Buckley was great.  But, he was a deeply East Coast, deeply Establishment figure, so of course he's going to get a pass from Rich, the NYT, and the rest of the East.

Give us uno breako  here.

Goldberg is quoted as saying "Liberals today bemoan how wonderful the liberals of yesteryear were solely to lament how terrible they are today." Presumably he means the conservatives of yesteryear? Or is this some telling slip of the pen?

Whoops, never mind - looks like someone at NRO caught the slip.

Bad form by Jonah, criticizing liberals for paying tribute to Buckley on his passing, and if liberals contrast him with the boorish behavior of modern day conservatives, doesn't that pay an even higher tribute, that here is a man worthy of mourning? The correct thing would have been for him to simply acknowledge the good things written about Buckley across the political spectrum and leave it at that.

One might almost think liberals only love DEAD conservatives. It's the live ones that are trouble.

Yes, blackie, you are right.  Buckley was a gentleman.  Gentlemen are nearing extinction.

And "gentlemen of the press" has, ironically, been more of an oxymoron since the press became predominantly college educated post-Watergate.

I think Jonah actually has a point. But what does he expect? For Liberals to praise Buckley for his stance on segregation, juntas, or the welfare state? What this goes to show is that a lot of liberals want to say something nice about Buckley, because they actually quite liked him (as I did) but found certain of his views repellent. What's more, he was successful in making his views--which liberals don't like--successful, and history has now given us the Bush years. Obviously, Buckley's exact role in the causality of this is tricky business, but it does make a lot of sense that liberals are praising him for his personal nature and also for things they agreed with him about.

I think I posted this elswewhere, but in case you missed it, this has to be the best line ever uttered about Buckley, from Murry Kempton, describing a Buckley news conference as “An Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus.”  

Buckley could certainly put them in their place, though so, so graciously.

Hilariously, the Jeet Heer piece that Josh linked to above offers this evidence of Buckley's "conversion" away from a pro-apartheid agenda:

"In the 1980s, he said that if he were a black South African he would probably support the ANC, a statement that shocked fellow conservatives."

Isn't that a bit like saying that if he were a black American, he would "probably" oppose Jim Crow? (Ha! "Probably.") While it's touching that Buckley was willing to concede to blacks their right to prefer their own political enfranchisement, this was hardly evidence that he had come around, himself, on the question of whether blacks were fully human beings.

For God's sake, why can't a white South African support the ANC? For that matter, why can't a white American? And why can't a white South African oppose institutional racism in the United States?

Even after his convenient, George-Wallace-esque conversion away from the KKK's racial agenda (no: not hyperbole), Buckley was still unable to imagine that people of different races could be on the same team, fighting for common goals -- or that many whites could conclude that it was in their own best interests to fight for racial equality for everyone.

Let's be honest: Buckley didn't change his racist positions because he came to conclude that they were morally wrong. He changed them -- in the late 1960s! -- because it would no longer have been possible for him to remain a respected figure -- the kind of figure who gets the sepia-toned obit treatment from The New Republic -- without (gently) renouncing them. Buckley's straight-faced support, in the 1980s, for Nazi measures against homosexuals, including the tattooing of the buttocks of gay men, proves that the William F. Buckley we're eulogizing today is the same Buckley who had argued that blacks were sub-human animals, and the same Buckley who couldn't have a political debate with Gore Vidal without calling him a "queer." Buckley never renounced or apologized for his call for the tattooing of homosexuals, by the way. In fact, he very recently defended it.

The last thing to remember is that Buckley -- back when these positions were acceptable in polite company -- didn't just argue that black Americans shouldn't be allowed to vote. As late as the 1950s, he was making what could credibly be interpreted as a defense of the institution of slavery. Even if Buckley himself would have reluctantly agreed that slavery was a terrible institution (at the very least, it was the kind of institution that polite persons did not approve of in the 1950s), his argument for the disenfranchisement and abjection of blacks in the 50s was the exact same argument that had been used for more than a century to justify the imprisonment of African-Americans. To return to this quote, which I'm glad to see is making the rounds this week:

"The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes - the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists."

This doesn't even represent a tweak of the pro-slavery arguments of the 18th and 19th century. The only thing that's changed is the final conclusion: "And so, we should continue [slavery/segregation]."

Fundamentally, then, I agree with Jonah Goldberg here. It's absurd for liberals to go soft on Buckley, or to imagine that he represents a more civil or palatable version of rightism than the one we've got today.

I just hope I'm not around when The New Republic rhapsodizes over the recently deceased "great Conservative" Ann Coulter. I have no doubt that, by then, the right will have become so much more vulgar and cruel that even Coulter seems, in retrospect, to have offered something admirable.

I call for a What's Your Problem? on this. Or has that program bitten the dust?

"WYP" RIP.

Let's hope, anyway. Goldberg is apparently trying to fill Buckley's Outrageous-but-Cordial Conservative shoes. He's about 5 sizes too small. It's painful to watch.

On top of that, the WYP format is so annoyingly unprofessional that it makes "Firing Line" look high-tech and cutting-edge by comparison.  

The "very important" thing Buckley supposedly got right was that he was opposed to socialism.  Well, fine.  Socialism, in this country, was decisively taken off the table by the New Deal, which saved capitalism for America.  Of course, Buckley engaged in that sort of imprecise and unintelligent rhetoric which equates the New Deal itself and similar measures to socialism, in which case he got something very important very wrong on that score too.

So what, exactly, did he get right?  He was very wrong about white supremacy (digustingly so), very wrong about homosexuality (disgustlingly so), and very wrong about McCarthyism.  As a student, he was very wrong about WWII.  He brought a genteel, upper-crust sensibility (along with a lot of fancy words) to an extreme right-wing agenda, and so, yes, in that sense, he managed to pull conservatism into the mainstream -- by making it seem respectable.  But he, like fellow pundit George Will, was more the clever stylist than the serious intellect it seemed he wanted to be mistaken for.  I've known *very* smart, very conservative people.  Buckley was not in their league, despite his affected erudition.

What hildner said. Buckley's legacy will be as a performance artist. Closer to Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal than to any serious political thinker or institution-builder. His movement has collapsed precisely because its intellectual foundations were so weak.

Well I found WYP mildly endearing. The problem with Goldberg is the old Arafat conundrum, militant speeches in Arabic, softer rhetoric for the UN.