Embracing the Permanent: William F. Buckley and Populism

 Embracing the Permanent: William F. Buckley and Populism › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

In embracing the permanent, one may be unfashionable, but one is never out of date.

"I never heard my friend William F. Buckley, Jr., opine about the merits or deficiencies of “populism.” But I often heard him discourse about the virtues of liberty and the political, social, and moral liabilities of the Left-liberal consensus. In my view, what we call “populism” was an important ingredient in liberty as WFB understood it. That was the point of one of his most famous mots. “I’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory,” he said, “than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.”

"Was this wealthy and sophisticated gadfly pulling our leg? Was this Yale man just guying his rivals in Cambridge?

"I don’t think so. Buckley, who died in 2008 at 83, did as much as anyone to make conservatism intellectually and (just as important) socially respectable in the United States. He was too urbane and too verbally nimble to be dismissed as another troglodytic tobacco-chewing throwback. (For one thing, Bill took his tobacco in elegant little cigarillos.)

"Nevertheless, he had an abiding appreciation of the wisdom of the people and a corresponding suspicion of the elites, especially in their overbearing, Potomac-fever incarnation. “I rejoice in the influence of the people over their elected leaders,” he said on that same occasion, “since I think that they show more wisdom than their leaders or their intellectuals.” 

"The fact that a man of Buckley’s pedigree could prefer a promiscuous sampling of the census rolls to the educated tony-ness of Harvard not only offers us insight into his own political filiations: it also offers us some lessons about some contemporary political controversies. 

"What would Bill Buckley have thought about Donald Trump and his “America First” platform?". . .