Buckley – The Conservative Spirit
William F. Buckley, Jr.
"The Conservative Spirit"
Keynote Address
The Philadelphia Society
40th! Anniversary Gala
Chicago, Illinois April 30, 2004
Mr. President, Mr. Secretary: The
trouble with this assignment is that there is so much to do, at least so much
that I want to do. And since the auspices tonight are libertarian, that which I
want to do, I shall of course proceed to do.
It will strike cynical members of this assembly that I speak kindly of Lee
Edwards immediately following his speaking well of me. But he should not be
penalized by my ignoring him, simply because he has not ignored me.
I keep wondering when Lee Edwards
will receive the critical attention he has earned with his continuing work as
historian of our movement. His most recent book, the history of the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is wise, penetrating, and readable. His brief
history of the Philadelphia Society, published in this weekendís program, is a
remarkable feat of research and organization. Among other of his revelations, I
am pleased to be reminded that I put up one hundred dollars to launch the
Philadelphia Societyís bank account, forever rupturing my relations with the
bank, which used to be friendly to me, but now spent its time coping with the
Societyís overdrafts.
Indeed, my concern over the
Societyís financial distresses is more regular than my irregular participation
in our proceedings. That concern has been at one level steadfast, at another,
reckless. I remember trying anxiously to reach Senator Goldwater on the phone
years ago because I needed his vote before the end of a trusteesí meeting at
noon the next day, in order to effect a grant for the Philadelphia Society.
I couldnít locate him. He was
off somewhere flying his airplane. In desperation, I sent a telegram to all
seven of our fellow trustees, registering approval of the proposed grant to the
Philadelphia Society. I signed it, “Best regards, Barry M. Goldwater.”
I was enormously relieved, when
his airplane finally landed and I was able to tell him what I had done, to hear
him say, “Fine, okay.” He added, “When Iím not at the Senate, you can
just send a telegram registering my vote.” It was an enormous relief to me
that he approved retroactively my use of his name, which also lightened
prosecutorial obligations of the FBI.
You think you can stop me naming
names?
Well, you canít. The most
economical way to put it is, What would our movement have done if Ed Feulner had
never been born?
There is of course the popular
fiction that he has wandered about all these years with three twin brothers,
attending to our needs, introducing our meetings, writing our books,
congratulating us on our good deeds, lamenting the causes of our misfortunes,
and arranging for a Mass when we die. But enough of that. He is the most
remarkable biological phenomenon since Pithecanthropus
erectus, and I hope that, before too long, they will name a tower, a city,
or a state after him. When that happens, I hope to be alive and to be there, as,
I know, all of you fellow Philadelphians will be, including Stan Evans, if he
has finished his book on McCarthy.
There are others bound to this
Society whom I admire and am indebted to. But I tax the limits of your time, and
my own patience, and so close with a full-fledged note about the Commodore.
Consider only the mentions of Don
Lipsett already made in the program. I know of nobody anywhere whose personality
so suffused the organization he represented. And, in his case, this did not mean
only the Philadelphia Society. His affiliations with light and truth had
stretched back to the Foundation for Economic Education. He went from there to National
Review, where in 18 months he created absolute chaos in the Circulation
Department; but when he left, he left us tearful at the prospect of life without
his inattentions, and without him in the office every day.
His illustrious career, with Vice
Commodore Norma Lipsett, who is here tonight, is recounted in Bill Campbellís
essay in the program, and I have to add only that his character truly affected
this organization. There was a benignity there which seemed to detoxify any
malign culture that was stirring. The puffs from his pipe didnít exactly
dissipate ideological or historical or philosophical differences, but they
managed to convey to us that life would go on, strengthening the one impulse
dormant in all of us, namely that we would never permit anything that would
disappoint Don Lipsett.
Donís powers of persuasion,
quietly, sweetly exercised with a smile and a little self-effacement, could
wring manna from desert soil. It was, I think, his ability to produce a
corporate jet at just the right moment, to address this or that emergency which,
untended, would keep a desperately desired guest speaker from going or from
coming, that brought on his designation as the Commodore. He went along with the
act, to the point of emblazoning an admiralís insignia on his stationery.
Don Lipsett never asked too much,
which is why when he did ask for something, it was granted as the only
alternative to lifelong self-hatred. The Commodore of course did not tell his
friends, not even Ed Feulner, that leukemia had been detected, and no one had
had any advance notice when the news came that he was gone, the most attractive
and selfless American to figure prominently in the revival of the conservative
spirit.
Am I done? Well yes. I have
nothing left over for Milton Friedman or Russell Kirk or Adam Smith or Erik von
Kuehnelt-Leddihn.
You hardly want, let alone need, a
catalogue of unfinished national business. For one thing, that which is
unfinished will remain so. One reason for this is that the reduction in the size
of the state is an asymptotic enterprise. Eliminate the state, and one has only
ugly anarchy and the absolutely predictable loss of liberty. So that exercises
in the limitation of the state have to be done on finer canvases than some, even
some members of this Society, have enjoyed drawing on for substitute
constitutional blueprints.
Here is a focus I find both useful
and elusive. It begins by asking how we objectify privations that are traceable
to state activity.
I have in the past recommended
that conservatives take advantage of the popular acceptance of the theory of the
slippery slope. We should adopt the metaphor for our own purposes. The critical
intelligentsia have argued, since the initial prohibition of the novel Ulysses,
that if you set out to censor Deep Throat,
the next thing you know you will—inexorably—be censoring James Joyce.
