Is Kathleen Parker's evil underrated?

In a wee-hours Twitter rant this morning, after discussing whether the University of Alabama's No. 2 poll ranking was fair (it's OK, and the ranking will take care of itself if the Tide upsets the No. 1 Gators next Saturday), I shared my 2009 Evil Top 10 rankings:

Evil rankings are indisputable: 1. Satan. 2. Auburn.
-- rsmccain

No. 3 is a tie between Charles Johnson and Osama bin Laden
-- rsmccain

Which makes Fidel Castro No. 5, David Brooks No. 6, Kim Jong Il, No. 7, Charles Manson No. 8
-- rsmccain

10th Place (tie): Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kathleen Parker
-- rsmccain

Naturally, this brought protests: What about Maureen Dowd?

Too bad. This year, Maureen Dowd got knocked off the Top 10 Evil list!
-- rsmccain

No, Kathleen Parker clearly managed to out-evil Dowd this year. Decisions of the judges are final.
-- rsmccain

Today, however, as if she had anticipated her emergence into the Evil Top 10, Kathleen Parker's column appeared on Memeorandum with the headline, "Ten 'principles' could keep thinkers away from the GOP." For some bizarre reason, the column itself has a different headline: "The GOP's Suicide pact," and begins:

Some people can't stand prosperity, my father used to say. Today, he might be talking about Republicans, who, in the midst of declining support for President Obama's hope-and-change agenda, are considering a "purity" pledge to weed out undesirables from their ever-shrinking party.
Just when independents and moderates were considering revisiting the GOP tent. . . .

All of which is in reaction to a proposed resolution -- note the emphasis -- that circulated via e-mail last week among Republican National Committee members. The fact that it was first reported by MSNBC tells you where Kathleen Parker gets her news nowadays, and look how the pro-Obama cable network framed the issue:

This comes on the heels of a rift in the party that was exposed in the once-obscure special election in Upstate New York's 23rd Congressional District, in which national conservative leaders, including Sarah Palin, clashed with national establishment Republicans. The so-called GOP civil war threatens to derail moderate Republican candidacies in heated 2010 Republican primaries already underway. Florida's Senate race is perhaps the best and most prominent example.

For the past year, the mere mention of "Sarah Palin" has been enough to inspire Sully-esque ranting by Kathleen Parker, and she does not disappoint:

The list apparently evolved in response to the Republican loss in the recent congressional race in Upstate New York, when liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava withdrew from the race under pressure from conservatives and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, who won. Republicans had held that seat for more than a century.
James Bopp Jr., chief sponsor of the resolution and a committee member from Indiana, has said that "the problem is that many conservatives have lost trust in the conservative credentials of the Republican Party."
Actually, no, the problem is that many conservatives have lost faith in the ability of Republican leaders to think. The resolutions aren't so much statements of principle as dogmatic responses to complex issues that may, occasionally, require more than a Sharpie check in a little square.

And the pièce de résistance of Parkeresque evil:

The old elite corps of the conservative movement, men such as William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk, undoubtedly would find this attitude both dangerous and bizarre. When did thinking go out of style? . . .
As Kirk wrote in his own "Ten Conservative Principles," conservatism "possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata . . . conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order."

You can be sure that when some latter-day elitist like Kathleen Parker cites Kirk and Buckley, the citation will always be used against conservatives. The elitist versions of Kirk and Buckley are revisionist mannequins, shorn of any unfashionable populism so as to obscure the fact that the conservatism of yore -- when Buckley defended Joe McCarthy and helped inspire the conservative insurgency that made AuH2O the Republican nominee in 1964 -- was thoroughly disdained by the soi-dissant elite of that time.

By the way, it is a myth that Republicans had held the 23rd District seat for more than a century. But Parker's elitist prejudice and her second-hand misperception of the Hoffman campaign derive from the same source: A willingness to accept at face value the spin delivered by the MSM, a gullibility that derives from a belief that conservative media are somehow inferior to their liberal counterparts.

And even though she doesn't mention Sarah Palin in this column, we know who was the target of Parker's ire. It was the hockey mom from Wasilla whose endorsement generated a one-day $116,000 haul for the Hoffman campaign. This is why Parker and other Palin-haters have so vehemently insisted that Hoffman is some sort of far-right extremist.

Parker makes a big point of arguing for intellectual nuance, when she's the one reacting viscerally to even the slightest evidence that the Republican Party might embrace a Palin-style populism.

