William F. Buckley, Jr. is certainly not beyond criticism and I
think there is a case to be made that the modern American
conservative movement did not succeed (or, more optimistically, has
not yet succeeded) in accomplishing its policy goals to the same
extent as New Deal liberalism. But this Timothy Noah column about Buckley, besides being
graceless, overstates the case quite a bit. Noah appears to suggest
that rolling back the New Deal and stopping the civil rights
movement were bigger conservative/Buckleyite goals than winning the
Cold War, ending 1970s stagflation or stopping the postwar slide to
European-style social democracy.
Now why would he frame the issue in this manner? Partly because
it makes it easier to portray conservatives as racist
crypto-fascists. And partly because it downplays conservatism's
biggest successes ("by the time Buckley's man Ronald Reagan entered
the White House... communism was dying of natural causes").
Or maybe Noah just wrote too fast, as he did when he penned this
sentence: "Shortly before he died, David Frum, a National
Review writer, published a book that called for a carbon tax
and promoted government action to combat obesity." The "he" must be
Buckley, since Frum wrote Dead Right but isn't dead.
Right?
topics:
Communism, Conservatism
