- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Oddly, Buckley's demise is very symbolic of the plight of today's reactionary movement. Buckley was always an intellectual, and while he paved the way for the think-tank and right-wing foundation reactionaries that intellectually buttressed the modern GOP, the Intellectual Right seem to be more marginalized by the anti-intellectual Right majority, like princesses captive in their ivory towers, surrounded by the mongrel hordes they've roused.
The Right today has grown toxic in its hostility to science, education, intellectualism. The roots of that animosity go deep, but Buckley was increasingly an anachronism, given where the dominant power of the GOP resides today. If not for their saturation in the mainstream gliberal media, the think-tankers of the reactionary movement would have no reliable soapbox. They still get called in as policy experts, but within the GOP, it almost seems like the Right's a headless monster, animated by the ideas of Buckley and his peers, but having slipped loose of its bonds long ago, careening heedlessly (and headlessly) toward a future it cannot comprehend.
