With the death of William F. Buckley, I thought I'd post one of my favorite clips of him that I found on YouTube some time ago, about his "inconsistent" view of the drug war:
Buckley was the sort of conservative that, in my childhood, I was taught all conservatives were like--intelligent, good-natured, unwilling to put up with "liberal propaganda", free-thinking, and so on. I grew up in a heavily conservative area--Roseville, California, home of the infamous Rep. John Doolittle, against whom I had the chance to vote twice before relocating to the Central Coast. The last time the Democrats carried the Fourth District of California in a presidential election was 1968, and despite being a poor representative with one hand in Jack Abramoff's pocket and another in Jack Abramoff's other pocket, Doolittle usually won re-election by landslide margins. This is all by way of saying that virtually everyone I knew growing up--the adults, anyway, and most of the kids--were conservative Republicans. I heard about the Great Reagan more often than I can remember, I heard about "the liberals" and their pathological attempts to destroy Christianity and all the rest and wondered how people could just not get it. I started to doubt the orthodoxy about the time I entered high school, in small ways at first--it was actually the subject of the death penalty that bothered me initially. I found it impossible to square with a pro-life worldview (yes, I was pro-life at the time) and intuitively I just didn't find the arguments in favor of it too compelling. Gun control was next--it seemed to make sense to me that less guns simply meant less violence. I found myself becoming more liberal, although the watershed event was when I went on a church-sponsored trip to inner-city New Orleans (pre-Katrina, of course) in which I learned that many of the "truths" I had been taught, especially in terms of poverty and African-Americans, were so untrue. I met people who worked hard but still struggled to make a living and get ahead, which just seemed unfair to me, and not at all in keeping with my conception of America. This turned out to be one of the seminal events in my life, and then the Iraq War came, which I opposed for a very good reason: I was highly attracted to a liberal girl who had me sign a petition against the war. I never actually wound up getting together with that girl, but at least I can credibly claim to have been a principled opponent of Iraq since the invasion--I just don't mention what those motivating principles actually were. And the Bush years, with all of the cronyism, the needless secrecy, extreme hard-line views, the self-righteousness and the bilious rage and anger for which the modern right has become known has made things come into focus for me. In essence, I have become a proud liberal, although the conservatism in which I was raised shows through in various places.
All of this is just to say that I wish that the Buckleys of the world were still running the conservative movement, and I wonder if he didn't undergo some sort of similar process as I did when he thought about the Iraq mess or the drug war. He must have questioned himself, struggled with how this thing he wanted to believe simply wasn't supported by the evidence, and then he went ahead and boldly challenged the assumptions of his fellows. Despite not really agreeing with much of what he had to say I always felt a sort of kindred spirit in the man, and had I been born when he did, I might very well have wound up having a political trajectory closer to his. Who can say? Ultimately, though, I am convinced that the country would be better off with a conservative movement headed by a Buckley-type figure who was willing to speak out against the right's status quo when it was wrong instead of the current situation, in which the most influential members of the right seem to be the most cynical, the ones most willing to see cracks in the conservative worldview and to try to exploit them for the sake of divisiveness. I do believe that conservatism has a place in political life, though I do not like the current strain of reactionary conservatism that has become so dominant as of late. Conservatism ought to be lower-case "p" progressive, too, I think, and that is part of the reason why I don't like the term "progressive" as a euphemism for "liberal" (in addition to the negative aspects of early 1900's progressivism) Conservatism, as I understand it, accepts the idea of progress while insisting that it needs to occur within the context of existing institutions, traditions, and beliefs. I think that Buckley knew this, and when conservatives were wrong on something--even something that got them a lot of mileage, like the "War on Drugs" or the Iraq War for a while--he was going to be damned if he just let it slide. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between a bona fide intellectual and a hack, and Buckley was certainly in the former camp. Because of my youth I can't say that it brings back memories of an earlier time when people just got along--I was raised with Rush Limbaugh, after all--but it is somehow gratifying to know that such a time existed, since the corollary is that such a time could come again.
