Today's America has quite a different political climate from the one into
which William Frank Buckley was born November 24, 1925, mainly because he
made the difference.
It was an America in which the conservative philosophy could scarcely be
called a philosophy; it was more like a relic under glass, its skeletal
remains rolled out now and then for an occasional autopsy by Walter Lippmann
or a funeral mass under the direction of George Santayana. Any distinction
between conservative thought and right-wing nuttism, the holy and profane,
had long ago blurred into inconsequentiality. Those bones had about as much
chance of living again as Robert A. Taft had of being elected president of
the United States.
By 1950, the cultivated Lionel Trilling, one of the few members of the
professoriate who had some reverence for the old ways, could observe: "In
the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even
the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no
conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."
Professor Trilling's diagnosis was all too accurate. Oh, there was still a
conservative impulse in American politics after the second Great War -
"perhaps even stronger than some of us know," the professor admitted. But
there was no extant conservative thought, he opined, only "irritable mental
gestures which seek to resemble ideas." That comment was more than a
diagnosis; it could have been an epitaph.
That was the valley of dry bones into which strode a young student at Yale -
Buckley, Wm. F. Jr., of the Connecticut and oil Buckleys - and which he
proceeded to bring to life despite the best efforts of academe to discourage
him. It's not that Bill Buckley was present at the creation of the
conservative revival; he pretty much created it, beginning at Yale.
This obstreperous young Edwardian, complete with the manners and accent of
his rarefied class, outpointed Yale's stultified bureaucracy at every
opportunity. This snooty caricature of all that Yale was solemnly dedicated
to extirpating reacted to its solemn efforts by compiling a best-selling
catalogue of its dull gray sins. Instead of being cowed like a proper
undergraduate eager for the system's approval, young Buckley fought back
with surprising zest. The result was his "God and Man at Yale: The
Superstitions of ŒAcademic Freedom.' "