Left Flank

About William F. Buckley, Jr., tributes have flourished. I watched Firing Line occasionally, and, although the debate format kept my interest, Buckley's taunting often didn't. Sometimes I wondered if he would fall out of his chair and choke on his pen. But, the devilish taunting was never to my liking, so it's fitting to post this with a Charlie Rose retrospective. I enjoy Charlie Rose in a way I didn't like Buckley. I also admired John McEnroe, with his tortured windmill serve, but his histrionics annoyed me just the same. Perhaps because my temper is vitriolic, I just can't appreciate someone who taunts. I have to sublimate lest I start swinging a pipe.

In the same way I admired Buckley's Catholicism. However, I inherited a Lutheranism I'm still sublimating, and I'm damn angry about it. I'm ignostic due to the fanatical faith Lutheranism foisted on me, that God is just too damn inscrutable and remote, and Christ is a luxury most peons don't deserve. Somewhere in my youth I lost joy. Buckley was less skeptical, and a little more animated.

Buckley's Catholicism was not the docile faith of the working-class Irish or Italian. Instead, he was very much in the mold of the English Catholic, for whom religion is a fighting faith against the prevailing Anglican Church. Thus, Buckley would feel no compunction in challenging American Catholics' deeply held support for welfare capitalism or later in rebelling against Pope John XXII's Pacem in Terris.

Yet the key to Buckley is to understand that he was a rebel, but not a heretic. He fancied himself and his politics to be anti-establishment, yet he was part of the American establishment against which he rebelled. He never went so far as to be cast out, or to attempt to be cast out.

Yet, as Judis himself pointed out, Buckley was tactful.

In 2004, when I had lunch with Buckley at a French restaurant a few miles from his house in Stamford, I asked him what exactly made Bush a conservative. He pondered for a moment, then said, "Well, he's a patriot and he believes in God." By this definition, of course, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would qualify as conservatives, too. Then again, it's never been entirely clear to Buckley just what constitutes an American conservative. "I confess that I know who is a conservative less surely than I know who is a liberal," he wrote in 1970. "Blindfold me, spin me about like a top, and I will walk up to the single liberal in the room without zig or zag and find him even if he is hiding behind a flower pot. I am tempted to try to develop an equally sure nose for the conservative, but I am deterred by the knowledge that conservatives, under the stress of our times, have had to invite all kinds of people into their ranks to help with the job at hand."

Buckley, a paragon of courtesy, will not say so, but I suspect he questions today the wisdom of having opened the gates quite so wide. For now, in the winter of his discontent, and from his perch above the partisan fray, he is watching the disintegration of the movement that has dominated U.S. politics for the past quarter-century--the movement Buckley did so much, perhaps more than anyone else, to create.

Now, there's a denouement only a Lutheran could appreciate.