My first encounter with William F. Buckley was watching that video I posted earlier. What struck me even before my appreciation of his sublimely poised calm was the purely gorgeous nature of his voice. With an undertone of aloof arrogance and positively aching with intellect and wry wit its smooth, supple tones lulled me with their feline grace.

His views on Vietnam were largely nonsense but as an experience it was superb.

Even before his death I could only see him largely as a figure of the past, no small part due to the pure measured and calmly courteous nature of his tone. He seems precisely the polar opposite of the snarling shock-jock outfits that have become the widely unchallenged mouthpiece of the right. This nature of him as a part of the part was stressed by Johann Hari in a piece he wrote on a conservative cruise in 2006. In a debate with Norman Podhoretz, another elderly statesman of the conservative movement Buckley, ever the empiricist, enquired “Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” only to receive some deranged rant about them being hidden in Syria, instead of being used on the American troops.

Of the two the right has gone far more towards the “National Greatness” espoused by Podhoretz than the “Individual Freedom” demanded by Buckley. Have rehabilitated the entire concept of conservatism Buckley lived long enough to see it plunged into a much deeper nadir than he had found it in. The American right as it stands remains wary of accepting John McCain, a victim of torture, into its bosom on the grounds that he was opposed to the use of torture methods. Having once based their entire movement around opposition to Communism’s faults and the promotion of limited government they now rely upon money to support their vast neo-conservative spending plans secured in loans from Communist China.

In the same article he explains to Hari he states the explanation for this willing plunge into the murk being being that: “What animated the conservative core for 40 years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That’s pretty well gone.” The achievement of Buckley was fairly substantial, indeed would have been entirely impossible without this united foe: much like Rove’s altogether more foul union of the Right was dependent upon hatred and noise Buckley’s unofficial yet cohesive coalition of libertarians, paleo-conservatives, traditionalists and, most strikingly of all, ex-communists were brought together solely by their consensus that Communism was too dangerous to be allowed to flourish abroad and socialism too inept to be introduced in America.

The latter element of the union are perhaps the most notable, in his 1969 Problems of Communist History Hobsbawm identified the high turn-over of the Communist Party as one of its major flaws. There was only a certain length of time that the overwhelming majority of young idealists could stand the Soviet party line and this led to a good deal of rapid departures. In America I imagine that a fair proportion of these disillusioned departures can to Buckley. This caused understandable stresses within the New Republic but these were resolved largely through internal discussion.

Long since has this era past: the Right establishes strict consensuses now, with any who diverge oft derided as mere “Liberals”. This article credits Buckley with reinvigorating the conservative movement and asks whether it will remain in existence after his demise. It is, in fact, something that I had considered before. After watching the aforementioned video I find myself rather morbidly pondering over which would cease first and what the consequences would be. Chomsky would leave a void that the relativist left would struggle to fill but Buckley seems to have remained active but not prominent, no longer relevant to a political movement that has long since abandoned effectively everything that he advocated, save the name.

The likelihood of it returning to its former path seems minuscule: as Buckley stated it had achieved its aims and thus was left devoid of direction and highly vague, the ultimate victim of its own success. Alas one of the residual elements that it retained was the dab of cognitive dissonance that was unmistakably present in much of TNRs output: this is the magazine that praised Mussolini in a retrospect, served as an outright apologist for Franco and suggested that Jews were silly and irrational for wishing to stage trials for Nazis caught decades after their genocidal crimes. And so the present incarnation of TNR defends waterboarding, “Rendition” to countries willing to do worth to the untried and massive innocent death in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So the most loathsome elements of his philosophy have been safely transposed while the vast amount of worthwhile material of it, both in ideals and in tone, are long since abandoned. He was a highly intelligent man, a fine speaker with an excellent voice and a perpetual challenge for all promoting leftism, but one of the variety which was enjoyable to face rather than ear-ache inducing and forseeably dull. The world is a less invigorating place in his absence.