I have pondered skeptically this
teleological enormity, the assumption that we canít define a difference
between the two, but I grant the usefulness of that line of argument, the perils
of the slippery slope.
An attempt to appropriate it
wholesale in the matter of taxation introduces correlative questions. The
corresponding position to zero censorship would be zero taxation. Since we
cannot have that in any earthly enterprise, we have played with variations of
this ideal.
One of us, in a lovely fantasy,
proposed that taxes should be paid voluntarily. The proposal, as will not
surprise, proved to have no legs.
The alternative of the flat tax
incorporates as its dynamic engine the assumption that no tax can ever be
enacted, in a democratic society, which imposes inordinate taxation on anyone.
Anyone, under the flat tax, is—everyone. It is impossible to single out for
victimization anybody, or any class, under strict flat-tax dispensations.
That of course is the primary
reason why the flat tax has not been written into law. That, plus the
sociological point made by Milton Friedman, which is that the great national
lobbying enterprise, in which are engaged not only individual lobbyists, but
also federal agencies, corporate agents, and state legislatures, would suddenly
face disfranchisement, if there were no tax code on which to practice their
pressures and seductions.
But there is no reason not to get
on with producing a tax index that would convey, state by state, the fiscal
statist impositions on citizensí lives. Which is to say, a number that informs
the resident of every location what is the level of taxation where he lives,
adding together federal and state income taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes,
and sales taxes.
It is likely that the whole,
hypnotic process of assimilation is at work, even as the withholding of taxes,
including the payroll tax, succeeded in concealing to the point of near
invisibility what it is that is actually being extracted at the source.
The tax allotment in America is
the easiest to objectify. Much much more difficult are the regulatory
impositions. They canít be weighed, often cannot be seen, and sometimes are
not even suspected, that flypaper that attracts impediments to your catching a
flight, building a house, mowing your lawn, or educating your child.
The relatively scant popular
reaction to those impositions on us by taxation and regulation calls up thought
on why there is this insensibility. The most obvious reason is that people get
used to things. Those of you who ever saw the play My
Sister Eileen will remember how Eileen and her sister suspended
unquestioningly all conversation every four minutes, to let the elevated train
pass by.
But there is another perspective
at hand which we need to consider, not merely to criticize, but to deliberate
deeply. It is that an affluent society can afford extravagances ill-suited to
poorer nations.
I noticed some months ago the
remark of a cosmopolitan Englishman who had been asked about persistent British
unemployment, which had sat there for many years at about 10 per cent. He said
that all that those figures revealed was that some of his fellow citizens
preferred not to work. “I think,” he said, “that unemployment is something
we can afford.”
Well of course it is, and we in
America can “afford” subsidies of various kinds, which is different from
saying that, in detached thought, we approve exactions from the public purse
extrinsic to safety and justice.
Adam Smith did teach us that we
correctly impose upon the state the burden of paying for public monuments.
The image sneaks its way into the
imagination: Are the unemployed, in an expanded focus, entitled to pass as a
monument to what an affluent society can sustain? As a kind of testimonial to
its latitudinarian impulses?
The easiest answer to that
question, and almost certainly the correct one, is No. Such extensions of what
Adam Smith acknowledged as social embellishments are the business not of the
state, but of the YMCA. Still, a fugitive thought to take to bed tonight—or
another night, tonightís thought being reserved for gratification at having
spent time in one anotherís company.
So we must sleep well, even though
there are always grounds for discouragement. But those who, staring the data
hard in the face, are driven to inconsolability, do well to guard against that
temptation.
Richard Posner observed in a
column in the Wall Street Journal on
Wednesday that conservatives have a duty to be cheerful, because we have no
right to be disappointed by failures, knowing as we do about the limitations of
the state, and the weaknesses of human beings. Mr. Posner is surely correct, and
surely that counsel of his shone always through the face and the attitude toward
life of Don Lipsett.
Albert Jay
Nock is but one, and his investment in pessimism is not for us. In later years I
have come to admire Mr. Nock more for how he said what he had to say, than for
what he had to say.
We are devoted here to the
proposition that what we do and say and write
normal”>does matter, does have effect. Mr. Nock wrote in the closing pages
of his book Our Enemy the State, “I
would be the first to acknowledge that no results of the kind which we agree to
call practical could accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it a
hundred times as cogent as this one—no results, that is, that would in the
least retard the Stateís progress in self-aggrandizement, and thus modify the
consequences of the Stateís course.”
But manifestly there has been a
slowing down of statist impositions, even if not on the scale the Philadelphia
Society seeks. Mr. Nock was the total platonist in respect of what can be
achieved on earth. As for the efforts all of us here undertake, we “might
indeed,” in his language, “be thought bound to do [such things] as a matter
of abstract duty.” He says of the remnant that they—we—do indeed “have
an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august
order of nature”—never mind that what we do is of no purpose.
But of course it does have
purpose. It could even be held, with utmost seriousness, that the work of the
Philadelphia Society—and this is testimony primarily to our meetings here with
one another—is itself proof of our substantiality. I have been with you from
the beginning, and my investment of one hundred dollars in our Society, I
insist—and I tell this to our cherished bankers—has surely yielded a
historic harvest. I am in your debt, and so is the Republic.