On William F. B. Jr.

Everyone and their brother, has been eulogizing Bill Buckley, so I will seek to take a divergent approach by pondering his legacy.

For many years, I idolized Bill Buckley—read all of his then-published works and read them again.
Almost a decade ago, I remember reading a collection of Buckley’s newspaper columns which included a number of obituaries, including those of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard.
At the time, I was a moderate Objectivist, drifting towards paleo-libertarianism.
Buckley’s amiable contemptuousness for his subjects was therefore borne in quite strongly to me.

Buckley’s prose was charming. He recited anecdotes about the deceased, analyzed by comparison the disparities between their ideology and his own, in short, eviscerating sentences.

He was witty, but disdainful, like a retired psychologist discussing some of his particularly zany former patients.
One can almost picture Buckley reciting those same anecdotes to a sneering Irving Kristol over cocktails at Elaine’s.

“They that live by the sword shall die by the sword,”

the Bible tells us.

Which is why Peter Brimelow’s eulogy is particularly appropriate?

Mr. Brimelow was one of the two feet which Mr. Buckley supposedly shot himself in, the other being Joe Sobran.

Replacing the distinguished John O’Sullivan (b.1942) with the youthful Rich Lowry (b.1968), was ironically a confirmation of O'Sullivan's First Law the dictum which states that all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.

Lowry began his career as an aide to that noted conservative Charles Krauthammer. He quickly rose to be the National Review’s “Golden boy,” though his record and works are mediocre.

Youth when elevated to power is generally either passionate or blasé. Lowry falls in into the former category. His finest moment might have been when Al Franken called him up in the middle of a night and challenged him to a duel in the parking lot of their hotel.
Lowry told him to go fly a kite.

When he passes on, the words Lowry and legacy will assuredly never be used together.
Yet, Lowry wasn’t responsible for the National Review’s move to the left. Buckley was.
Lowry had no anchor to hold him to the right, so he drifted with the flow.

So why did Buckley make the decision to move left by placing the National Review in Lowry’s incapable hands? Was it because of his ego?
As writers, Peter Brimelow and Sobran were his equals if not superiors. Their legacy might have been controversial but powerful.

Chances are that their legacy would have been merely controversial, but had these gentlemen been manning the flagship, the conservative rank and file would have been kept in line.
There would have been no purges, but substantial defections, instead.

It was almost certainly not in a spirit of envy that Buckley concluded to staff his magazine with pedestrian writers and ex-political hacks.

Buckley was a New Yorker, born and bred. He liked to think local, so it was natural that in the last thirty years of his life, the rising Neo-Conservative movement, based as it was,in New York City, would be an important influence.

For some forty years, since the National Review’s conception, Bill Rusher, a transplanted Midwestern conservative had exercised great influence, as the magazine’s publisher.

Rusher was a moderate, but his refusal to embrace Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon, and his strong support for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 primaries made him a formidable figure in the constantly compromising conservative world.
The European rightists were influential as well. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Ernest van den Haag were intellectuals, whose conversation could make a New York City Neo-con’s look trifling and pretentious by comparison.

But the man who had the greatest influence over young William F. Buckley was probably Willmore Kendall.

Like most of Buckley’s other new-right intellectual compatriots, Kendall had started out as a Trotskyist, even visiting Spain during the Civil War. This alone disqualifies him from being a “Neo-conservative.”
Kendall was older than Buckley and, like James Burnham, somewhat smarter.
For a long time however, I had the sneaking impression that William F. Buckley Jr. my conservative hero, that WASP intellectual, was nothing more than an upper-class version of Rush Limbaugh.

It is certain that Willmore Kendall had great influence over Buckley. He was essentially a democrat, as Murray Rothbard liked to point out with an anecdote.

“His great thrust was the right and the duty of the majority of the community—as embodied, say, in Congress—to suppress any individual who disturbs that community with radical doctrines. Socrates, opined Kendall, not only should have been killed by the Greek community, whom he offended by his subversive criticisms, but it was their moral duty to kill him.”

The laws of a man, right or wrong were sacrosanct to Kendall. Simultaneously, it appears that he did not buy the concept of liberal democracy.
Kendall was that rarity, which we may never encounter in our lifetimes, a genuine democrat.

Whatever abstract anti-egalitarian principles Kendall might have also held, he was first and foremost a Cold Warrior.
It was Kendall’s influence which started Buckley on the road away from his original individualism which itself came from the influence of Frank Chodorov.

