In the beginning, there was Buckley

SteynonLine ^ | November 24, 2025 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

William F Buckley Jr. was born one hundred years ago today. He died in 2008 of complications from diabetes and emphysema less than a year after he lost his beloved Patricia . Here is what Mark wrote shortly thereafter:

If you were running one of those Frank Luntz machine-wired focus groups to produce the ideal conservative leader for America, I doubt you'd come up with an urbane patrician harpsichordist who lived part time in Switzerland and was partial to words like "eremitical" and "periphrastic." "It's the epigoni, stupid" is not a useful campaign slogan – although, in fact, a distressingly large number of political candidates are certainly epigoni ("a second-rate imitator").

But William F. Buckley Jr. was a first-rate original, who founded the modern conservative movement half a century ago and saw it through to victory in the 1980 presidential election and then to vindication in the collapse of communism a decade later. He would demur when credited with "creating" the entire show but he was certainly its impresario, and at a time when there wasn't exactly a lot of talent stampeding to audition.

The 1950s are assumed, at least by children of the Sixties, to be a "conservative" era. But at home New Deal liberalism controlled all the levers of society, and abroad the communists had gobbled up half of Europe, neutered most of the rest, swiped China, were eyeing up other valuable real estate across the planet, and Washington's foreign policy establishment was inclined to accept this as a permanent feature of life to be "managed" rather than defeated.

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TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: billbuckley; marksteyn

[Rummyfan]

Thank you. I could not find it on Steyn Online.

[Rummyfan]

Forty-nine years ago, he wrote, “We must bring down the thing called liberalism, which is powerful but decadent, and salvage a thing called conservatism, which is weak but viable.”

The appeal of liberalism continues.

[Verginius Rufus]

I heard Buckley speak to a small gathering on my campus when I was an undergraduate, but did not take the opportunity to shake his hand.

[Rummyfan]

Buckley once ran for a political office.. mayor or such.

Mayor of NYC I believe, against John Lindsey.

I think his most famous line is 'I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.'.

[PGR88]

I wonder what Buckley would have made of the USA in 2025 and MAGA?

[Steely Tom]

Was it Buckley that said, back when Sen. McCarthy was gunning for homosexuals in the Pentagon, that employees were so scared that they ate bananas corn-on-the-cob style.

That was in one of his novels.

"They're so scared over at State, that in the commissary they're eating hot dogs like they're corn on the cob!"

[x]

Buckley’s world is gone. He sort of realized that in his last years — or at least he realized that his father’s laissez-faire world was long gone and he missed the Cold War of his own youth and the clarity of those days.

[cymbeline]

“That was in one of his novels.”

Thanks for the clarification. A classic line. Pure Buckley.

[awelliott]

He introduced me to the marvelous insult "retromingent."

I remember that well and even used it a time or two. LoL

[arkfreepdom]

He became my hero when I was at MIT in the mid 70s. I figured out quickly that these eggheads weren’t near as smart as they thought they were. It made them pull into a cocoon. Pseudo-intellectuals.