Eds.: The following features three comments on  William F. Buckley's betrayal of conservatism. Peter Brimelow's article is essential reading. Brimelow considers Buckley's "character to have been among the most contemptible I have encountered in public life." Hereward Lindsay, a regular TOO columnist, has the following observations on Buckley's character:

One of the problems at the very source was that he fervently desired acceptance and approval by the Establishment.

This was most ludicrously exposed by the ecstatic effusions that erupted when Buckley achieved something that gave him almost unlimited satisfaction and delight.

This was his actually being invited to Barbara Streisand's cocktail party! Not only Buckley himself but the entire company of the faithful trucklers joined in taking an almost orgiastic delight in this great break-through. Someone this deeply desirous of approval by the Establishment could not possibly lead an opposition to it despite the brave words upon the founding of National Review about standing across the march of history and saying "Stop!"

No opposition is far more dangerous to the Establishment than a controlled opposition.

And Buckley achieved preeminence in insuring that the conservative "responsible right" would never oppose the liberals on anything that mattered.
 

vdare.com

Feb. 28, 2008

After last year’s defeat of the Kennedy-Bush-McCain Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill, John O’Sullivan’s published a cover story in American Conservative magazine entitled Getting Immigration Right: How conservatives blocked the open-borders establishment. (Read Steve Sailer’s comments here.) It opened with an amusing account of how O’Sullivan, in his then-role of editor of National Review, maneuvered my own 1992 Time To Rethink Immigration? NR cover story, which he (perhaps too generously) said " launched the modern American debate on immigration", past the magazine’s proprietor, Bill Buckley. This whole opening passage was a salutary reminder of the extreme inhibitions that had prevented even established conservative intellectuals from addressing immigration policy up to that point.

And, alas, subsequently. The glaring omission from O’Sullivan’s article was the fact that after 1998 National Review "stopped stridently claiming opposition to immigration as a conservative cause", as Wall Street Journal Editor Robert L. Bartley accurately gloated (July 3, 2000), and did not return to the issue until some time in 2002. The reason for this, of course, is that Buckley fired O’Sullivan without warning and purged the magazine of immigration reformers (e.g. me). ...

But Buckley’s betrayal was not without wider significance. It raises the question of whether the current National Review editors’ belated opposition to the Kennedy-Bush-McCain Amnesty/Immigration Surge bill was anything more than an opportunistic effort to insert themselves at the head of a parade, which they will abandon when their assessment of their career requirements shifts. After all, the amnesty they now congratulate themselves on opposing was the monomaniacal obsession of a president they slavishly supported, although his views were obvious.

Indeed, O’Sullivan himself provided an example of this opportunism. He writes:

"Bill Kristol, representing many neoconservatives disposed to favor the bill, came out against it. He did so in part because it had serious drafting defects but, more importantly, because it was creating a bitter gulf between rank-and-file Republicans and the party leadership. That in turn was imperiling Republican objectives in other areas, notably Iraq."

I predict that Kristol will return to immigration enthusiasm once he has helped persuade Bush (or McCain) to attack Iran. [more]

Eds.: Bill Buckley is famous for ridding conservatism of what the L.A. Times obituary terms the "anti-Semitic fringe." However, as the op-ed by Jacob Heilbrunn below suggests, Buckley may have had second thoughts about allowing the neocons to take over National Review. The failure of American conservatism resulted in large part because of the triumph of the neocon agenda on a wide range of topics, especially immigration and foreign policy.

The last true conservative: William F. Buckley shaped a movement for the right, which then left him behind