Kendall did not, as has been charged, play a substantial role in the subversion of Bill Buckley.
For one thing, Buckley wasn’t that pliable. For another, Kendall’s asperity kept him in constant confliction with half of the National Review’s intellectuals.

The fact that Kendall was an ex-OSS agent, and Buckley an ex-CIA agent is significant, though not for the usual kooky reasons.

Many not acquainted with its history forget that while the CIA was never the sinister organization of fiends and cowboys that Hollywood and spy novels made it out to be.
Rather, it was your run of the mill government agency whose extensive reach combined with a desire to have a finger in every pie inevitably provoked conflict and developed its negative reputation.

It is unlikely that we will be seeing any articles from America’s more politically-acceptable journals pondering the CIA’s role in the 21st Century.
The CIA has no role. Though wholly supplanted, it remains, as a cultural icon because of its past influence.

“Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses--yes, even among the soldiers--of Stalin's own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people.”

—Sidney Hook.

I think it would be unfair to give the CIA credit for creating Buckley’s New Right. The Agency certainly played a role in its inception, as it did in the Feminist Movement, the Psychedelic Culture and the “Artificial Left.”
Overall, the CIA exercised the least influence over Buckley’s magazine, because its other projects bore more scrutiny and required careful management.

Between Burnham, Kendall and Buckley the National Review’s path was assured.
It’s hard to believe, but quite obvious that both Kendall and Burnham were playing a multi-level game and that the eloquent Buckley was not.
Buckley sought political power. He was first and foremost a Republican.
Rush Limbaugh considered him a mentor, and in many ways, Rush was and is Buckley’s loud-mouthed, less-intelligent bourgeois younger brother or intellectual son.
By contrast, the forgotten Burnham’s acolyte Sam Francis, whose impact appeared to be nonexistent, would in fact be lasting.
Francis wouldn’t surrender, at a time when science was about to endorse his principles.

“The problem today is not to conserve [the status quo], let alone to persuade Americans that it ought to be conserved. The problem today is how to persuade Americans that it ought to be—and can be—changed.”

Buckley might have kept up the pretense that he was a world-class intellectual, but he tipped his hand by a writing a series of spy-novels.
Whether they desire to or not, novelists bare their minds when creating works of fiction.
By writing these novels, Buckley showed himself to be an intellectual lightweight.

Obsessed as he was by the left-liberal dominance of society and culture, Buckley was supposedly concerned by the success of John Le Carre’s novels.

Le Carre was a writer who embodied the worn and weary Europe, and the character he created, the lonely, childless bureaucrat George Smiley was the modern European.
Le Carre was briefly a foot soldier in the Cold War, and he retained a foot soldier’s narrow view of the conflict in shades of gray and platitudes of moral equivalence.

Buckley was no different. He had worked for the CIA in Mexico and being a fervent anti-Communist. His missions had been successful, and his view of the organization was positive.
It all came down to the fact that neither he nor Le Carre were sportsmen. They were believers and followers.
But while Le Carre was a workmanlike writer “of great powers,” whose years of experience at scribbling fiction had prepared him to write his famous trilogy, Buckley, the polemicist plunged right into the business. When he was uncertain, he was condescending to the reader. His plots were banal—like those of a cheap thriller, but slower paced.
Buckley was writing down to the masses and it shows. His protagonist, Blackford Oakes, (boy wonder) involves himself in every major Cold War incident from the late ‘40s to the early ‘60s.
With the plot and protagonist of a thriller, one might think that Buckley would set a fast pace. Instead, he imitates Le Carre and meanders.
The difference is that no matter how long and far Le Carre meandered; he kept the reader reading interestedly.
Buckley’s prose meanders too, as it allows him to stretch his extensive vocabulary. Unfortunately, it is not at all compelling.
Like most conservative novelists, he breaks the cardinal rule of fiction, “show, don’t tell.
Furthermore, the characters, even those supposedly based on real individuals, are constructed of cardboard and their dialogue is affected.

Most pathetic is Buckley’s seemingly insatiable need to see the Americans as the “good guys.” This is antithetical to his support for American Imperialism.
A true imperialist is indifferent to world opinion (consider our friendly neighborhood Zionists.) Buckley cared.

About the time Buckley was writing his abysmal novels, another conservative from a similar background was crafting a similar series of espionage fiction.
Charles McCarry had spent a decade in the CIA. More astute than either Buckley or Le Carre, his fiction is not only better written, from a conservative slant, it is often eerily predictive of the future.

