Bill Buckleys Conservative Family - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S a pity that great conservatives have to die for us to find out how remarkable they were. We learn, now that he is dead at age 82, that William F. Buckley, Jr. was the best friend in the world.

He was a man of astonishing work habits, productively busy every waking hour. Yet he was a man who would sit down with you and be genuinely interested in what you had to say. He sent notes to people all the time, was extraordinarily generous, and throughout his life constantly encouraged conservative writing talent.

The best story last week belonged to New York Times columnist David Brooks.

When I was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a book called “Overdrive” in which he described his glamorous lifestyle. Since I was young and a smart-aleck, I wrote a parody of it for the school paper.

Buckley, he wrote, “spent most of his infancy working on his memoirs.” And so on.

So when William F. Buckley came to give a speech at Brooks’s college he announced: “David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.” It turned out to be David Brooks’s big break.

People think of Bill Buckley as the acerbic host of Firing Line, the writer who wielded a pen like a rapier. But if we are to believe his eulogists, the most important talent of this conservative warrior was the feminine virtue of looking after the family. He kept in contact with people. He gave them presents. He encouraged the young. And when he sat down for a conversation he really listened—as only women do.

We live today in a great age of liberalism, when women are encouraged to behave like men, pursue brilliant careers, sleep around, live public lives, and liberate themselves from the dead weight of children and domesticity.

Meanwhile America’s Mr. Conservative lived a life whose great edifice is a far-flung conservative family that he birthed and reared by cultivating the feminine virtues.

It is in families, of course, that social mores are established and refined. Tocqueville holds in Democracy in America that religion “reigns supreme in the souls of the women, and it is women who shape mores.”

There have never been free societies without mores, and... it is woman who shapes these mores.

Mores are the private virtues of the face-to-face society, such as obtain under the direction of women in families, churches, and associations. These mores often constitute, as Lee Harris writes in The Suicide of Reason, a “shaming code,” an instinctive code that children take with their mother’s milk and internalize so completely that when they violate its precepts in adulthood they unconsciously blush with shame.

There is no better example of a shaming code in operation that the pivotal moment in Pride and Prejudice when Miss Elizabeth Bennet refuses, with prejudice, the offer of marriage made by the very rich and proud Mr. Darcy. Months later, when Darcy had reformed his manners and won Lizzie’s heart he could talk to her about how she had shaped his mores.

The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners... has been many months inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: “had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.”

Our liberal friends, of course, have based their political and cultural movement upon the destruction of these bourgeois mores. They talked about organized religions as systems of social control that denied them their freedom, and determined to liberate themselves from the control of religion and mores and to live lives of self-discovery. The feminist revolution was a movement to apply these notions to women’s lives. Here is how British Conservative Danny Kruger describes the liberal way:

Liberalism is the philosophy of the individual. Its ethic is liberty and its characteristic is autonomy — the freedom of the will from external constraint. It says ’I shall…’

The upshot has been a blizzard of laws to control behavior that once was controlled with a much lighter hand by mores. Most pernicious has been the criminalization of anti-social behavior in government schools and universities.

The life of William F. Buckley was a witness against this folly. You may say that he lived his life in the truth of Danny Kruger’s definition of conservatism:

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ’we should…’

As the great generation of conservatives passes onwards to its eternal rest we are constantly reminded that its great men were not just great but good, not just great political and intellectual leaders but good husbands and friends.

We may ask why this should have been so. But that is the great mystery of the universe: Why?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Bill Buckley's Conservative Family

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