George Will: William F. Buckley Jr. would recognize Charlie Kirk as a kindred spirit
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — On a tranquil, sun-dappled afternoon here, the day before the killing of Charlie Kirk on a university campus more than 2,000 miles west, Yale University hosted a ceremony at which the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a commemorative stamp honoring the 100th anniversary of the birth of a Yale man in whose large footsteps Kirk had walked. William F. Buckley Jr., who died in 2008 at age 82, would have recognized the 31-year-old Kirk as a kindred spirit.
The poet Robert Frost wrote of his “lover’s quarrel with the world.” Buckley burst upon the national scene in 1951, at age 25, by announcing such a quarrel with his alma mater. It was heatedly explained in his first book , “God and Man at Yale.” Looking back, this volume was an early spark that lit the fuse that led to the explosion that has blown universities into the maelstrom of today’s contentiousness.
Kirk was called “divisive.” So was Socrates, who also paid with his life for the offense of being too argumentative, corrupting young Athenians by encouraging independent thinking.
Seven decades ago, Buckley, the foremost maker of the postwar conservative movement, was not often somberly denounced as divisive. His immunity was primarily because conservatism then was often regarded condescendingly as a harmless eccentricity — naughty but unserious.
By founding National Review magazine in 1955, and by his tireless traveling to small and soon not-so-small gatherings on campuses and in communities, Buckley made history: Without National Review, Barry Goldwater would not have been the Republicans’ 1964 presidential nominee. Without Goldwater, Ronald Reagan’s nomination would have been less likely.
Kirk was killed at the beginning of what was to have been a Buckley-like tour of political evangelism among the unconverted: college students. He also was probably killed because , unlike Buckley when he was 31 in 1956, Kirk was advocating a powerful and ascendant politics.
When Goldwater, an Arizona businessman, decided at age 40 in 1949 to run for the Phoenix City Council , he said of politics , “It ain’t for life, and it may be fun.” In 1949, Yale was incubating Buckley as an undergraduate who, like Kirk, had a talent for making politics fun. It ought to be such. It flows from what makes us human.
Today, on both sides of the barricades, politics is practiced with a snarl. It makes people cranky, permeates everything, and in two months, will spoil innumerable Thanksgiving dinners. Why then must we have politics?
Because we are what Aristotle said make humans distinctive creatures: Like Buckley and Kirk, we all are language users.
Trout get along swimmingly without politics. Ants and beavers collaborate building anthills and dams, and bees in apiaries have hierarchies (queens and drones), but we do not speak of the “politics” of ants, beavers and bees.
Only humans have politics, for two reasons: We are opinionated, and we are egotistical. We think our opinions are preferable to others’ opinions. Hence the primary purpose and challenge of politics is to keep the peace among such creatures living together.
Many visionary nuisances think that keeping the peace is a contemptibly modest, even banal purpose for politics. They believe that social peace — living together congenially — is not merely overrated, it is evidence of bad character: too little passion for perfecting the world. Sacrificing social peace is, they think, an inevitable price worth paying for a politics with properly elevated ambitions, including the suppression of those whose opinions and egotism are impediments to politically driven progress.
Addressing what he called, with notable understatement, “my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” Lincoln said in his first inaugural : “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” When he spoke, seven states had voted to secede. The nation was fractured by disagreement about the right of some human beings to own other human beings.
Today, American politics is embittered by many disagreements, but not even all of them cumulatively begin to justify the insanely disproportionate furies that so many people on both sides of the metaphoric barricades relish feeling. Perhaps they feel important, even to themselves, only when cloaked in the derivative importance that comes from immersion in apocalyptic politics. Politics too grand to settle for merely keeping the peace that gives congeniality a chance.
Kirk, like Buckley, was a teacher unconfined to a classroom. Anyone is such who argues for a living — who by welcoming interlocutors pays them the compliment of acknowledging the kinship of all serious users of language. It is horrific that nowadays this can be fatal.
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One thing they definitely share in common is if Buckley were assassinated debating someone in 2025,[✘]
I dont think you've seen enough Charlie Kirk videos.
Rush Limbaugh was a piece of crap in many ways, and Kirk was just as bad or worse. Personally I would say worse.
It is not a surprise that the far right and conservatives love him, and the rest of us dont, its just reality. This notion that all he wanted to do is "debate" people is nonsense.
I never paid any attention to him in the past. I am kind of aghast about his racist comments and how idiots like Senator Tim Scott could embrace Kirk.
Of course Scott laces his comments with religious opioids, so I guess we can all blame the Bible and Christ and Ephesians...
I've seen made up comments supposedly from him, distorted quotes taken blatantly out of context. It's the same playbook.
It just doesn't matter. Same thing will be rolled out if a moderate leftist like Bari Weiss is shot by the hard left. We'll hear how she a hateful, bigoted, reactionary, hard right, fascist etc.. because she dissented on some progressive issue. The same silly labels misused and applied so indiscriminately they lose all meaning. Everyone who isn't far left will be called a fascist at this point.
I used to listen to kirk, gorka, levin, hewitt, prager and a few other of those fake jew and xtian nationalist hypocrites on the local thumper radio affiliate, salem. take my word for it, the anti-democrat hate rhetoric that trump spews is almost benign compared to the bullshit that flows from any of the mouths of those religious scam artists. I wouldn't listen without wearing a chinstrap though. salem streams that religious extremism online.
to me, listening to that hateful, divisive, and totally unamerican rhetoric was the metaphorical equivalent of continuously sharpening a bayonet that I was going to happily use on them, if and when they ever crossed the wall of separation between church and state. they seem to forget that "traditional american values" are contained within 2 documents, the declaration of independence and the constitution, and as an american I will defend both.
what I find hilarious is how these pillars of the xtian right are so quick to reassign blame for the action/inaction of their omniscient sky daddy, especially when his omnipotence has again failed them. don't they wonder why? I can't think of anything more unamerican and unconstitutional than their attempts to blend religious dogma and government, and then force it upon the unwilling. why must the religiously challenged need to learn this lesson over and over and over again thru history?
the only positive thing about charlie kirk getting clipped was another round of deleting morons from my FB account.
as a DEI senator, I'm sure tim scott probably feels a lot of pressure to overcompensate ...
The author, born in 1941, bases his theory on the smugness that only humans have language, intellect and feelings.
Like the first rule of a computer; feed it false information and the computer will spit out false information.
Ants and bees in particular, have complex language(s), defend territories and practice warfare, mostly among their own kind but not exclusively.
This necessitates "politics" at some level.
Bee Hive Democracy Isn’t So Different From Human Democracy
Exactly my point. Thanks .
George Will attempts to leverage a political assassination to revive an obsolete political legacy that got it wrong? Libertarianism has weakened the United States to the point that the rot may be irreparable. Communism is dead; the windmills have all fallen down. And a tradition of autocratic Catholic conservatism never contributed anything to the American experiment.
The only thing Charlie Kirk and William F. Buckley really have in common is they're both dead. But Buckley was never the martyr that George Will wants him to be.