For example, in 1995, McCarry wrote, Shelly’s Heart, in which the closely contested 2001 presidential election between two Southern candidates results in close tie, after extensive vote-fraud in California, Michigan and New York. It seems that the voting machines were hacked by a leftwing conspiracy and the deciding factor in the election will be the recount of a few thousand votes in Illinois.
Sound familiar?

And there’s The Better Angels, (written in 1979) Hijacked jets are crashed into buildings by Arab Terrorists, financed, by the scion of a wealthy Saudi family who formerly worked for the CIA.
Plans to unite Canada and the U.S. are afoot and another election is stolen by computer hackers.
Written in 1979….
All McCarry’s novels are worth reading, because he writes them with the New England WASP sophistication that Buckley disdained to use.

Even before his demise, it was to Le Carre that McCarry, not Buckley was often compared.

Throughout his life, Buckley possessed genius, talent, articulacy and relative wealth, he was not a philosopher and lacked sufficient ideological groundings.
Genetics tell all, and it is a telling fact that Buckley’s son, Christopher is a moderate libertarian, of the D.C./New York City variety who voted for Bill Clinton in 1996.

Because living as a wealthy Manhattanite yachtsman, Buckley was utterly unaffected by the issues which engaged his movement.
He had no connection with the heartland and was amenable to his last companions, the Neo-Conservatives who had managed to outlive or destroy their adversaries on the right.
Brent Bozell was co-opted, Rusher marginalized and Buchanan ex-communicated.

In the end, Buckley could at best, merely hold his ground against the Kristol’s and the Podhoretzes.
Perhaps, he figured it out, in his last years. His movement was a shambles, his last, bright young things; Austin Bramwell, Caleb Stegall, Daniel McCarthy and Michael Brendan Doherty had been exiled or simply left the movement of their own accord.
Buckley played Old King Log to the hilt. Perhaps he knew it had been all a joke. Perhaps his sense of history told him that the he’d taken the wrong fork in the road, by surrendering Sobran, Brimelow, and later Bramwell.

Sam Francis wrote of Russell Kirk,

“[Kirk] shrank, for whatever reasons, from betraying what today has long ceased to be a secret of empire: The American order is bankrupt; both political parties and the major ideological identities associated with them are part of the problem; and the regime that prevails in the metropole of Washington-New York-Hollywood is the enemy of the American people and its historic social and political order. The problem today is not to conserve it, let alone to persuade Americans that it ought to be conserved. The problem today is how to persuade Americans that it ought to be—and can be—changed.”

Kirk chose to know good and ignore evil. Buckley desired the knowledge of good and evil. He wanted to be anarchist and an imperialist—or rather his mobile convictions left him no choice but to take up the cudgels for two opposing natures.
Needless to say, only one would win out.

Perhaps, Buckley’s purge was the best thing that ever happened to Sobran and Brimelow and others whom he betrayed.
Had they continued on, they would have been forced to compromise somewhere along the line, surrendering their integrity to a democratic culture of concession, like Buckley did.

Certainly, Buckley left this world bemused by it all—more so, than he would have been willing to admit.
The opposing Right Alliance which he created by repeated purges lacks perspective on his ideology, to this day.
When he hurled Robert Welch to the lions, Buckley became an enigma rather than an enemy to the Hard Right.
Later, Revilo P. Oliver accused his fellow outcasts in the John Birch Society of being “sell-outs.”
So who was right the first time?

If there was one thing Buckley did believe in it was liberalism, of the social-democratic variety. He didn’t endorse it, but like Barry Goldwater, he probably believe that it was a necessary counter-weight to conservatism.
That is the ultimate litmus test for every conservative leader. How would your favorite polemecist adapt to a world where Tradition reigned supreme?
Buckley would have undoubtedly found it hard. This too, he undoubtedly realized, near the end.
One can picture Sam Francis, Thomas Fleming and Pat Buchanan living in quiet obscurity in a Traditionalist utopia which no longer required their services.
But not Bill Buckley. He was a firefly who burnt out in the mid-70s, but retained the substance to press on for another thirty plus years on his formidable reputation.
It’s very telling that Brimelow’s attack on Buckley has not been answered, except by a few simplistic hacks, in the blogosphere.
The Neo-Conservative intellectuals whose influence dominated Buckley’s declining years, don’t care.
And Buckley’s repeated purges had left him alone in a sea of marginally friendly faces, monopolizing him because he was Bill Buckley.
And there were the genuine followers, whose mentality was insufficient to render them worthwhile. Buckley could do little but patronize them.
At his death there is not one polemecist of equal caliber left to defend his name or perpetuate his centrist legacy.