Well, 2009 is not over yet. At least Charles Manson remains safely behind bars and Ahmadinejad has been quiet lately. Kathleen Parker's evil ranking may require re-appraisal.

(P.S.: If you're wondering why the Gators didn't rate inclusion in my 2009 Evil Top 10, it's because their evil is a transitory phenomenon. If Alabama beats Florida next Saturday, their evil will be vanquished, whereas Auburn is permanently evil.)

RCP now has a Twitter page?

Who knew? At any rate, RCP/Twitter caught this exchange, beginning with my Tweet:

@Ali @Cubachi Reihan Salam Gets Punk-Smacked http://tinyurl.com/yd2lpk2 (I Got TIES Older Than You, Kid!) PLZ Re-Tweet

To which Patrick Ruffini responded:

@rsmccain Douthat and Salam get a lot of things wrong but can we dispense with the reflexive anti-intellectualism? #weneednewbuckleys

To which I subsequently replied:

@PatrickRuffini Anti-elitism is not anti-intellectualism http://tinyurl.com/yd2lpk2 Distinct phenomena, not to be confused #tcot

And furthermore:

@PatrickRuffini And we've got an annoying surfeit of Buckley wannabes #weneednewbuckleys #tcot

All of this, of course, prompted by the original punk-smacking of Salam. As to the accusation of "reflexive anti-intellectualism," I'll have more to say later. But right now my wife's waiting for me at church, where my son performs today with the academy orchestra, and I must go.

Thanks to Matt Crowl, whose Tweet brought the Salam piece to my attention.

The Tanenhaus Republicans and the Architecture of Intellectual Prestige

Should you wish to develop a critique of the conservative movement, yet are incapable of genuinely original thought, try to avoid borrowing your second-hand ideas from an avowed enemy of conservatism like Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times. (Y'all reckon his Buckley bio will get a good review?)

The brilliant Dan Riehl observes Rachel Maddow's MSNBC guest host Ana Marie Cox (speaking of "sworn enemies") interviewing Tanenhaus "discussing how WND is the equivalent of the Birchers today? Detailing how the Birchers were shut down." Dan continues:

Going on about the lack of intellectuals in conservatism today? Questioning where the Republican leadership is?
Damn! Almost seems to me I heard precisely all that just recently.
Then going on to pull in NRO, claiming that NRO (wink wink) only pretended to reject, while bringing forth new evidence, in the Birther conspiracy? Calling today's conservative "mouthpieces" pseudo-intellectuals? Do they mean Talk Radio? I'd bet they do.
No point in reading The Next Right anymore, perhaps. I can just wait to catch the latest young conservative wisdom on MSNBC. . . .

Ouch. Here's the MSNBC video, so the reader may appreciate the extent to which the liberal Tanenhaus has influenced this species of "conservatism":

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What astonishes me is that these Young Turks, who conceive of themselves as infinitely superior to their elders in terms of intellectual sophistication, fail to recognize that they are being played as suckers in a very familiar sort of hustle. I explained this four months ago in "The Republicans Who Really Matter":

The Republicans Who Really Matter can be relied on to reinforce liberal stereotypes of the GOP, and to pen op-ed columns offering "helpful" advice to the Republican Party which, if followed, would lead to certain electoral disaster. . . .
No Republican pundit is ever going to become influential by buddying up to Wayne LaPierre or right-to-lifers; make favorable mention of environmentalism, however, and MSNBC producers will flood your inbox with e-mail invitations to a 10-minute guest segment on "Hardball."
One reliable method for advancing to the pinnacle as a Republican commentator is to argue that the party is badly divided, and to blame this fragmentation on some constituency universally loathed by liberals. . . .

The inarguable fact that liberals dominate the publishing industry, academia and other such institutions of intellect means that liberalism and its advocates possess a prestige that no out-and-out conservative can ever enjoy.

The Monopolization of Prestige
Neither Joseph Farah nor Dan Riehl will ever be published by the New York Times, will they? If Michelle Malkin, Mark Levin or Ann Coulter wrote biographies of William F. Buckley Jr., would their books be praised in a feature NYT book review? Would they be excerpted by The New Republic?

Of course not. Liberals would never lend the prestige of their institutions to such avowed enemies of liberalism. And anyone who desires to research the career of Buckley may easily discover the vehemence with which he was once denounced by liberals -- up until such time as liberals discerned that they might use him as a weapon to attack other conservative targets.

