Next to denouncing others on the right, the surest way for a conservative to win respect from liberals is to retire or die. Once in the grave, professionally or literally, a conservative leader becomes a standard by which to judge all who come after him as deplorable. Barry Goldwater was a maniac with a twitchy finger reaching for the nuclear trigger when he ran for president in 1964. Upon leaving the Senate in 1987, he became an elder statesman trying to exorcise Jerry Falwell from the gop. Ronald Reagan earned a partial rehabilitation when George W. Bush was in office, and now that Donald Trump is president, the younger Bush’s sins are forgiven. He had been a fascist; now the current Republican president is a fascist, and the last one is a model of civility.
Writers no less than politicians may be accorded this strange new respect. William F. Buckley Jr. is now every concerned liberal’s conservative idol, an angelic counterpoint to the diabolical likes of Tucker Carlson. Buckley is remembered as the man who rid the Right of the extremists, but only so that today’s conservatives can be dismissed as extreme, unless they are named Max Boot.
Russell Kirk has not yet been posthumously press-ganged into the ranks of “the resistance,” but certain misunderstandings about the Sage of Mecosta and the conservatism he championed must make him a tempting target. Kirk was a man of letters who at times depreciated politics as “the
