Posted by
Bert Chapman on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 6:11:40 PM
Conservatism has lost a stalwart intellect and courageous warrior today with William Buckley's death. His influence on American political discourse is enormous thanks to his staggering corpus books, lectures, oped columns, television appearances, and National Review magazine. Buckley played a crucial role in sculpting American conservatism into a credible political movement that could win the White House, gain control of Congress, and state governments. His intellectual approach to political activity has had an enormous influence on my own political development and this approach demonstrated that conservatism is the only intellectually and morally credible way to govern the United States and the American people.
In our age of vocational specialization, Buckley was a refreshingly renaissance man. Besides politics, his interests encompassed sailing, the arts, book culture, education, religious and moral development, history, dogs, and numerous areas of public policy. His book God and Man at Yale was a courageous assault against the secularism which has destroyed so many once superlative academic institutions and whose woeful effects are felt in countries all over Europe and even in many aspects of American life. Buckley's ability to make and retain friendships with a wide variety of people, even those who were political antagonists, is a superlative demonstration of his generous personal character.
The flourishing of conservative opinion journals such as National Review, the American Spectator, Weekly Standard, the proliferation of conservative oriented blogs, the role of conservatives in recent presidential administrations and congresses, and a growing body of scholarly literature on American conservatism during the second half of the 20th century, all testify to Buckley's enduring intellectual and political influence. Buckley has left a legacy that intellectually honest historians and political scientists can constructively analyze for decades to come.
He helped conservatism become a critically important factor in American political life by weeding idiotic anti-Semites and John Birchers from the embryonic conservative movement. Such actions enabled conservatism to confront and, in many cases, defeat liberalism whose intellectual and moral fallacies were becoming more apparent as the 1950s passed into the 1960s. As will all humans, not everything Buckley said was correct. For instance, National Review's decision to embrace marijuana decriminalization is a highly imprudent public policy position because it will further the personally destructive addictive behaviors which weaken individual freedom and autonomy and give the state the chance to exert greater control over our lives.
Our prayers and sympathies go out to his family as they mourn his death. All of us can comfort ourselves with and be inspired by what William Buckley has accomplished with his life, how well he lived out his faith, and with the Christian promise of eternal life to spur us on to our own accomplishments in whatever arena of life God calls us to.