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Picking Up Aperçus. Some of the programs advanced by Buckley are being freshly scrutinized by liberals who have become disillusioned with some of their own panaceas. Many agree with Buckley that initiative in social progress lies as much with local government as with federal. Like him, they are unhappy with the massive dislocations caused by such federal superprograms as highway construction and urban renewal. When Bobby Kennedy recently urged private industry to help rebuild the ghettos, Buckley congratulated him for a "statement so sensible that it made recommendations I made three years ago." Buckley, in fact, is a bit chagrined that it is liberal Democrats and not conservative Republicans who have been making some dramatic proposals along conservative lines. "The other side," he told Richard Nixon on Firing Line, "is picking up an essentialy conservative aperçu and running off with it."
Some of Buckley's admirers feel that he has spread himself too thin, that he has dissipated his energies in too many ephemeral enterprises. "I'm not sure what I would have done with my energies if I hadn't dissipated them," says Buckley. "Would the world have been better off if I had written more books instead of columns?" Besides, he adds, "I reproach myself more than they do when I think of all the sailing I might have done." The sum total of his activities has nevertheless left its mark. He has certainly given conservatism a sheen of articulateness and thoughtfulness it has not always had. "The average American," says Ohio Congressman John M. Ashbrook, "thinks that conservatives are dour, always griping and clipping coupons. Bill puts down that notion."
Buckley himself feels that the U.S. may be moving—at a snail's pace, to be sure—toward his kind of society. This is the point he makes in a book he is writing: The Revolt Against the Masses, a sequel to Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses. To Ortega's somber message that the mass mind has displaced the aristocratic ideal, Buckley replies that there are signs of a resurgence of that ideal—in the movement away from behaviorism, from the "extreme pretensions of democratism." If Buckley foresees a conservative society emerging, however, he is probably in for a disappointment.
Despite the adoption of certain programs that might be considered conservative, the U.S. public is unlikely to swerve from its liberal course no matter how much a solitary Buckley may prod. But the fun is in the prodding, as far as William Buckley is concerned. And if, through fire, flood, earthquake, atomic holocaust or even conservatism, the present-day liberal U.S. should expire, no one stands to lose more than Buckley. For he enjoys the best of both worlds: a society that is especially vulnerable to criticism from the right and equally willing to take it.