William F. Buckley was one of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century, and I agree with him on very little. Buckley made a career of pushing back against liberalism on TV, in prose and most famously in the publication he founded in 1955, the National Review. He constantly questioned the wisdom of progressivism, despised communism, was a dyed-in-the-wool advocate of laissez-faire economics and called for society to embrace a common set of morals.
He was viewed as the intellectual conservative icon of a generation. This did not, of course, mean that Buckley was immovable—in fact, after writing a particularly nauseating piece entitled “Why the South Must Prevail” in 1957, Buckley eventually changed his views, becoming a staunch opponent of George Wallace and an admirer of Martin Luther King, Jr., pushing for a national holiday honoring the latter.
Vigorously opposed to anti-Semitism, he was instrumental in helping to root it out in the mainstream Republican Party and refused to employ anyone with such beliefs. Buckley was correct when he wrote, in the mission statement for his newly founded magazine, “Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas—not by day-to-day guesswork, expedients and improvisations….A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is—dare we say it?—as necessary to better living as Chemistry.”
In short, Buckley was a perpetual thorn in the side of those in power, asking them to question themselves and their beliefs, reminding the nation that there can be a dark side to progressivism.
We liberals, especially the more radical variety, need and deserve pushback from our stodgier counterparts. Many of us believe our ideas to be unconditionally right and thus beyond reproach, dismissing dissenters as ignorant or greedy. Instead, we must be willing to hear and accept criticism and to shape our raw ideas into something workable and necessarily non-utopian. Conservatives provide the pushback against “guess work, expedients and improvisations” that we need, and instead of rejecting out of hand a preference for a more static set of rules we should carefully measure new ideas against existing ones, always asking whether we are truly improving.
Policy can almost always be improved by conservative input and criticism. Social Security, while undeniably a boon to the average American and a matter of life and death to many of our poorer citizens, may go bankrupt in a matter of years thanks to a lack of foresight in its funding scheme. Here at Bowdoin, the conservative impulses of many students and administrators have questioned the wisdom of divestment. While divestment is a very nice idea, it is simply a proposition of financial martyrdom with no realistic end goal. Do we really think that society can simply quit using fossil fuels?
Of course, conservatives do not have the monopoly on asking tough questions and thinking about a policy’s implications far down the road. But they are historically very good at raising an argument where no self-respecting liberal is willing to do so—generally out of fear of being labeled uncaring or ideologically impure.
Implicit within this argument is the notion that progress will always win out over conservatism, and thus conservatism is only valuable as a foil for progressivism. That’s clearly a problem. So it is paramount to draw a distinction between radical conservatism and mainstream conservatism. Radical conservatism includes the Tea Party and the religious right—political groups that wish to apply antiquated rules to modern society. I say “radical” not because all members of those groups are particularly extreme, but because they agitate for a wholesale shift in the status quo, just like “radicals” on the left. Mainstream conservatism, in the tradition of Buckley, President Eisenhower, and (dare I say?) Mitt Romney, exhorts society to go slow and to think about all the implications of change. The message is “let’s not stray too far from our base principles” rather than “we must unconditionally adhere to the ideas of our society’s founders.”
Will the urging of conservatives always or even often lead progressives to change their minds? No. This is historically evident. Some questions raised by conservatives are brought up and then, gradually, resolved. We appear to be at the tail end of assuaging doubts about marriage equality, for instance. The involvement and influence of conservatism in public discourse tempers public policy and helps us understand precisely what we’re doing. As Buckley said of his magazine, and perhaps of conservatism in general, “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.”
As much as we might be inclined to forge ahead, having voices like Buckley’s are indispensable to the responsible development and implementation of ideas—lest we wantonly legislate from the heart and end up in an inelegant, broken dystopia. I would exhort conservatives to be heard, and I would expect any progressive with a modicum of intellectual honesty to engage. If we cannot defend our ideas to naysayers, we cannot expect to defend them against the harsh realities of the world.