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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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
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Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
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US Life in 1842

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Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
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Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
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Class War

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Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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