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Eric: Requiescat In Pace: William F. Buckley

As I have often mentioned, sometimes defiantly, sometimes less so, I am a Liberal.

I didn't used to be a Liberal -- not a capital-L one, anyway. I was proud of my being a moderate. I was proud of my addressing the issues and examining all sides of political thought. I was proud of my open-mindedness and my capacity to embrace all sides.

That's changed over the past seven years, which to me is the great tragedy of the Bush administration. Or one of them, anyhow. Bush made it difficult for people to remain open to discussions and debate. He was the great polarizer. The great "you're with us or with them" of our generation. In the months after September 11, I felt I had to make it clear and unequivocal. At a time when Liberals were being accused (even by the Vice President) of treason, I chose to align myself squarely on their side, and I had no interest in being open to a side willing to cast the Left as a scourge. I'm still there today, and I don't see any chance of it changing in the future.

And that's tragic. For me as a person, for our nation as a whole. Because the only way it works -- the only way it works -- is for Liberal and Conservative ideas to come into conflict and ultimate compromise. We need both principles in good measure to make a nation great. We need to help and protect those in need with the spirit of largess, and we need to stand firm against corruption and evil. When the principles are in balance, the nation flourishes.

Which is why I feel so badly today. William F. Buckley is dead.

William F. Buckley has, for well over fifty years, been the seminal definition of literate conservatism. A man of conviction but also of thought and reason, Buckley has championed the conservative cause and ideal through times of great support for his positions and times of great disgust over them. In the 60's he was for Goldwater. In the 80's he was for Reagan. Through both, he was for conservative ideology and educated discussion. In the aftermath of the television program The Day After, in the famous discussion and debate where Carl Sagan is so remembered (and revered) for saying that the United States and the Soviet Union were both standing in gasoline, with one side holding three lit matches and the other five, it was William F. Buckley who sat on the other side and discussed the needs for Nuclear deterrence. It didn't matter if he was the only person in the building who believed it -- he did believe it, and he could rationally and intelligently lay out the reasons for it.

William F. Buckley was a conservative thinker, with the emphasis on thought. He examined positions and cast them in his own philosophical views. Take, for example, marijuana. Obviously, the hard Republican line (and let's be honest -- the hard Democratic line) is to pursue the War on Drugs, to stop this dangerous gateway drug, to pursue, restrict, arrest and incarcerate those involved with it.

But Buckley was a Conservative. A true Conservative. And to him, the fight against marijuana failed on conservative grounds. It failed to account for essential individual rights, and the necessary individual taking responsibility for his own actions. It failed to restrain the growth of government and government's intrusion into our lives. And it failed the fiscal test -- true conservatism rigorously examined its resources and its expenses, and eliminated those expenses made for specious reasons or specious results. As he wrote in the National Review in 2004:

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great. The laws aren't exactly indefensible, because practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana, moved on to severe mental disorder. But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that every rapist began by masturbating. General rules based on individual victims are unwise. And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend. If all our laws were paradigmatic, imagine what we would do to anyone caught lighting a cigarette, or drinking a beer. Or ? exulting in life in the paradigm ? committing adultery. Send them all to Guantanamo?

Legal practices should be informed by realities. These are enlightening, in the matter of marijuana. There are approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very year. Most of these ? 87 percent ? involve nothing more than mere possession of small amounts of marijuana. This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10-15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone. Most transgressors caught using marijuana aren't packed away to jail, but some are, and in Alabama, if you are convicted three times of marijuana possession, they'll lock you up for 15 years to life. Professor Ethan Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, writing in National Review, estimates at 100,000 the number of Americans currently behind bars for one or another marijuana offense.

Buckley's record isn't spotless, as he himself would say. He and the National Review he founded opposed the Civil Rights Act in the 50's and 60's, for example. But unlike many in public life, on either side of the aisle, he didn't simply recant this position later on -- he said that they had been out and out wrong, and that the Civil Rights Act had been a watershed moment not just in American life, but conservative life as well.

