When our friend William F. Buckley Jr. died on
February 27 at 82, the world poured forth a library of
grateful recollection. His passing made the cover of
Newsweek, The Weekly Standard, and the front page of
The New York Times. National Review, which Bill Buckley
founded in 1955 when he was only 29, devoted almost all of
its issue for March 24 to memorializing his
accomplishments
—literary, political, journalistic, nautical, oenological,
social, musical, philanthropic, gustatory, and
philological (that’s the short list). As far as we know,
only one or two mephitic breathes of resentment wafted out
from the petulant fever wards of political atavism that Bill
Buckley had manfully quarantined in his early years at
National Review. The overwhelming response interwove
admiration, sadness, and gratitude in more or less equal
proportions.

Endeavoring to epitomize Bill Buckley’s achievement, many of
the eulogies settled on his role in resuscitating American
conservatism. As was often said, he rescued conservatism
from its sect-like status as a talisman for the perpetually
disgruntled while at the same time honing it into an
effective weapon in the battle against the enormity of
Communism and its many bureaucratic domestications. The
magnificent victory over Soviet tyranny at the end of the
1980s led some observers to conclude that the work of
conservatism was finished, or at least redeployed to the
department of mopping-up operations. Bill never made that
mistake. He knew that the totalitarian temptation was an
abiding feature of modern life, and he was ever alert to its
insinuations in the beguiling rhetoric of egalitarianism and
statist dispensation. The question was never whether
socialism and all its works were an encroaching evil.
That, for Bill, was axiomatic. The
question was rather what were the most effective responses.

Note the plural. Bill understood that the battle against
socialism—against the incursions of state power into the
interstices of everyday life—was a battle that embraced
more than politics. Or perhaps we should say that he
understood that the politics of liberty could only succeed
in a world where individual prerogative triumphed over
politics. In many of the recollections by Bill’s friends, you
will find a sentence that, edged with some surprise, tells
you that conversations with Bill seldom revolved around
politics. Music, yes. Books, to be sure. Sailing, you bet. The plot of his latest
novel, ditto. But politics in any ordinary sense was but an
intermittent object of attention, subservient to more
humanizing concerns. The important thing to understand is that Bill’s
devotion to private pursuits was not in conflict with his
conservative political determination but was a fulfillment
of it. The English philosopher Roger Scruton put it well in
his book The West and the Rest:

Western civilization is composed of communities held together by
a political process, and by the rights and duties of the citizen
as defined by that process. Paradoxically, it is the existence of
this political process that enables us to live without politics.
Having consigned the business of government to defined offices,
occupied successively by people who are the servants and not the
masters of those who elected them, we can devote ourselves to
what really matters—to the private interests, personal loves,
and social customs in which we find our satisfaction.
Politics, in other words, makes it possible to separate
society from the state, so removing politics from our
private lives.

As Scruton stresses, this removal is not an abrogation but
rather a triumph of politics, a triumph threatened wherever the
preferments of individual freedom are besieged by
collectivist zeal.
Bill Buckley touched and improved countless lives. He
created and nurtured a score of important institutions. He
was part of the tonic that revitalized the appetite for
ordered liberty and helped defeat one of the most monstrous
tyrannies in history. It speaks less to the irony than to the
amplitude of Bill’s vision that he undertook these
initiatives not to further a political agenda but to rescue
us from one.