I read that first line and had to think about good ole' @Tricord and his elitist disdain for those who (rightly) view the academy with intense distrust. If you ever get a chance to go and watch Buckley debate liberals, progressives, et al, he absolutely destroys them. His vocabulary was so extensive I don't think they could intellectually follow him 90% of the time. If you watch him or read his works, have a dictionary at hand.
Was William F. Buckley a Populist?
Not quite. He disliked the liberal elite mostly because it was liberal.
William F. Buckley, Jr., then Conservative Party candidate for mayor of New York City, outside the Overseas Press Club in 1965. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
Alvin S. Felzenberg
Feb. 26, 2018 6:53 p.m. ET
55 COMMENTS
William F. Buckley wrote in 1963 that “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard.” What would Buckley, who died Feb. 27, 2008, have made of today’s populism?
The answer isn’t entirely clear. He certainly preferred entrusting the nation’s fate to the public at large rather than to an elite he saw as uniform in opinion, hopelessly left-leaning and usually wrong. He dedicated his career to opposing that elite’s central doctrine, “moral equivalence.”
Buckley wanted American institutions to affirm capitalism on the grounds that it created more wealth and higher civilization than any alternative. He wanted them to acknowledge that not all cultures were equal and that the Judeo-Christian creed was superior because it recognized that man was created in the image of God. That premise, he held, was the source of all liberty, justice and law.
By the time he scoffed at the Harvard faculty, Buckley had already waged two celebrated battles against the prevailing liberal establishment—Yale’s curriculum and the State Department’s failure to take internal security seriously. Populism became the means through which he took each institution to task.
With insular academic departments prone to conformity rather than diversity of thought, Buckley would have university trustees, themselves accountable to alumni, reassert their authority to hire and fire faculty. If federal bureaucracies proved slow to ferret out security risks, Buckley would have Congress, the branch of government closest to the people, exercise oversight.
But in both instances, Buckley’s ultimate goal was to build a conservative elite—he called them “tablet keepers”—that would police the movement he founded, and if necessary purge it of bigots, anti-Semites, racists and kooks. One of his most notable campaigns was waged against the John Birch Society’s Robert Welch, who held that much of the U.S. government, from President Eisenhower down, took orders from Moscow. Another was against race-baiting “welfare populists,” such as Govs. Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama, who cynically cloaked themselves in “states rights” and other conservative tenets.
As a child, Buckley learned to fear mobs by watching newsreels that depicted enthusiastic crowds cheering on foreign dictators at rallies. “They did not appear to have been coerced,” he wrote in a paper when he was a boarding-school student.
He lamented in another student submission that a ballot cast by an unintellectual, uneducated citizen received the same weight as one cast by a voter who had studied the issues and was able to distinguish among the candidates. He worried that uninformed voters would be manipulated by corrupt political machines or flattered by demagogues. Today’s political scene would have given him ample cause for anxiety.
Mr. Felzenberg is author of “A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.” He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications.
Was William F. Buckley a Populist?
Not quite. He disliked the liberal elite mostly because it was liberal.
William F. Buckley, Jr., then Conservative Party candidate for mayor of New York City, outside the Overseas Press Club in 1965. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
Alvin S. Felzenberg
Feb. 26, 2018 6:53 p.m. ET
55 COMMENTS
William F. Buckley wrote in 1963 that “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard.” What would Buckley, who died Feb. 27, 2008, have made of today’s populism?
The answer isn’t entirely clear. He certainly preferred entrusting the nation’s fate to the public at large rather than to an elite he saw as uniform in opinion, hopelessly left-leaning and usually wrong. He dedicated his career to opposing that elite’s central doctrine, “moral equivalence.”
Buckley wanted American institutions to affirm capitalism on the grounds that it created more wealth and higher civilization than any alternative. He wanted them to acknowledge that not all cultures were equal and that the Judeo-Christian creed was superior because it recognized that man was created in the image of God. That premise, he held, was the source of all liberty, justice and law.
By the time he scoffed at the Harvard faculty, Buckley had already waged two celebrated battles against the prevailing liberal establishment—Yale’s curriculum and the State Department’s failure to take internal security seriously. Populism became the means through which he took each institution to task.
With insular academic departments prone to conformity rather than diversity of thought, Buckley would have university trustees, themselves accountable to alumni, reassert their authority to hire and fire faculty. If federal bureaucracies proved slow to ferret out security risks, Buckley would have Congress, the branch of government closest to the people, exercise oversight.
But in both instances, Buckley’s ultimate goal was to build a conservative elite—he called them “tablet keepers”—that would police the movement he founded, and if necessary purge it of bigots, anti-Semites, racists and kooks. One of his most notable campaigns was waged against the John Birch Society’s Robert Welch, who held that much of the U.S. government, from President Eisenhower down, took orders from Moscow. Another was against race-baiting “welfare populists,” such as Govs. Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama, who cynically cloaked themselves in “states rights” and other conservative tenets.
As a child, Buckley learned to fear mobs by watching newsreels that depicted enthusiastic crowds cheering on foreign dictators at rallies. “They did not appear to have been coerced,” he wrote in a paper when he was a boarding-school student.
He lamented in another student submission that a ballot cast by an unintellectual, uneducated citizen received the same weight as one cast by a voter who had studied the issues and was able to distinguish among the candidates. He worried that uninformed voters would be manipulated by corrupt political machines or flattered by demagogues. Today’s political scene would have given him ample cause for anxiety.
Mr. Felzenberg is author of “A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.” He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications.
