What makes Bill Buckley great? I think "God and Man at Yale" was excellent, he wrote that at age 25. What did he do in the next 50 years that made him great?
There is a line of argument that he spent most of his capital repeatedly "purifying" Conservatism of influences he thought disruptive, and ultimately this harmed conservatism.
Initially he used his "purge power" to write the John Birch Society out of the Conservative movement. He did this because he disliked their claim that Eisenhower's administration was packed full of Communists. He felt it distracted from the war against Russian Communism.
Ok, fair enough, perhaps that was a reasonable judgement call, but 50 years on the infiltration of the executive branch my Leftists certainly seems like a central issue, one that we needed to win a while ago, but didn't.
Maybe the power intoxicated him, but the purge became his favorite response to criticism, especially from his right. He went on to purge those he considered "anti-semites", then "paleo-conservatives", then former comrades like Pat Buchanan, and even his long time friends, like his best man from his wedding, the writer Revilo Oliver.
The essence of the cuckservative insult, of recent vintage, is that the Buckley-era Conservative Movement , while supposedly fighting for the conservative cause, when push comes to shove - always folded.
The evidence supporting this is the steamroller of leftist causes is matched by the flattened conservative opposition on issue after issue. The civil rights act, forced integration, school busing, legal abortion, legalization of homosexuality, homosexuals in the military, homosexual adoption, homosexual marriage.
It's instructive to look at the institution Buckley founded, the National Review. It's not against his wishes that Rich Lowry is the editor, he appointed him.
Many of the writers they publish are associated with the Heritage Foundation or American Enterprise Institute.
So, we are left with Buckley's legacy as the institutionalization of Big Business Conservatism, or as critics sometimes call it "Conservatism, Inc.".
Buckley's formula allowed him to continue to be welcome in the salons of the Upper West Side, despite his conservative leanings, he was house-trained.
Where this all ended was with the entire institutional Conservative movement created and nurtured by Buckley agreeing with the importance of preventing Trump from winning the Presidency, despite his being arguably the most Conservative GOP candidate since Reagan.
I no longer view Buckley as great. He was good, and he was amusing, and he did fight some important battles, but in the end he cucked and failed.
We would have been much better off with someone more like Pat Buchanan leading the Conservative movement, than Buckley and his disciples.
I've left out some of the deeper questions about Buckley's personality that a close look at his life inevitably leads to, but to really make the call on whether he was "great" I think you'd need to look into them.
This image leads to a review of a book that presented this criticism in the most detail:
