He defined the antitheses to the foregoing paragraph as central to contemporary liberalism (see his “Up From Liberalism”). And so he saw that the fundamental enemy was not so much the logical-extension collectivism of, e.g., communism, but the liberalism that abided it and made it possible — not statism or atheism or Keynesianism or pacifism but the tolerating liberalism under which they flourished.

Finally, as Buckley understood a liberalism consisting of multiple strains, so he saw that a countervailing conservatism — to be successful, even victorious — must go beyond this or that single issue to contain all its essential strains. Still, he knew, any amalgamated conservatism would grow enervated were it ever to become an ideology (as a hence capital-l Liberalism already had become) requiring strict adherence to every item in a capital-c Conservative litany.

So this formidable, far-seeing revolutionary mounted the intellectual ramparts and poured boiling oil. His newspaper column — the first by a conservative to go beyond David Lawrence, George Sokolsky and Holmes Alexander — led to conservative dominance in writing and ideas on op-ed pages for two generations. His televised “Firing Line” far outclassed today’s network shout-shows and made possible Fox News and talk radio. His speeches, books and multitudinous writings left an effete liberalism little more than a blob of blubbering protoplasm.

Thereby, Bill Buckley galvanized conservatives into a new conservatism and — brighter, more optimistic, and more persuasive than anyone around him — made it relevant and respectable.

He rendered it victorious, too. Without him, there would have been no Barry Goldwater, no Ronald Reagan, and none of the past decades’ seismic shifts in the sociopolitical plates. Along the way he proved, among many others, the truth articulated so well by George Will — that anyone not actively conservative likely will drift left.

Now surely busy galvanizing the angels, Bill Buckley knows the principal risk today is that certain ideologized social conservatives may not rally to the conservative John McCain. And so, inviting the godawful alternative (albeit of a different sort), we would throw the hard-fought Buckley-led victory away and risk becoming — as a people and a nation — what, dismally, we used to be.