Buckley: a great conservative, or just a great Cold Warrior?

Paul Cella writing at Red State pays tribute to William Buckley’s leadership in the one area about which he was truly passionate and committed: opposition to Communism.

I agree with Mr. Cella’s praise and gratitude to Buckley as an anti-Communist intellectual leader. But I also agree with Gintas J.’s superb comment the other day:

Buckley, in summation, seems an odd sort to build and maintain a conservative movement. How did he build it? He sure didn’t maintain it. Did he build a Conservative movement, or just a “Win The Cold War” movement? You’d think a conservative movement based on the Permanent Things would have outlasted the Cold War a little.

Gintas has just explained why Buckley, and so many other conservatives, went into intellectual eclipse after the fall of Soviet Communism. There was nothing else they really knew about and cared about. Their conservatism, in the end, did not consist in an articulation and defense of our civilization, but in opposition to one particular thing that dramatically threatened that civilization. When it came to defending our civilization from more subtle but no less grave dangers, they have been (a) unserious, or (b) silent, or (c) actively on the other side. Buckley himself said that to deport illegal aliens would be the moral equivalent of shipping African slaves across the Atlantic, and that a fence to stop Mexicans from invading the U.S. would be the moral equivalent of the Berlin Wall! Think of the betrayal in those words: Buckley was equating a defense of the borders and sovereignty of the United States with what Buckley himself saw as the greatest evil in the modern world.

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Paul Nachman writes:

Perhaps you should attribute the Mexican border/Berlin wall analogy to sheer stupidity, since the point has been made a million times that one would be to keep people out, the other was to keep people in.

You’ll object that he wasn’t stupid. I say he flunked a test that proved he was. Or if not stupid, terminally thoughtless and unserious.

LA replies:

Yes, valid point. But I’d say that that difference is secondary in the mind of a liberal—and here Buckley was thinking like a libeal. For liberals, we livle in a world of equally free humans. Whether you’re keeping people out or keeping them in is secondary to the fact that you are restricting their equally free choice to go where they will.

Thus, under modern liberalism, promoted by such conservative anti-totalitarian luminaries as William F. Buckley and John Paul II, any restriction on individual freedom of choice becomes the moral equivalent of keeping people locked in a totalitarian society. Remember that JPII categorized immigration restrictions with abortion as a crime against the “culture of life.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 05, 2008 01:15 PM | Send