Taki on Buckley

Taki has an affectionate column remembering William Buckley, whom (I did not know this) he knew well and who, as he tells it, took his side throughout life, even seating Taki and his wife next to him at his 80th birthday party at the Pierre Hotel, while “some neocons nearby turned green.” Taki seems to be the only person in the paleocon/paleolibertarian camp who has good things to say about Buckley, but I must say it is nice to see something affectionate about him coming from those quarters, after reading Peter Brimelow’s harsh attack on him, which a VFR reader described as a savage indictment.

As for me, I didn’t know Buckley personally; my interest in him is solely as a political and intellectual figure.

Also, I notice to my amazement that VFR, the scourge of the paleolibertarians, is still on Taki’s blogroll, right between Justin Raimondo (!) and lewrockwell.com (!). Here it is:

Favorite Blogs
Musings of a Black Conservative
Tom Piatak
Global Paradigms
Leon Hadar
Freedom in Our Time
Justin Raimondo
View from the Right
Lew Rockwell Blog
Antiwar.com Blog
VDare.com Blog
Pat Buchanan
Sandro Magister
The Monarchist
Steve Sailer
Andrew Cusack

- end of initial entry -

“Albert Nock” writes:

We all know you’re really just a big softie. Plus, anyone who suggests restricting the franchise as part of rejecting modernism is rather paleo whether he recognizes it or not.

LA replies:

It’s true that my tyrannical streak has been overstated.

In the broader sense of paleocon, almost all conservatives who adhere to some aspects of concrete particularity against the abstract universalism of neoconservatism are paleocons. However, I use “paleocon” most of the time in the narrower sense, as people grouped around certain magazines and personalities (I’ll skip getting into a definition of their ideology at the moment), and therefore do not normally refer to myself as a paleocon.

Also the same distinction exists for neoconservatism. In the broad sense of neocon, almost all mainstream and establishment conservatives today, including many who are never called neocons, could be thought of as neocons, meaning that they define America more as a set of principles and values than as a concerete particular nation and people.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 03, 2008 11:59 PM | Send