It is, so to speak, the end of an era. William F. Buckley is giving up his controlling interest in The National Review—a leading conservative
magazine.
Tonight, however, Mr. Buckley, 78, is giving up control. In an interview, he said he planned to relinquish his shares today to a board of trustees he had selected. Among them are his son, the humorist Christopher Buckley; the magazine’s president, Thomas L. Rhodes; and Austin Bramwell, a 2000 graduate of Yale and one of the magazine’s youngest current contributors.
Mr. Buckley’s “divestiture,” as he calls it, represents the exit of one of the forefathers of modern conservatism. It is also the latest step in the gradual quieting of one of the most distinctive voices in the business of cultural and political commentary, the writer and editor who founded his magazine on a promise to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop,’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it.”
…”The question is choose some point to quit or die onstage, and there wouldn’t be any point in that,” Mr. Buckley said, recalling his retirement from his television program “Firing Line” a few years ago. “Thought was given and plans were made to proceed with divestiture.”
I’ve never been a fan of Mr. Buckley’s. In fact, he’s been known on occasion to set my teeth on edge. So much of his conservatism seems to come from the perspective of a member of a priviledged class arguing for the continuance of that priviledge and of its exclusivity. To paraphrase his quote above, Mr. Buckley positioned himself “athwart history” somewhere around the time he started the National Review, back in 1954, and has always given the impression that it would have been perfectly fine with him had social progress stopped right about then. (As a white, heterosexual, Protestant male, I can imagine he wood. Those were very good times to be all the things he is.) I can’t help but think that if the world were as Buckley would have it, I—being pretty much the opposite of everything Buckley is—wouldn’t have the life I now enjoy, had time stopped about when he seems to have wanted it to.
Someone else puts it better than I can:
Not everyone shares this assessment of Mr. Buckley’s work. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, called Mr. Buckley’s sometimes baroque style “genially ridiculous.”
Mr. Wieseltier added: “It is a kind of antimodern pretense, but of course he is in fact a completely modern man. His thinking and his writing have all the disadvantages of a happy man. The troubling thing about Bill Buckley’s work is how singularly untroubled it is by things.”
Still, I’ll give Buckley this much; he’s head an shoulders above some of the more popular conservative writers and commentators today. I’d take him over Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, or Sean Hannity any day of the week. He may be just as insulting to those who stand to the left of his own positions, but at least his insults are elegantly phrased.