CAMPUS

Buckley v. The World: The Conservative Icon at his Impudent Best

Most of us cut our teeth at publications that are namesakes of his brainchild.

We admire his elegant writing as much as his A-list group of friends, his lifestyle of travel and hobbies. We marvel at how a man so busy finds the time, not to mention the drive, not to mention the ability, to pump out almost a book a year, for 50 years — and his son who is even more productive than the icon was at his age.

It’s easy to forget that things weren’t always this way. Not even for William F. Buckley, Jr. Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription, a collection of outtakes from National Review’s popular “Notes & Asides” column featuring non-traditional letters to the editor, reminds you of this.

It’s also easy to forget just how far conservatism has come since chilly November 1955. Just earlier that year, it had been declared dead. Wrote the influential Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, “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 nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Fifty-two years later, and not only are conservative (and libertarian) ideas “in general circulation,” but liberal is a four-letter word in the political lexicon. William F. Buckley Jr.’s fortnightly correctly receives a lot of credit for that.

It’s easy, then, as an admirer, to forget that Buckley is a man, too. A man who, 50 years before he retired from day-to-day work at National Review and was widely hailed as the “godfather” of the conservative movement, had plenty of critics and naysayers himself.

Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription reveals Buckley as his contemporaries knew him, not the saintly, agree-to-disagree type he’s portrayed as in the mainstream media.

Buckley himself has noticed this trend, and he doesn’t like it. As he said in a 2005 interview with the New York Times, “When generations go by and you get fresh players, people are prone to say, ‘Well, he isn’t as civilized as that other guy.’ And it’s opportunistic,” Buckley continued, “because one has the feeling — at least I do — that they’re trying to give an authenticity to their criticism, which is more easily done by making comparisons of that kind.”

In short: it’s disingenuous to compare the present day disfavorably to the time of men who are leaving the debate, whose voices no longer influence the debate. Said more bluntly, as Buckley’s nephew, Brent Bozell III, did when I asked him about how the mainstream media has changed its tone regarding his uncle, and “[to liberals,] the only good conservative is a dead one or a retired one.”

How things have changed. Wittingly or not, Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription plays the role of counter-history to the narratives portraying Buckley as the sterling example of Conservatism Done Right. We see this best in a conversely humorous and heated exchange between WFB and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., when the latter declined an appearance on “Firing Line,” unwilling as he was to do anything to “help” Buckley or further his worldview.

When Buckley published his rejoinder, Schlesinger responds, gruffly. “I do not see National Enquirer or National Review or whatever it is called, but I understand you ran your silly letter to me…in a better world I might have hoped you had the elementary fairness, or guts, to provide equal time; but, alas, wrong again.”

Buckley responds in kind: “Now, suppose I had begun this letter “Dear Arthur, or Dear Barfer, or whatever you call yourself.” Would I do that? No; and not merely because it’s childish, but because it isn’t funny.”

When Schlesinger sheepishly counters that “the reason one confused National Enquirerand National Review is because they have comparable standards of wit, taste, intelligence, and reliability,” Buckley goes in for the kill: “it is obvious to me that only someone who had difficulty in distinguishing between National Enquirer and National Review could have written such works of history as you have.”

When Newsweek prints a story claiming that National Review and the head of the hateful and racist Liberty Lobby “agree on about 90 per cent of their positions,” Buckley doesn’t miss a beat.

“This is about as illuminating as if National Review were to report that Newsweek and the Soviet Union agree ‘on about 90 per cent of their positions’ (health care, Social Security, educational opportunity for all…),” he begins. “What is distinctive about Liberty Lobby isn’t its love of the American flag or its belief in the free market. The outstanding contribution of Liberty Lobby to the public discourse is its concern…for the “niggerfication” of America, and its discovery that the Holocaust was a Jewish hoax.”

And when the New York Times makes the same mistake and hails National Review and the Liberty Lobby as “two organs of the conservative movement,” Buckley’s acid tongue re-emerges: “Think what you will of American conservatism, but pray do not confuse it with that pestilential sheet.”

By the time of the last Notes & Asides column, on December 31, 2005, the feature had begun to receive too few fitting correspondences to continue regularly, and disbanded after a 40 year run, retiring from regular appearance at the same time as its creator and prime contributor.

Casual readers will enjoy seeing WFB “let his hair down,” so to speak, not to mention the famous names that grace its pages. Buckley’s command of the language itself makes his every contribution a worthwhile endeavor, but Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription has something else to offer young writers, artists, and journalists, and that’s that one must trust his own voice. Anyone who tries to do anything worthwhile in life will come up against his fair share of detractors; it’s those who keep pushing forward anyway who have the most success. If Buckley had taken his intellectual ball and gone home after any of the insults contained in Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription, not only would we have lost a unique voice among the chorus, but conservatism itself may well have been the worse off.

The Buckley who gives as good as he gets is the Buckley that America has come to know and begrudgingly respect — and a different man from the Buckley that mainstream America has come to mythologize. Conservatives who know the difference, and prefer the former, won’t be disappointed by Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription — even if they decline taking its editor up on his advice.

James David Dickson is the Collegiate Network Fellow at The Detroit News.