"Right Reason: A Laurel for William F. Buckley, Jr."

         Everybody says how witty and urbane Bill Buckley is -- and he is.  But nobody stops to say that he's right -- and he is.  Humor and sophistication are not the limits of his contribution to American politics or journalism.  Face it, he was right about Yale decades ago, and he's been right most of the time ever since. 
         He was right to complain about the Washington pundits who think that reducing the tax burden on high wage earners is taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich -- as if ceasing to take from someone what is not yours to begin with constitutes a gift.
         He was right to oppose those who described the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in terms of moral equivalence -- as if military intervention anywhere on the globe could arise from only one motive:  self-aggrandizing imperialism.  He knows better than most journalists why our refusal to permit another oozing Marxist pustule on the face of the Western world is not chauvinistic, and why those who cannot understand this are moral (and therefore political) illiterates.  That is because Bill Buckley knows that those who shove old ladies aside in order to steal their purses and those who shove old ladies out of the paths of speeding buses must not be indiscriminately lumped together and condemned as shovers of old ladies.
         He was right to insist that we live in a Freud-obsessed society that believes criminals become criminals because they did not get enough food stamps when they were children. 
         He was right to say that realism helps and that it has no substitute. 
         He was right to observe that among the unemployed in America there are only three sorts of people:  those who cannot work, those who cannot find work, and those who cannot find work they are willing to do.
         He was right to teach us that governments are better advised to deflate the passions of the already passionate than to excite the desires and ire of the moderate and peaceful.
         He was right to insist that our failure to eliminate poverty through bureaucratic intervention and redistribution ought to cause us to question the very concept of welfare rather than to extend or expand it.
         He was right to endorse Milton Friedman's observation that all tyrannies are despicable, but that tyrannies of the right tend to be less tenacious in their wickedness than tyrannies of the left.
         He was even right about Edgar Smith -- but too late.
         He was right to insist that we must bring down liberalism, which is now institutionally powerful but decadent, and that we ought to advocate conservatism, which though institutionally weak is more virtuous and therefore both preferable and viable.  Danger arises, he said, when doctrinaire schemes of liberal social reform, powered as they usually are by good intentions but not by wisdom, fall into a dissolute disregard for political and moral principle.
         He was right to remind us that true eloquence is based on reality, which is precisely why those who call Bill Buckley witty and eloquent are paying him a higher compliment than they realize.

date modified:
5 July 2006