RIP William Buckley Jr. 1925-2008

[Trollbait]

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

Buckley so loved a good argument—especially when he won—that he compiled a book of bickering in "Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription," published in 2007 and featuring correspondence with the famous (Nixon, Reagan) and the merely annoyed.

"Mr. Buckley," one non-fan wrote in 1967, "you are the mouthpiece of that evil rabble that depends on fraud, perjury, dirty tricks, anything at all that suits their purposes. I would trust a snake before I would trust you or anybody you support."

Responded Buckley: "What would you do if I supported the snake?"

[Croinc]

I wonder if they will do a tribute of some sort at the GOP Convention......seeing as, ya know, the GOP is nominating a "true conservative".

[Finglefinn]

RIP


http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/27/ ... cnn_latest

[Partha]

I'm sad that article didn't talk about his civil rights work in the 1960's.

[Klast Brell]

I kept coming across the quote from his national review article from 1957. To be fair I wanted to read the whole thing in context. It took way too much digging to find it, but here it is.

'why the South Must Prevail
The most important event of the past three weeks
was the remarkable and unexpected vote by the
Senate to guarantee to defendants in a criminal contempt
action the privilege of a jury trial . That vote
does not necessarily affirm a citizen's intrinsic rights :
trial by jury in contempt actions, civil or criminal,
is not an American birthright, and it cannot, therefore,
be maintained that the Senate's vote upheld,
pure and simple, the Common Law .
What the Senate did was to leave undisturbed the
mechanism that spans the abstractions by which a
society is guided and the actual, sublunary requirements
of the individual community. In that sense,
the vote was a conservative victory. For the effect
of it is-and let us speak about it bluntly-to permit
a jury to modify or waive the law in such circumstances
as, in the judgment of the jury, require so
grave an interposition between the law and its violator.
What kind of circumstances do we speak about?
Again, let us speak frankly . The South does not want
to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving
him of the vote . Political scientists assert
that minorities do not vote as a unit . Women do not
vote as a bloc, they contend ; nor do Jews, or Catholics,
or laborers, or nudists-nor do Negroes ; nor
will the enfranchised Negroes of the South .
If that is true, the South will not hinder the Negro
from voting-why should it, if the Negro vote, like
the women's, merely swells the volume, but does not
affect the ratio, of the vote? In some parts of the
South, the White community merely intends to prevail-
that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on
which there is corporate disagreement between Negro
and White. The White community will take whatever
measures are necessary to make certain that it has
its way .
What are such issues? Is school integration one?
The NAACP and others insist that the Negroes as
a unit want integrated schools . Others disagree, contending
that most Negroes approve the social separation
of the races. What if the NAACP is correct,
and the matter comes to a vote in a community in
which Negroes predominate? The Negroes would,
according to democratic processes, win the election ;
but that is the kind of situation the White community
will not permit . The White community will not count
the marginal Negro vote . The man who didn't count
it will be hauled up before a jury, he will plead not
guilty, and the jury, upon deliberation, will find him
not guilty. A federal judge, in a similar situation,
might find the defendant guilty, a judgment which
would affirm the law and conform with the relevant
political abstractions, but whose consequences might
be violent and anarchistic.
The central question that emerges-and it is not
a parliamentary question or a question that is
answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the
rights of American citizens, born Equal-is whether
the White community in the South is entitled to take
such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically
and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate
numerically? The sobering answer is Yes
-the White community is so entitled because, for
the time being, it is the advanced race . It is not easy,
and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing
the median cultural superiority of White over Negro :
but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be
hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists
. The question, as far as the White community
is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization
supersede those of universal suffrage . The British
believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya,
where the choice was dramatically one between civilization
and barbarism, and elsewhere ; the South,
where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in
Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative
differences between its culture and the Negroes',
and intends to assert its own .
NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South's premises
are correct. If the majority wills what is socially
atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though
undemocratic, enlightened . It is more important for
any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and
live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands
of the numerical majority . Sometimes it becomes
impossible to assert the will of a minority,
in which case it must give way, and the society will
regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot
prevail except by violence: then it must determine
whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible
price of violence .
The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting
the original version of the Civil Rights bill
were based was Universal Suffrage . Everyone in
America is entitled to the vote, period . No right is
prior to that, no obligation subordinate to it ; from
this premise all else proceeds .
That, of course, is demagogy. Twenty-year-olds do
not generally have the vote, and it is not seriously
argued that the difference between 20 and 21-yearolds
is the difference between slavery and freedom .
The residents of the District of Columbia do not
vote: and the population of D .C. increases by geometric
proportion. Millions who have the vote do not
care to exercise it ; millions who have it do not know
how to exercise it and do not care to learn . The
great majority of the Negroes of the South who do
not vote do not care to vote, and would not know
for what to vote if they could . Overwhelming numbers
of White people in the South do not vote. Universal
suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or
the beginning of freedom . Reasonable limitations
upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendation
of tyrants or oligarchists (was Jefferson either?) .
The problem in the South is not how to get the vote
for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro-and a
great many Whites-to cast an enlightened and
responsible vote .
The South confronts one grave moral challenge .
It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness
to preserve the Negro as a servile class . It is tempting
and convenient to block the progress of a minority
whose services, as menials, are economically useful .
Let the South never permit itself to do this . So long
as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior
mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine
cultural equality between the races, and so long as
it does so by humane and charitable means, the South
is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that
permits it to function .

