Death of a Sneer

As of this writing, it is just under 24 hours since I have heard of the passing of one of the 'elder statesmen' of neo-conservatism, William F. Buckley. I am not sad.

Though, I will admit, unlike the death of Reagan (an event I marked with gleeful toasting, and curses on his memory for all those sleepless nights in the '80's I spent, worried that the sonafabitch was going to Drop the Bomb, and not in a Gap Band way. Oh, and for many other reasons) I am not joyful at Buckley's passing. Just notably not sad.

Strange as it may sound, when I was a child, watching Firing Line was a bonding point between my mom and me. My mother esteemed Buckley - his erudition, his star power, his von Misean lust for free-market lebensraum. Me, I didn't know any better. Blame it on my youth.

In the years since the days of those halcyon Libertarian wet-dreams, however, I have learned many things about Buckley. His friendship and early championing of Reagan is not a selling point for me. The fact that he claimed Catholicism, yet sneered at everything that the Book of Acts and the Sermon on the Mount would imply about how humans should order their economic lives, reviles me. And, like the cherry on the white, oh-so-white whipped cream, there is this:

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. . . . It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

—William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957

I'm sorry, but that is (if you will excuse the expression) beyond the pale.

Now I realize that many will say that Buckley repudiated his racism later in life. Frankly, I don't care. Someone with his intelligence, and particularly his religious background, should never have been a racist at all. It is inexcusable, even if he simply held these opinions in private. The fact that he used his magazine as a national bully-pulpit to trumpet these opinions is, I am afraid, damnable.

These are harsh words for a theologian to use, I realize (though perhaps no harsher than Buckley's in 1957), and so I should couch them theologically. Within Catholic understandings (a worldview in which, apparently, Buckley saw himself), such actions are damnable if they are not confessed. And perhaps he did, at some point, confess them to his priest.

But if absolution is going to forestall condemnation, it requires genuine repentance. Repentance, moreover, requires a making of amends to those wronged. I cannot speak for William F. Buckley, so I do not know if he undertook these weightier matters of the soul in private. It does not appear so, from his public actions.

But we can still hope, at some level, that his heart was changed; that he truly repented of the very un-charitable, un-loving positions he espoused. We can hope.

But in my hoping, I am still not sad. God help him, yes. God help us all, in the wake of his legacy.