The Centenary of Buckley and the Crisis of Free Speech

William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in February 2008, would have been 100 years old in November of this year. There are many tributes planned to celebrate his centenary. The huge, authorized biography by Sam Tanenhaus will be out in just a few weeks. I will not say anything about that book apart from noting that its subtitle—“The Life and the Revolution That Changed America”— is apt.

For five or six years at the end of his life, I would generally see Bill at least weekly. We sailed and dined, emailed, and spoke on the phone very often. I find it hard to believe that seventeen years have passed since he died. In some ways, it seems like yesterday.

It is interesting to ask what Bill would make of the contemporary cultural and political scene. He had witnessed similar follies throughout the 1960s and 1970s. And after all, the Sage of Ecclesiastes was right: there is nothing new under the sun, though many of our most prominent cultural figures seem to believe that they occupy a unique perch at the very apogee of virtue and moral rectitude and are therefore entitled, O how entitled, to discard the achievements and admonitions of the past as so many false starts and dead ends on the way to true enlightenment, which is to say, to whatever they happen to believe at the moment.

It is important to remember how general the assault on our civilization was in the 1960s. It wasn’t just protests against the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, or the new hedonism. What was aimed at was nothing less than what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of all values.”

Among other things, that project represented a categorical repudiation of the American consensus, not just its engines of prosperity and individual liberty but also the basic tenets of our self-understanding, tenets that went back through English liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment to the political meditations of the Greeks and the Romans.

We see something similar today in a different modality. In some ways, indeed, the assault on the fundamental values of our civilization is more thoroughgoing today than it was in the 1960s.

This is partly because those conducting the assault are not launching their fusillades from outside the establishment but are themselves well integrated into and often highly placed members of the establishment. They are, in a word, the elite.

The assault today is also more thoroughgoing because it is no longer undertaken in the name of freedom and truth, however spurious, but, strange though it sounds, against both.

George Orwell was right when he observed that the first indispensable step towards freedom is the willingness to call things by their real names. We—which is to say, our masters in the media and cultural establishment—have lost that fortitude. The triumph of “wokeness” and political correctness has encouraged an epidemic allergy to candor.

The hope is that the embrace of euphemism will alter not only our language but also the reality that our language names. And to a large extent, it is working. Unfreedom does not become freedom by calling it free. Reality continues to check the fantasies of our narratives. But the misprision can help spread and reinforce the fog of self-deceit.

There is a sense in which the triumph of political correctness erodes free speech chiefly by negative means. It promulgates speech codes, rules against ‘hate speech,’ and the like. But I suspect that its gravest damage is done by instilling a timidity of spirit, a lack of what the Greeks called θυμός, among its charges.

A reluctance to speak the truth instills an unwillingness or even an inability to see the truth. Thus it is that the reign of political correctness quietly aids and abets habits of complacency and unfreedom.

This atmosphere of supine anesthesia is an invitation to tyranny. It took several centuries and much blood and toil to wrest freedom from the recalcitrant forces of arbitrary power. It is a melancholy fact that what took ages to achieve can be undone in the twinkling of an eye.

I do not think it is properly appreciated just how bizarre it is that socialism appears to be making a serious comeback, not just as a common-room amusement among ignorant students who have no idea what socialism is, but also among politicians, academics, and much of the media.

Winston Churchill was too kind when he said that socialism was “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”

All that is correct. But beyond that, socialism rests upon two fundamental goals: the abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth. A corollary to the achievement of those goals, as socialist totalitarians the world over have instantly realized, is terror and a police state. And yet here we are, notwithstanding the triumph of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, with serious proposals to institute socialism in the United States.

It seems to me that we are at a crossroads where our complacency colludes dangerously with the blunt opportunism of events.

Courage, Aristotle once observed, is the most important virtue because without courage we are unable to practice the other virtues. The life of freedom requires the courage to recognize and to name the realities that impinge upon us. Day is Night. Peace is War. Love is Hate. Out of such linguistic capitulations, as Orwell showed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, totalitarian tyranny is born. We’ve all read the book. But have we learned that hard lesson?

Free speech, it turns out, is like other freedoms: its victory is never permanent. It is a melancholy truth that the right of free speech, like other civilizational achievements, must constantly be renewed to survive.

That was one of Edmund Burke’s central insights. But it is an insight that is regularly forgotten—until reality intrudes upon our reverie to remind us. Every generation finds that it must work anew to win or at least to maintain the freedoms bequeathed to it by earlier generations.

What was argued for and won yesterday is today once again up for grabs. Which moves patience and perseverance to the head of the queue of political virtues. You already made the argument. But it always turns out that you must make it again.

During the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai in 1932, the Austrian essayist Karl Kraus was anguishing over the placement of commas in a column. It might seem futile at such a moment, he told a friend, but concluded that “if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.”

Was that hyperbolic? Perhaps. But the general point holds: language matters. Telling the truth is not only a linguistic desideratum; it is also a political imperative. I know that Bill Buckley, who devoted much of his seemingly boundless energy to broadcasting the truth, would have had much to say about the many ways our culture has colluded against that often lonely but always exigent task.