William F buckely was not only a fine example of someone definining what conservativism was, but more importantly, what it wasn't.
William F Buckely defined a movement that repudiated the paranoid excesses of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. His was not a conservatism based on the bogeyman or Satanic forces taking control of the US government or some other secret cabal hell-bent on our destruction.
Instead his was a conservatism based on the postive values bequeathed to the world by Western culture, and dare we say it, our Judeo-Christian tradition.
His was a conservatism of rational discourse, intelligence, and discovering the truth through vigorous debate. It was a conservatism that recognized values, and was not ashamed to assert the values that America and the West in general posess in great abundance.
It was a conservatism that could also change its mind with the better argument, as was the case when Buckely himself changed his mind on the race issue.
For his was a conservatism not just of ideals, and believing inthe civilizing influence of the culture of the West, but it was a conservatism that understood that even great ideals could not politically survive were they to become entwined with some of the bigotry coming from other right wing forces on the race issue.
His was a conservatism that inspired presidents.
Because of William F Buckely Jr, conservatism is a living force in America to an exponentially greater scale than it is in any other western country on earth. In a world afloat in an endless, anchorless sea of liberalism, William Buckely is an anchor, a foundational link to a harbor of the great ideals and great cultural inheritance that will be the source of America's wealth in the future.