To be the sort of conservative intellectual acceptable to liberals, one must never make a criticism of liberalism that is genuinely effective, an argument that undermines the prestige of liberal ideas and liberal heroes. Why? Because once an intelligent person comes to suspect that liberalism does not deserve its prestigious reputation -- well, the emperor has no clothes, you see? Therefore, Pinch Sulzberger hires a neurasthenic weakling like David Brooks, and not a vigorous, forthright and courageous advocate of conservative ideas.

At some level, the shrewd and ambitious young Republican-leaning writer perceives all this. He understands that he can gain an especial distinction by courting the praise of liberals, in quite the same way a junior varsity cheerleader can become "popular" by dating the defensive line of the varsity football team. And the analogy is all the more apt in that the JV cheerleader who seeks the easiest way to "popularity" so often condemns as ill-motivated hypocrites those more virtuous girls who eschew her ways.

'Boring' or Burkean?
When, in a symposium on Tanenhaus, Austin Bramwell declares that conservatism is "intellectually boring," he is in one sense quite correct. The basic principles of American conservatism -- the defense of constitutionally limited government, opposition to the welfare state, sympathy for tradition, foreign policy based on strength, sovereignty and national interest -- are so well-known that they offer no attraction to those who crave novelty in political thought.

The upstart who desires to gain a reputation as an "innovative" thinker is welcome to seek employment outside conservative politics, if he is not content to find new ways to celebrate old verities or new arguments with which to eviscerate liberals.

Instead, what we see over and over -- see Brooks' disastrously influential "National Greatness" as a textbook example -- is an enthusiastic race to get ahead of the Zeitgeist, to become the Promethean author of a new Welltanschauung, to establish one's place as the founder of Some Other Conservatism.

Wise men are not deceived by these pretentious intellectual hustlers. When a self-described conservative begins slinging around words like "creativity" and "progress" in political discourse, it is not generally taken as evidence of doughty resolve. Rather, it is wise to suspect such a person of being what the Brits would call a trimmer.

The Cruelty of Ambition
Conservatism is a philosophy of opposition. Excuse me for repeating myself, but some of our Young Turks do not seem to be paying attention to the lessons.

They invite chastisement, lest they become still more impudent (if such a thing were possible). I call them "Young Turks," but they rather remind me of certain Young Hegelians of yore, unwisely eager to hasten the historical synthesis. Their conceited trust in their own superiority is dangerous, perhaps more to them than to the hoary elders of the "movement" whom they seek to supplant, and I suspect there would be far less tolerance of dissent if these ambitious youngsters were mounted in the saddle and empowered to wield the whip.

We need no Nietzschean ubermensch nor Platonic archons to rule over us, to enlighten our supposed benightedness and soothe us with their tendentious myths about Olympian idols. This dishonest campaign to employ the aid of Tanenhaus to enlist the departed Buckley as a ghostly advocate of Pragmatism deserves to be rejected with extreme prejudice. And any Young Turks who desire to keep pursuing this approach will do so at peril to their own ambitions.

Whatever the Zeitgeist amongst the intelligentsia, the balance of power within the conservative movement does not favor "Pragmatism," which means that would-be leaders of Some Other Conservatism will suffer from a shortage of followers, and will find themselves isolated and ignored.

Even while I was writing this little essay, the brilliant Dan Riehl was busy discovering what sort of advice Sam Tanenhaus offered to his own party in 2003. The liberal Democrat urged Democrats to embrace their own radicals, while the same liberal Democrat's arguments are now being used to urge Republicans to purge Joseph Farah and WND.

"Maximize the contradictions," as Abby Hoffman said.

Buckley and Reagan

Ross Douthat reviews The Reagan I Knew -- William F. Buckley's last book -- for the New York Times, and tries to address the arguments that Buckley would abhor contemporary populist conservatism:

Buckley began his writing life . . . as a quasi-apologist for Joe McCarthy and ended his career as a great friend to Rush Limbaugh. And he spent most of the intervening decades championing Reagan, the greatest right-wing populist of all -- more authentically middle-American than Bush, a cannier player of the "jes' folks" card than Palin, and as roundly disliked and disdained by the liberal commentariat as either one of them.

That's about right, except there was nothing "quasi" about Buckley's defense of McCarthy. But why quibble? I've read the book -- it's sitting on my desk right now -- and I heartily recommend it. The witty repartee and occasional disagreements between two giants of 20th-century American conservatism are well worth remembering.

