Free at Last

Jesus. The praise for Buckley. The mad encomiums! He was the A.K. Chesterton of our time. He was a third-rate thinker with a second-rate vocabulary who only ever impressed the fourth-rate English majors who cluster in newsrooms and on the teevee. He was always wrong when it mattered and only right when it was too late. The fact that he was the exemplar of American Conservativism and one of the movement's great intellectuals proves something about both Buckley and American Conservativism, neither proof being proof of anything good. He was Ezra Pound shorn unfortunately of classicism, talent, and a cage.