When William F. Buckley Jr. died Wednesday at the age of 82, conservatives mourned the loss of an intellectual titan whose life’s work had helped give birth to the modern conservative movement.
But seriously, how much brainpower does an individual need to command in order to be considered an intellectual titan in crowds populated by the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh?
Buckley became known to millions through newspaper column, the TV show Firing Line and the pages of the National Review, a conservative publication he founded in 1955. He famously claimed that the magazine "stands athwart history yelling Stop."
Several of the conservatives who eulogized Buckley said that he was not himself a racist. But there is too much evidence to suggest that Buckley used his keen mind and trademark polysyllabic prose on behalf of causes that were both intellectually indefensible and morally reprehensible. Astonishingly, he defended bigotry in the South, saying that whites had the right to impose their ideas on blacks who were as yet culturally and politically inferior to them.
After some fellow conservatives objected, Buckley blithely suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should be denied the vote.
In some ways, the Ivy League-educated Buckley resembled the archetypical country-club Republican. It’s not difficult to imagine someone like him playing golf at the private country club and slugging back martinis at the 19th hole — someone who could see the less fortunate around him and be unmoved, simply by invoking the phrase, "not our kind, dear."
Maybe it was that kind of disconnect that allowed Buckley to retain views that were anti-Semitic long after the Roman Catholic church whose teachings he subscribed to had renounced such views He declined to turn over the reins of the National Review to a journalist who was Jewish.
When Catholic bishops produced a document calling for the church to end efforts aimed at converting Jews, Buckley offered the following observation: "...the long tenure of Pope John Paul II is marked by dramatic efforts to disown, as indeed un-Christian, that much of Church history that tolerated and encouraged what we would now call anti-Semitism, considered, back then, evangelical ardor."
Wow. "Evangelical ardor" as a synonym for the more than 1,000 people estimated burned during the various inquisitions sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church. I get exasperated when evangelical ardor leads church-goers to put flyers on my windshield.
Buckley’s personal charm lent an aura of respectability to ideas that otherwise would be too awful to contemplate. Many of his would-be successors cannot maintain that veneer or civility.
That’s nothing to celebrate.