how one could actually measure his influence in that regard decades later

To Buckley's credit, he embraced Rush Limbaugh and his brand of conservative populism when he began national syndication out of New York. Limbaugh once described getting his first invite to drinks and dinner with Buckley and his wife. The guests that evening included Henry Kissinger and a clutch of luminaries, with harpsicord music.

National Review later featured a cover that had Limbaugh as the "leader of the opposition," addressing his fellow Senators in early 19th Century dress.

Buckley was a man of his time and place. For much of his life he thought he was, or felt he was, or wanted a be a man of his father’s time and place. But in some part of his being, he understood that he wasn’t a rugged, self-made wildcat oilman, but a Manhattan/Fairfield county media guy with inherited wealth.

So he had more in common with his political enemies than with his allies and admirers. I’m not saying he betrayed his followers, but they weren’t as likely to get invited to his shindigs as rich Manhattanites were.

Still, Buckley was skeptical about Bush’s wars, and he made John Sullivan — who was skeptical about mass immigration — his successor (Sullivan went on to other ventures, so Buckley went with Rich Lowry as his replacement).

The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement

Paperback – April 1, 2015
by Paul E. Gottfried (Editor), Richard B. Spencer (Editor)

A central crucible in the evolution of the American Right has been "the purge"-that is, the expulsion, often in an explicit fashion, of views or individuals deemed outside the bounds of "respectability." Victims include the John Birch Society, Peter Brimelow, John Derbyshire, Sam Francis, Revilo P. Oliver, Murray Rothbard, foreign-policy makers deemed "isolationists," immigration reformers, and many others.
This essay collection is an attempt to better understand conservative ideology (often euphemized as "timeless principles") and how it functioned within its historic context and responded to power, shifting conceptions of authority, and societal changes. Through the purges, we can glimpse what conservatism is not, those aspects of itself it has attempted to deny, mask, leave behind, and forget, and the ways in which memories can be reconstructed around new orthodoxies. Contributors include Peter Brimelow, Lee Congdon, John Derbyshire, Samuel T. Francis, Paul Gottfried, James Kalb, Keith Preston, William Regnery, and Richard Spencer.

Buckley, as was mentioned above, was a gatekeeper. He (and pretty much he alone) decided what was "legitimate" conservatism, and what was beyond the pale. Over time he moved Left, and so a lot of his early collaborators were eventually pushed out. To be to the right of Buckley was to be an extremist, by his definition. The Left was happy to go along with this. Why not accept a general who divides his own forces before the battle?

As you can see this book was published 9 years ago. It was the spring of the Alt-Right, before Richard Spencer made his transition to white nationalist and class clown, that brought the whole Alt-Right crashing down on top of him.

It's ironic that someone who could so clearly see how badly that Buckley had handled his "15 minutes of fame" and lost the plot of what he was trying to accomplish -- in turn handled his fifteen minutes of fame even worse.

Richard Spencer to the memory of William F. Buckley: "Here, hold my beer"

Still, before all that he started Arktos Publishing, and did a couple issues of this magazine: The Radix Journal, which were pretty good. The publishing house lives on (sans Spencer) but the journal is history. They both published a lot of French "New Right" and other European right-wing stuff. Arktos still does.

Currently they seem to have picked up all of Alexander Dugin's books, which I believe the Biden administration specifically asked Amazon to deplatform (and they did, of course).

A representative sample of recent books published by Arktos

Free Republic was pretty much itself an outpost of Buckleyism in the early years. Buckley was very successful in gatekeeping. And, just like you couldn't write about race and IQ, or black dysfunction in the pages of The National Review after a little while, such topics were off-limits on FR in the past. (And, you still can bump into remnants of these prohibitions if you try top post articles from some sources).

My sense is that Free Republic has moved in a Nationalist and rightward direction over the last 20 years, while the National Review has continued to slide to the Left, so that today a lot of Freepers hold views more aligned with Paul Gotfried, Pat Buchanan, and others from the paleo-conservative right that Buckley was so busy purging.

After. Not at the time.

And not in time to give a reprieve to those who argued that the Iraq War may have been in Israel’s interest. But not in America’s interest.

But the idea that there could be a difference, was an absolutely not allowed opinion at the time, and is still an impermissible idea amongst many elements of the center-right.

Although I cannot claim absolute accuracy, I am inclined to remember otherwise regarding your timeframe v. WFB skepticism/disapproval of the Iraq venture.

All the people who got purged were the ones who described what the future would be if we kept going on the trajectory of the 1990’s and 2000’s.

Their assessment turned out to be totally correct. And if anything, understated.

What FR will turn into remains to be seen. It’s mostly boomers who are aging out, and old people don’t like change and throwing over the opinions of a lifetime.

Thirty years ago, the USA was globally dominant, and Political Correctness was in retreat. In 2024 the USA is in serious decline, and the Left has won all the battles and Woke dominates corporate and institutional life.

The future of the Right is in how it responds to its total defeat. On FR we have various mixtures of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance and we will see what that looks like at the end of a second Trump Presidency.

These statements strike me as simply absurd:

Further, when National Review’s editorial board went after the Birchers in the mid-1960s, it was mostly for their opposition to the Vietnam War. Like many other American journalists in the second half of the last century, Buckley moved periodically to the left to remain “relevant.”

By conversion, he is implying that the 1960s left supported the Vietnam War. This is just nonsense.

The Birchers and leftover pre-WWII isolationists were just like the New Left, firmly believing that if the US just imposed morality internally, left foreigners alone and manifested our good intentions, then this kung-fu virtue signaling would cause foreigners to slap their foreheads with the sudden realization that we were the good guys and "whirled peas" would break out.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2004/07/should-we-have-gone-war-william-f-buckley-jr/

On FR we have various mixtures of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance...

I have seen that. That's an insightful observation.

Depression wasn't a stage, though. Depression is what happens when someone doesn't progress through the anger stage correctly.

Have you heard that "depression is anger without enthusiasm."?

It's an old quote, but very very accurate.

correct and the future is bleak

I once shook Bill Buckley’s hand. It was an honor meeting him. I was a NR subscriber for 25 years.

The NR no Trumpers committed suicide this day:

https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/21/politics/national-review-magazine-opposes-donald-trump/index.html

The publisher of NR and I often met for breakfast on Saturday. After this issue I told him he was an a-hole. NR hated the idea of populism.

It’s taken from the Stages of Grief.

Conservatives were routed, and people are still trying to process it.

My sense is that Free Republic has moved in a Nationalist and rightward direction over the last 20 years, while the National Review has continued to slide to the Left, so that today a lot of Freepers hold views more aligned with Paul Gotfried, Pat Buchanan, and others from the paleo-conservative right that Buckley was so busy purging.

The two main issues were, first, that the 1980s dose of deregulation and more free markets were supposed to scrape the barnacles of New Deal statism from the SS United States. The free market were supposed to reinvigorate the US economy, not make the world safe for globalist oligarchy and drive down US wages.

Second, the failed half-fought wars of Korea and Vietnam were supposed to avoided by a combination of the more judicious use of force that, when applied, was supposed to be overwhelming and brief like the Gulf War. Instead, Bush refused to simply pick a local client sufficiently brutal to impose order in Iraq and refused to recognize that we had, in fact, won in Afghanistan in 2022 and we could have left a handful of SF operators in place in perpetuity. When he decided to impose the same "nation building" plan in Afghanistan to build a strong central regime in Kabul that no one wanted, he simply repeated the Soviet's mistake.

So now we have an utterly corrupt political and business elite who are only good at ferociously defending their privilege and revolting cultural tastes and not the United States.