Never at a loss for words

Politicians and media have talking points, slogans, spin, speeches and loads of rhetoric. What they lack is brilliance.

We need Bill Buckley back.

“It’s the epigoni, stupid” is not a useful campaign slogan — although, in fact, a distressingly large number of political candidates are certainly epigoni (“a second-rate imitator”). But William F. Buckley Jr. was a first-rate original, who founded the modern conservative movement half a century ago, and saw it through to victory in the 1980 presidential election and then to vindication in the collapse of Communism a decade later.

He elevated the art of the argument to an exquisite level of engagement – both contact and spectator sport – and put it in the public marketplace of ideas to elevate everyone who participated. The arena was Firing Line.

Buckley’s Firing Line offered real debate. Not the effete insipid format-choked epigoni we witness every presidential-campaign season beginning with some compromise moderator laboriously explaining that under the painstakingly negotiated rules each candidate will make a two-minute opening statement, after which a randomly chosen rival will offer a 45-second rebuttal, followed by the original candidate’s 30-second pre-rebuttal of the next candidate’s re-rebuttal, followed by, etc, etc. On Firing Line, Bill Buckley and his guests just had at it. His insouciant bravura demonstrated week in, week out that conservatism didn’t have to be clunky and squaresville, but could take on all comers with tremendous style.

Conservatism is already searching for its center of gravity in this presidential election. Break out the writings and captured intellectual honesty of Buckley.

Forty-nine years ago, he wrote, “We must bring down the thing called liberalism, which is powerful but decadent, and salvage a thing called conservatism, which is weak but viable.” It is an unending struggle because, while the facts of life are conservative (as his friend Margaret Thatcher put it), liberalism is eternally seductive.

That is abundantly clear in this election.