Posted on 11/24/2025 7:10:43 AM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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Thank you. I could not find it on Steyn Online.
The appeal of liberalism continues.
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.
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.'.
I wonder what Buckley would have made of the USA in 2025 and MAGA?
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!"
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.
“That was in one of his novels.”
Thanks for the clarification. A classic line. Pure Buckley.
I remember that well and even used it a time or two. LoL
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.
“In otehr words, the “conservative movement” has been a Deep State op from the beginning, now coming to an end?”
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Buckley was also NOT a natural born citizen. His parents were Canadians.
Let’s see: Yale, Skull and Bones, CIA, etc. He was as deep state and compromised as anyone can be.
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