William F. Buckley, Jr’s., early clashes with liberal-progressive intellectuals illuminates the difficulty of the role that he played.
Read George Shadroui’s Crossing Swords: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance, posted on the Intellectual Conservative website.
It’s lengthy, but the scope of the article more than justifies it.
When William F. Buckley, Jr. graduated from Yale in 1950, liberal-progressives were supremely confident that socialism was mankind’s sole hope for peace, justice, and harmony. So much so that they turned blind eyes toward Stalin’s mass murders in the Soviet Union.
Although Judeo-Christianity was the foundation of Western civilization, of conservatism, and of the United States itself, celebrated New York liberal icon and literary critic Lionel Trilling could write correctly that, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is a plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” ( The Liberal Imagination, 1949).
We’ve had a barrage of encomia to the late William F. Buckley, Jr., but none that I have read covers so well as Mr. Shadroui’s essay the nature of Mr. Buckley’s early struggles to give voice to Judeo-Christian traditions, which had long since fallen out of favor in literary and higher-education circles.
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