BILL BUCKLEY AND THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATISM

The most important lesson of his career is that there are limits to
accommodation.

In times of perplexity evangelical Christians ask themselves, "What
would Jesus do?" Conservatives trying to regroup in the age of Obama
might ask themselves, "What would William F. Buckley Jr. do?"

Buckley died in 2008 after almost 60 years as a public intellectual
and celebrity. His quirky and hyperarticulate defense of his ideas, in
books and columns and on television, gained him celebrity, and he used
his stardom to propagate his ideas. He fought in great victories -- he
helped create the climate of opinion in which Ronald Reagan was
elected president -- and he saw great debacles, from the fall of South
Vietnam to the travails of George W. Bush. I wrote for him and worked
with him for almost 40 years, and I believe conservatives might turn
to him now, not for salvation, but for a little mental clarity and
temperamental reinforcement.

The most important lesson of his career is that there are limits to
accommodation. Buckley came to fame in the early 1950s after two
decades of liberal Democratic dominance, the Fair Deal of Harry Truman
having followed the New Deal of FDR. When Republicans finally
recaptured Congress and the White House in 1952, it was a case of new
men and old measures. The new president, Dwight Eisenhower, despite
his conservative instincts, was unwilling to pick ideological fights.
On the sidelines of politics, the poet Peter Viereck called for a New
Conservatism dedicated to managing change gracefully and recognizing
liberal Democrats like Adlai Stevenson as its natural leaders.
Germany, Japan and (it seemed) the Depression had been beaten by great
collective efforts. The world had moved into a new era, and
conservatives should recognize the fact.

Buckley would have none of it. He wanted a conservatism that stood for
capitalism and freedom. The Cold War required another great
mobilization, which Buckley supported wholeheartedly, but he would not
lose sight of his individualistic goals. In 1955, when he founded
National Review as the journal of opinion for his kind of
conservatism, he declared its purpose to be "to stand athwart history,
yelling 'Stop!'" He yelled because he hoped to be heard. Liberalism
had been ascendant for years, but that didn't mean it always would
be.

The political vehicle of a late 20th century conservative movement was
bound to be the Republican Party. Buckley recognized this, but he was
never a party loyalist -- another lesson for today's conservatives.
Practically speaking he was married to the GOP, but he never expected
it to be faithful to his ideas, and he fought it when it strayed. The
election laws of New York, where he worked, allow politicians to run
on more than one line, which encourages a proliferation of third
parties. He supported the Conservative Party, a right-wing pressure
group, from its inception, and ran as its candidate for mayor of New
York City in 1965, hoping to defeat the liberal Republican hotshot
John Lindsay. (He didn't.) In 1988, in his home state of Connecticut,
Buckley went even further in party disloyalty, backing a liberal
Democrat, Joseph Lieberman, against an even more liberal Republican
incumbent, Lowell Weicker. This time he won. The party should, as much
as possible, support the movement, not the other way around.

For all his feistiness, Buckley knew that counsels of perfection are
not for this world. The journalist, poet and ex-Communist spy
Whittaker Chambers was one of Buckley's most-admired colleagues. "To
live is to maneuver," Chambers told him, and Buckley quoted the line
often. It was important for a political movement to establish
paradigms -- he called it "keeping the tablets" -- but then one had to
make choices.

Though he thought it was possible to change climates of opinion, he
knew it was futile to try to change certain facts about human nature.
Large institutions are of slow growth and cannot be created or
supplanted easily. Buckley was a Roman Catholic traditionalist,
unhappy with the vernacular mass and pacifist Vatican diplomacy, but
he always opposed schismatics who hectored the church from the right.
Despite his turbulent relationship with the Republican Party, he never
believed in trying to replace it with a new national party. National
Review opposed George Wallace in 1968 and thought that Ronald Reagan's
best shot (in 1976 when he failed, and in 1980 when he succeeded) was
to work within the GOP.

Another Buckley lesson is always think for yourself. No one was more
deferential to the wisdom of his betters. He loved Edmund Burke's
purple passage about "the great principles of government . . . which
were understood long before we were born" and will continue to be
understood "after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption,
and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity."
But Buckley was always trying to apply those great principles to the
problems of the day, and he could be very pert when they took him in
new directions. The problem of drug addiction preoccupied him as early
as his mayoral run, and he kept thinking about it for years. In 1972
he ran an article in National Review by Richard Cowan, later executive
director of The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws, calling for the decriminalization of marijuana. By 1996 he
edited a symposium in the magazine concluding, bluntly, "The War on
Drugs is Lost." This made him the pet of liberals and pot-heads. He
didn't care: The drug laws, he decided, were capricious and
unenforceable and ought to be changed. That was the proper
conservative position, and he would uphold it even if he was almost
alone in doing so.

He made some wild suggestions over the years. He decided that Barry
Goldwater might win the 1964 election if he tapped former President
Eisenhower as his running mate, an idea that was both crazy -- Ike
would not have played second fiddle to Abraham Lincoln -- and possibly
unconstitutional. Early in his career he justified obstacles to black
suffrage in the South -- "the white community," he wrote in 1959, "is
entitled . . . to prevail politically because, for the time being
anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white." He ended his
career in despair over the Iraq War, concluding as early as 2005 that
we should bug out -- "our part of the job is done as well as it can be
done, given limitations on our will and our strength."

He changed his mind on both issues, embracing the civil-rights
historiography of the political scientist Harry V. Jaffa and
supporting the surge in Iraq when it began in 2007. Being wrong is the
risk you run by thinking and acting. The only people who are never
wrong are hermits -- unless withdrawing from the arena is itself
wrong. For Buckley quietism was never an option.

He was an activist, but he was always also a man. His final lesson, as
important as any of the others, was to take the time to have a blast
and honor his creator. It is one of the conservative insights, even of
conservative political figures, that there is always more to life than
politics. The complete ideologue, by demanding of himself more than
flesh can bear, becomes less than human.

So Bill Buckley sailed, skied, played his harpsichord, and worshipped,
preferably in Latin if the traditional mass was available. It's tough
going out there, and the tough always know when to take a break.

Mr. Brookhiser is the author, most recently, of "Right Time, Right Place:
Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement,"
out next week by Basic Books.