> [Buckley] was pretty influential.
I wonder. Isn't this a little like thinking that the guy on the surfboard is creating the wave?
Don't you think there was a pretty general move on the part of the American elites to retrench and recover lost ground after WWII -- which was interrupted and even to some extent reversed during the Sixties, and then resumed the revanche as soon as possible? Buckley seems pretty epiphenomenal to that.
His particular brand of quixotic, attitudinizing, Catholic lumpen-intellectual wankery seems like a pretty far cry, too, from either the type of Protestant born-again religious militancy that the Republicans depend on so heavily, or the eminently practical corporate freebootery that constitutes the real substance of modern "conservatism".
But I daresay Doug knows the Buckley corpus a great deal better than I do, from his days on the Dark Side....