William F. Buckley

It couldn't have been pleasant for Buckley these past few years watching as "conservatism" was wrenched from his hands and sent on its current wild ride. I'm sure that in a way, having only recently lost the terrific woman he called his wife, and experiencing the tail end of a cliff diving exercise known as "compassionate conservatism (aka, 'the darkside')," he was ready to go.

And Ezra notices he's only the latest of capital T "Thinkers" to pass on with no one there to replace their wit and ideas.

As a slightly more general point, in the last two or three years, a whole host of giants have passed away, men who were political thinkers at a time when that made you a cultural figure. John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Norman Mailer, and now, William F. Buckley Jr. Gore Vidal is just about the last of their number left. And that's a shame. They would write serious books of political analysis and sell millions of copies -- they were the writers you had to read to call yourself an actual political junkie. Now, the space they inhabited in the discourse is held by the Coulters and O'Reilly's of the world. Where we once prized a tremendous facility for wit, we're now elevating those with a tremendous storehouse for anger. Run a search on quotes from Galbraith, Buckley, or Friedman, then do the same for O'Reilly and Coulter. We're really losing something here. And we don't even have Molly Ivins around to wrest it back.

Exactly. This is what we have in return.

But, before we get too misty-eyed thinking about the thought leaders of the 1960s...well, I'm here not to praise William F. Buckley, but to bury him.

Federalism has come a long way too. In the 60s it grew fat on segregation, taking up the states' rights argument for allowing jim crow to die in bed. The Tribune couldn't countenance the Birmingham bombings, but William Buckley's National Review, which would champion Barry Goldwater for president the following year, was able to. "Let us gently say," it said, "the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur -- of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro." The magazine said some evidence supported this possibility.

"And let it be said," the National Review declared, "that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court's manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham's Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free."

He was wrong about a lot of things, even if he didn't scream out his wrongheadedness the way his scions do now.

And he was right about some things.