And that is one of the things that made Buckley so remarkable. He could hold an opinion, have new information come in, and acknowledge that his opinion was wrong and revise it. He supported the Iraq War in the beginning. However, when it became clear that the intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction was wrong, he acknowledged that it had been wrong and he has described Iraq as failed essentially on every level. He did not defer responsibility from himself -- he flat out said he had been wrong.

Though, of course, he said it more eloquently than I could write. William F. Buckley was a master of language -- brilliant in writing, entertaining and engaging in dialogue. And it is worth remembering in this modern era where "intellectualism' is considered innately Liberal, education is distrusted as 'elitist' and discourse is best rendered shouted, that Buckley came to his greatest national fame on PBS. He was a PBS star through the 70's into the 80's, on his program Firing Line. This was a show of discussion and debate, which would bring on prominent figures and thinkers and Buckley and that group would dissect and deliberate over the issues of the day. It was often lively but always erudite, and anyone who appeared had best have brought their A game, because Buckley was intelligent, logical, reasonable and most of all focused, and any fallacies brought to the table would be skewered. Some of Buckley's best debates were with intelligent, reasonable men of the Left. Sagan, as mentioned above. Noam Chomsky. And most (in)famously Gore Vidal.

Vidal and Buckley had a series of debates during the 1968 Democratic Party convention -- the convention infamous for protestors, the Chicago 7, and out and out riots. The contentiousness of the conventions extended to the two debaters, with the final debate featuring Vidal calling Buckley a 'crypto-Nazi,' and Buckley calling Vidal a 'queer' (on national television, I would add), and threatening Vidal to "stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I will sock you in your goddamn face, and you will stay plastered." This then extended into a battle of words in Esquire, followed by various lawsuits.

Which honestly is about as vehement as Buckley ever got. It might have been the most eloquent blood feud, gay-slurs and nazism claims aside, ever committed in American letters. Certainly, the educated and above all civil debates Buckley was known for was as antithetical to today's punditry as can be imagined.

There's lots more to say -- Buckley's denouncing of the John Birch Society, his lack of patience with certain branches of Objectivism (he would amusingly recount the grand and dramatic exit Ayn Rand would make from any room he entered), and many others -- but the point is this: Buckley was good for America.

Not good for American conservatism (which he was often called the Father of), not good for the Republican party. Not good for snobby white intellectual Skull and Bonesmen from Yale. William F. Buckley was good for America. And I am certain that he would argue that the reasoned and intellectually rigorous Liberal thinkers were equally so -- because Buckley did not enter into debate without also entering into discourse, and Buckley undertstood that the resultant compromise of what was, after all, two very American positions made for a better nation than any singular could. Buckley also understood that opinions within one of those positions could vary (drugs were not the only area Buckley stood in reasoned opposition to the conventional wisdom of his side). Buckley, as a very educated man, bemoaned the casting of public education by many conservatives as statist -- and bemoaned the same for health care, as two examples. To Buckley, it was always a question of resources and management, and a healthy and educated populace was a more productive one which would lead to greater prosperity.

Buckley was good for America, even in all the areas I disagreed with him, because he forced Liberals like me to defend their positions -- not with our hearts and our compassion but with our brains and rationality. He argued that a position that could not be defended rationally simply could not be defended, and in this I think he was correct.

I long for a world where Buckley and those like him sally forth in rhetorical but intellectual confict with their Liberal opposite numbers, and where a moderate center could result from the alloy, taking on the strengths of both sides. In this world of jingoism, where more people listen to Rush Limbaugh or read Ann Coulter than were reading Bill Buckley or George Will, where Michael Moore supercedes Noam Chomsky and debate is something between shouting pundits on MSNBC, CNN or Fox, I yearn for a world where intelligent men and women, respectful of the other side but considered in their moral, philosophical and intellectual stances can debate and try to find common course together.

But one might as well yearn for Narnia or the United Federation of Planets. Educated discourse isn't fun to watch, and 'news' is something that happens on channels that aren't showing CSI: Newark.

And William F. Buckley is dead.

Sleep well, sir. Well fought. Well played. Well done.

Posted by Eric Burns at February 27, 2008 1:21 PM

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