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April 09, 2008
Steyn on WFB
Kathryn Judson posted this snippet of Mark Steyn's observations on the impact of William F. Buckley:
"...The 1950s are assumed, at least by children of the Sixties, to be a “conservative” era. But at home New Deal liberalism controlled all the levers of society and abroad the Communists had gobbled up half of Europe, neutered most of the rest, swiped China, were eyeing up other valuable real estate across the planet, and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment was inclined to accept this as a permanent feature of life to be “managed” rather than defeated.The Republican minority in Congress were isolationists or country-club liberals, and their presidential nominees were “moderates” like Dewey or non-partisans like Ike. There was virtually no serious intellectual energy in American conservatism. The notion that in the early 21st century more Americans would identify themselves as “conservatives” than as “liberals” would have struck the elites of 50 years ago as preposterous: a scenario unimaginable outside the more fanciful dystopian science fiction... [snip]...
Then Bill Buckley showed up and was brilliantly effective. In the barren soil of the Fifties, he planted what became a mighty family tree that includes not just Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan but millions of other Americans. I’ve been amazed in recent days by the number of e-mails I’ve received from readers retelling essentially the same story across the decades: Buckley came to their college in the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties, and the scales fell from their eyes. Or they were in the local library and found a stray copy of something called “National Review” that had somehow managed to penetrate the perimeter fence. Or they were flipping through the channels late at night and stumbled across this cool guy with a pencil effortlessly eviscerating some liberal panjandrum..."...
"There was virtually no serious intellectual energy in American conservatism." Absolutely spot on. I've come to the conclusion that the image of the "fifties" that is so reviled by the baby boomers is really a myth, a creation of Hollywood, really. Think of it: Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best were creations of the Hollywood studios and bear as little resemblance to everyday life in the fifties as Friends did to life in the early 2000's. And Steyn makes an observation that should be obvious: the fifties were the absolute low point of conservative ideological influence.
I'm pretty close with my praise of so-called great men or women, but it cannot be denied that WFB was a truly great man.
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