Word: buckleys
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...There is no doubt that Buckley deserves much of the credit for the right-wing ascendancy of the past thirty years. Yet in spite of being a seminal presence in modern American history, he launched his career with a much different conception of the National Review’s purpose: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” That Buckley was dead wrong on pretty much every major historical issue of his time?...
...founder of the National Review, Buckley lent an intellectual conscience and a new energy to a conservative movement that had long been wallowing in dour irrelevance. His greatest achievement was to serve as the demiurgic force behind the emerging conservative coalition of the 1960s and 70s, unifying Goldwater libertarianism with ardent anti-communism and the remnants of the conservative old guard. The crowning achievement of his project, of course, was the messianic rise and eventual election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency...
William F. Buckley, the majestic patriarch of modern American conservatism, died yesterday at the genteel old age of 82. He was one of the last truly charismatic public intellectuals—and in this sense his passing should be lamented by anyone nostalgic for those days when ideas and the “life-of-the-mind” still mattered. Buckley was certainly an artifact of this dwindling era: He famously lost his temper on national television and blustered, in his droll blue-blood Connecticut brogue, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi...
...many years to come, Gore Vidal, an equally dazzling writer and social critic. Watching their strangely genteel 1968 scuffle on YouTube, we are reminded of the sorry spectacle that intellectual life has become today, polluted by such loutish mediocrities as Christopher Hitchens and Ann Coulter. Unlike the latter, Buckley had a unique talent for making even bigotry seem courteous...
...while Buckley’s anti-elitism was charming because of its element of ironic self-awareness, today’s conservatives, admittedly attempting to follow his lead, have lapsed either into a reflexive philistinism or George Will’s poseurish pomposity. Buckley only could maintain this balance because he understood that one must first have the benefit of intelligence before maligning the intelligent. As for elitism, he was an aristocrat par excellence, fond of Bach and sailing, and is rumored to have taken his yacht outside of U.S. waters so that he could smoke pot while preserving...