I had to study up on Reagan to write the feature obituary for the Washington Times, and in the years since, I've read several books on various aspects of his career. One thing that seems to get overlooked in the hagiographic retrospective view is the extent to which Reagan was a man of his time. He had been an FDR Democrat, a self-described "bleeding heart" whose liberalism led him to join (unwittingly) two Communist Party "front groups" in the early 1940s. So Reagan very much understood, at a deeply personal level, how humanitarian sympathies and naivete about communism could lead someone to become a "dupe" or a "fellow traveler."

The pivotal moment for Reagan was during the Hollywood labor wars of 1946-47, when communist union organizers tried to shut down the film industry, at a time when Reagan was a leader of the Screen Actors Guild. The dishonest tactics of the communists awoke in Reagan the understanding that communism was a totalitarian menace no less dangerously evil than the Nazi menace.

Over the next 15-20 years, this revelation ripened into a deep and mature insight into the nature of the communist threat. Reagan's job as a GE spokesman gave him the opportunity to hone to perfection a standard speech extolling America's system of democracy and free enterprise, which he would contrast against the stifling forces of government bureaucracy, as well as against the totalitarian threat of communism.

These speeches were given to very diverse audiences -- executives and plant workers, Chamber of Commerce types, etc. -- whose political orientations were mixed and unknown. So Reagan struck patriotic themes in a way that wasn't overtly political, and he aimed his rhetoric directly at the common sense of common people. His speeches weren't a discourse intended for intellectuals, nor were they fire-and-brimstone partisan sermons. Rather, they were decent and respectable and generous, with a general tone of suggesting that all good people should be willing to fight for the basic ideals of American civilization.

American adults of the 1950s and early '60s had been through common experiences -- the Depression and World War II -- and most of all they shared the patriotic sensibilities imparted by the public school system in the decades before historic iconoclasm came into vogue. There was a common cultural understanding about the heroes of Valley Forge, etc., and a near-universal antagonism to Soviet tyranny to which Reagan could appeal without being accused of jingoism or partisanship.

So when you see Reagan in his famous 1964 speech, "A Time for Choosing," you're watching a man who had spent more than a decade striking those same basic themes in dozens of speeches annually. He adapted these themes to the occasion, and the speech he gave was a humdinger. You want some Reagan populism?

This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

David Brooks would faint dead away, for certainly the advocate of "national greatness" has no faith in the ordinary American's capacity for self-government, consistently siding with that "little intellectual elite" against the common sense of common people. Reagan never saw himself as part of that "elite," and never had a good thing to say about it. And if you study Buckley's early works -- especially God and Man at Yale and Up From Liberalism -- you know that for all his erudition, Buckley saw himself as an opponent of that elite (and vice-versa).

Reagan and Buckley respected and admired one another as equals, each independently seeking a common goal. What has changed in the relationship between conservative politicians and conservative intellectuals in the contemporary era, it seems to me, is that the intellectuals think themselves so infinitely superior to the politicians -- and with good reason, generally, since few Republican politicians today show the kind of curiosity about ideas that Reagan so clearly had.

The real trouble is that this contempt for GOP politicians tends to fester into a contempt for GOP voters. This is where the David Brooks type so grievously goes astray, in smug condescension toward the typical Republican voter in Pennsylvania or Indiana or Ohio. The very fact that your average rank-and-file Republican likes Sarah Palin is, in the eyes of the Brooksian intellectual, reason enough to conclude that Palin is an unworthy idiot. By the same token, the fact that your average Republican likes Rush Limbaugh is sufficient cause to conclude that Limbaugh is harmful to the cause of "meritocratic aspiration" that a Brooksian considers "true conservatism."

Reagan and Buckley were both populists in the sense that they believed that the ordinary American possessed basic common sense, and could do without the meddlesome superintendence of their everyday lives by Washington.

Buckley's brobdingnagian vocabulary and his arch hyperintellectualism was meant as a challenge to the imagined superiority of mid-2oth-century liberalism, conveying to his reader the idea that one could be both intellectually sound and conservative (something the liberals of that era furiously denied). Reagan, on the other hand, spoke to people in a way that was simultaneously down-to-earth and inspirational -- mixing the homey anecdote with the oratorical firepower of a latter-day Patrick Henry. Their methods were different, but their objective was the same.

