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obit: Bringing out the dead.

William F. Buckley, RIPWhy we should be (mostly) glad that he outlived his brand of conservatism.

By Timothy Noah
Updated Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008, at 8:36 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

[M]y own study of McCarthy ended with his activity in September 1953 … his fight with the Army, which was what the fracas [depicted in George Clooney's film Good Night and Good Luck] was about in 1954—which got him censured, and which loosed Edward R. Murrow—was something else. … McCarthy had thrown restraint to one side. ... [H]e was deep in booze in those days and did some flatly inexcusable things, for instance his attack on General Ralph Zwicker.

Although he was tough on communism, Buckley was soft on fascism. In a "Letter From Spain" for National Review (also unearthed by Krugman), he wrote:

General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihlistis that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain's historical identity.

Fortunately for all of us, by the time Buckley's man Ronald Reagan entered the White House, various civil rights laws were already on the books, communism was dying of natural causes, and Gen. Franco (to quote Saturday Night Live) was still dead. As for dismantling the New Deal, Reagan rallied the nation against big government but did little to shrink it, instead ballooning the budget deficit from $74 billion to $155 billion. About this, Buckley said at the close of Reagan's presidency, "most cool observers now realize that the deficit is a problem not curable by any means as easy as voting for one or another presidential candidate." Meanwhile, Buckley praised the tax cuts that helped create those deficits as "a revolution not merely in economic thought but in ethical thought as well."

Reagan was clearly a Buckleyite, but the presidency of his ideological successor George W. Bush led Republicans away from Buckley-style conservatism. Partly, Bush did this by making his peace with the New Deal. Reagan had railed against big government while doing little to reduce it; Bush dispensed with the rhetoric and used the federal agencies as a patronage machine for disastrously incompetent loyalists. Bush also turned his foreign policy over to the neoconservative movement to a much greater extent than Reagan had, with the unending Iraq war the result. Buckley had never cottoned to the neoconservative movement, probably because it was too tolerant of the New Deal. Eventually Buckley would declare the Iraq war a mistake, putting himself at odds with his own magazine, which under the editorship of Rich Lowry had become emphatically neoconservative. Shortly before Buckley died, David Frum, a National Review writer, published a book that called for a carbon tax and promoted government action to combat obesity. As I write this, the Republican Party is preparing to nominate a candidate—John McCain—who, if elected, seems likely to revive Eisenhower-style modern Republicanism.

History did not stop. It never does. That's the good news, and also the bad.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
Photograph of William F. Buckley by Mario Tama/Getty Images.
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