August 24, 1957 edition of the National Review

[Embar Angylwrath]

Later in his life he regretted that position.

[Finglefinn]

Quite a large sector of the population of the US agreed with that position in 1957.

[Partha]

Indeed, he was eaten later by the very creatures he helped create.

A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley--two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party--begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking--"I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I'm going to have some ex-friends on the right, too," he rants--and Buckley says to the chair, "Just take the mike, there's no other way." He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.

Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left- liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims, "There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and "thank God" for that.

Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded National Review in 1955--when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction--and he has always been skeptical of appeals to "the people," preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a worldview that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning."

The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward." His wife nods and says, "Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

I decide to track down Buckley and Podhoretz separately and ask them for interviews. Bill is sitting forlornly in his cabin, scribbling in a notebook. In 2005, at an event celebrating National Review's fiftieth birthday, President Bush described today's American conservatives as "Bill's children." I ask him if he feels like a parent whose kids grew up to be serial killers. He smiles slightly, and his blue eyes appear to twinkle. Then he sighs, "The answer is no. Because what animated the conservative core for forty years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That's pretty well gone."

This does not feel like an optimistic defense of his brood, but it's a theme he returns to repeatedly: The great battles of his life are already won. Still, he ruminates over what his old friend Ronald Reagan would have made of Iraq. "I think the prudent Reagan would have figured here, and the prudent Reagan would have shunned a commitment of the kind that we are now engaged in. ... I think he would have attempted to find some sort of assurance that any exposure by the United States would be exposure to a challenge the dimensions of which we could predict." Lest liberals be too eager to adopt the Gipper as one of their own, Buckley agrees approvingly that Reagan's approach would have been to "find a local strongman" to rule Iraq.

A few floors away, Podhoretz tells me he is losing his voice, "which will make some people very happy." Then he croaks out the standard-issue Wolfowitz line about how, after September 11, the United States had to introduce democracy to the Middle East in order to change the political culture that produced the mass murderers. For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, he is remarkably blasé about the fact that 80 percent of Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. "I don't much care," he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that "nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo" and that Bush is "a hero." He is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will attack Iran.

"I keep telling people we are in World War Four," Podhoretz declares. He fumes at Buckley, George Will, and the other apostate conservatives who refuse to see sense. He again declares victory. And for a moment, here in the Mexican breeze, it is as though, thousands of miles away, Baghdad is not bleeding.