Of course, it is grossly unfair to Sarah Palin to compare her to Ronald Reagan (though perhaps not as grossly unfair to Bill Buckley as comparing him to David Brooks). Palin has not had the advantages of Reagan's experiences, having been so busy as a mother, a mayor and a governor that she surely has spent little time reading Friedrich Hayek or Whittaker Chambers. Yet she does seem to have a basic belief in the ordinary American's aptitude for self-governance, and that strikes me as the right place to start.

UPDATE: JR at Conservatives4Palin has written two posts about The Reagan I Knew. One refers to this quote from Reagan:

For every problem, there are ten people waiting to volunteer if someone will give them a lead and show them where they can be useful.

Of which JR says:

This quote is great because it applies to the current state of the Republican party. We have a great "base" and grassroots network, from the fiscal conservatives to the defense hawks but we lack a competent leader, we lack what Reagan calls, "someone who can show us where we can be useful."

You could relate this to Reagan's famous maxim that you can accomplish anything, as long as you don't care who gets the credit. The conservative movement today suffers from the "too many chiefs, not enough Indians" problem -- it's very hard to find capable, dependable team players who are content to labor in obscurity, as most political activists inevitably must.

In another post, JR quotes a letter from 1973 in which Buckley passes on advice from a "well-wisher" who says Reagan "refuse[s] to wrap [his] mind around foreign policy." Here you see the vast gap between reality and perception. Reagan was keenly interested in foreign policy, especially the major issues of the Cold War, but because he was at that time busy with being governor of California, it was perceived that he didn't "wrap his mind around" the issues. And here, I think, you see a parallel to Palin -- the Katie Couric "gotcha" of what newspapers she read daily, as if the governor of Alaska should spend her mornings leafing through the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (are those even available in Anchorage?).

Buckley & Reagan

Bill Buckley's last book, The Reagan I Knew, gets reviewed by Hunter Baker at The American Spectator:

What one sees in the letters between the two great icons of 20th-century American conservatism is a conversation between equals. Buckley was not the Machiavellian manipulator liberals might have believed Reagan "the amiable dunce" needed. Instead, he was an ideological soulmate, a debate partner, and occasionally an opponent. These were two men working to the same end, but never shy to differ or to try to convince the other of their own position.

I've read the book, and it is absolutely charming. You will enjoy the inside jokes between Reagan and Buckley, who keeps promising to run away to Casablanca with Nancy, and refers to himself as Reagan's ambassador to Kabul. You should definitely buy the book.

Fake hate, real stupidity

Predictable: Another campus "hate" hoax, with a black student posting a bogus "racially offensive" message on a student Web forum, prompting the ritual recriminations by students and faculty, until finally the hoax is admitted, and defended as "satire." (Via Volokh & Instapundit.) This very much reminds me of the anti-Muslim "satire" at GWU last year.

Liberals possess Complete Moral Authority, which means that however vicious, unfair, obnoxious, dishonest, or coercive their tactics, their good intentions can never be questioned. Conversely, no matter how courteous, honorable and erudite a conservative may be, he will inevitably and routinely be accused of bad faith. One recalls the reviewer of William F. Buckley's classic God & Man at Yale who said the book had "the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night."

At some point, any conservative who aims to accomplish anything must learn to accept such attacks as evidence of success. If you were accomplishing nothing, they wouldn't bother to call you names and impugn your motives.

UPDATE: In seeking that particular criticism of Buckley's first book, I turned up an online version of his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of God & Man at Yale. Buckley quotes a two-sentence formulation from the book that drove his critics into paroxysms of fury:

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

Those two sentences were eagerly embraced by Christian conservatives -- indeed, Buckley might well be said to have been a founder of the "Religious Right" long before that term came into common usage -- but were bitterly assailed by liberals.

What Buckley's critics did not realize was that this passage had been crucially amended by Buckley's mentor and editor, Professor Willmoore Kendall. Yet Buckley did not disown or repudiate that striking parallelism because, he says, he was "not unamused by the sputtering outrage of its critics."

This, you see, was the original genius of Buckley -- his unabashed joy in offending the sensibilities of liberals and driving them into "sputtering outrage." What liberals always count on in debate is their moral superiority (wholly imagined as it is) which they expect will cause the conservative to slink away in shame. Buckley, however, was made of sterner stuff. He saw the fury of the liberal attack on that two-sentence passage as evidence that he must be onto something. The indignation with which liberals denied a nexus between the religious and the political, he realized, meant that he had touched them in a tender place. He therefore vigorously defended the most unpopular part of his book -- even though the precise wording was not originally his own.

