When conservative icon William F. Buckley died 15 years ago, the movement to which he dedicated his life was facing an ordeal. It was the last year of “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush’s second term, a presidency marked by the massive failures of the Iraq War, response to Hurricane Katrina and subprime mortgage crisis.
Buckley, the intellectual driving force behind the National Review, in 2006 called the Iraq war a failure and in an interview the year before had chastised Mr. Bush’s foreign policy as “not conservative at all.” As the presidential campaign unfolded in 2008, the Republican brand was badly tarnished.
Less than a generation after Buckley’s death, conservatives are somewhat split over the major foreign policy question of the times: to what extent should the U.S assist Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression? Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely entrant into the 2024 presidential race, criticized “blank check” funding for Ukraine’s defense while labeling the war a “regional dispute,” rather than a cosmic confrontation pitting democracy against autocracy.
Moreover, both the Republican Party and conservative movement – the two overlap – are infused with more right-wing populism than Buckley might have liked, a populism that embraced the rise of Donald J. Trump in GOP politics. In this episode of History As It Happens, National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin discusses the changes that have overtaken conservatism since Buckley’s death and the reasons behind the growing illiberalism in American politics.
“To the extent that we’re looking back to the end of the Bush era, I don’t think we’re dealing with a different set of problems so much as the continuation of the working out of those problems through the movement. In some ways we’re dealing with a situation that resembles the one when Buckley came on the stage in the 1950s,” Mr. Laughlin said.
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Listen to the National Review’s Mr. McLaughlin discuss the legacy of William F. Buckley and the future of conservatism by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