I call attention to this not merely because it is an important lesson in conservative discourse, but because it is such a contrast to the method of many of the latter-day Buckley wannabes. David Brooks, who professes to admire Buckley, would rather sneer at conservative "populists" than to lay down a withering fire on a vulnerable salient of the liberal position. And Buckley, it will be recalled, once co-authored a stout defense of Joe McCarthy, a thoroughgoing populist.

Buckley was a fighter, a man who did not hesitate to identify liberalism as the enemy, and who attacked it with all his might. Go and do thou likewise!

Ron Robinson on Buckley and bias

Thursday evening, Young America's Foundation President Ron Robinson was at the Magic Gourd restaurant in Washington to teach an activism seminar for members of the George Washington University YAF chapter.

Robinson's presentation was about the nature of media bias, but his mind was clearly on the recent death of William F. Buckley Jr., the "conservative icon" to whom Robinson paid tribute on the YAF Web site:

"William F. Buckley Jr. was the founder of the modern YAF movement and a longtime friend of Young America's Foundation. The staff and board of Young America's Foundation send our thoughts and prayers to his family and friends."

While waiting for the event to begin, Robinson talked to me about what a tremendous loss Buckley's death is for the conservative movement. Later, during his remarks to the GWU students, he related anecdotes about Buckley, including the National Review founder's famous 1965 response when asked what was the first thing he would do if he won election as mayor of New York City: "Demand a recount."

Robinson told the GWU students that Buckley would be proud of the work their YAF chapter was doing on campus. And while even liberals praised Buckley at his death, it wasn't always so, the YAF president reminded the students. When he was in high school, Robinson said, one of his teachers told him Buckley was "more dangerous than Hitler."

The notion that conservatives are dangerous and menacing is propagated chiefly through the news media, and Robinson's presentation consisted of more than 100 slides showing covers of Time and Newsweek magazines, contrasting how liberal and conservative figures were portrayed. A November 1994 cover of Time featuring Newt Gingrich with the headline, "MAD AS HELL," was one example.

"How did you become a conservative?" Robinson asked the GWU students. "I bet it wasn't because of an overload of conservative teachers or professors. I bet it wasn't because of anything you saw on ABC, CBS, NBC 'Nightly News.' I know it wasn't because of anything you saw on the cover of Time or Newsweek."

With the assistance of Ron Robinson, YAF's national headquarters staff and local supporters, the George Washington University YAF chapter -- led by seniors Sergio Gor and Iris Somberg -- is becoming a model for conservative campus activism nationwide. Thursday's seminar was attended by more than 30 members, including freshman Joe Sangiorgio, whose notes on Robinson's presentation were essential to the preparation of this report.

A featured post at Memeorandum -- thanks!

Bill Buckley, R.I.P.

Alas, he died working in his study. (Via Memeorandum.)

When I was growing up in Douglas County, Ga., I used to read Buckley's columns in the Atlanta Journal. For a boy 11 or 12 years old, reading Buckley was a splendid educational experience because I was so often forced to look up those fancy words he liked to use.

Years later, in the mid-1990s, when I was beginning to reconsider my loyalty to the Democratic Party, one of the first conservative books I read that helped change my mind was Buckley's classic Up From Liberalism -- first published in 1959, the year of my birth.

Buckley meant so much to the conservative movement. He was not only a magazine publisher, author and columnist, but for years in the 1950s and '60s, Buckley was the most public face of conservatism. He'd go on "The Tonight Show" or some other TV program and -- with his superbly honed skills of rhetoric and logic -- represent in fine fashion the movement he helped to build.

His jut-jawed aristocratic demeanor and his British-influenced locution conveyed an upscale sensibility that helped make conservatism appealing and respectable in an age when liberal spokesmen otherwise dominated the public discourse.

He will be missed.

UPDATE: Here's Buckley debating Noam Chomsky in 1969:



UPDATE II: Jimmie at Sundries Shack was also influenced by Buckley:

Between National Review magazine and his indispendable weekly Firing Line television shows, Buckley filled my teenaged mind with facts and arguments that required me to read a lot more than I already was just to keep pace.

Just so, Jimmie. Just so.