What William Buckley and Charlie Kirk Had in Common -- Harold Meyerson - The Americal Prospect

[erronis]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-09-16-what-william-buckley-charlie-kirk-had-in-common/

As George Will noted, both made ‘politics fun’ (to be sure, even while disparaging equal rights).

(This is a companion to the post I submitted earlier today - different viewpoints and somewhat different opinions.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220646454)

William Buckley, we were told in a Washington Post column last week by the venerable George Will, “would have recognized the 31-year-old [Charlie] Kirk as a kindred spirit.” Writing in the wake of Kirk’s horrific assassination, Will noted that Buckley, “like Kirk, had a talent for making politics fun.”

Working within the iron cage of the 750-word Post opinion column, however, Will lacked the space to document many of the myriad similarities between Buckley (particularly the young Buckley, to whom Will devoted most of his consideration) and Kirk. Allow me, then, to add some specifics to Will’s glowing generalities.

Among the deeply held beliefs that Kirk and the young Buckley shared was a staunch opposition to the federal government’s striking down the Southern laws that mandated race-based segregation. In 1957, when Buckley was the same age as Kirk was when he was cruelly struck down, he authored an editorial in his magazine, National Review, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” In the wake of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, in which Blacks won the right to sit where they wished on public buses rather than in the last few rows, and at a time when the leader of that boycott, Martin Luther King Jr., had called for legislation enabling Blacks to win the right to vote in Southern states, Buckley wrote:

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race … The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.

As Buckley saw it, “the claims of civilization,” collectively personified by the white South, did indeed trump those of universal access to the ballot. For which reasons, Buckley would oppose both the 1964 Civil Rights Act, mandating an end to racial discrimination in public institutions and employment, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, mandating an end to the Southern states’ effectively prohibiting Black voting.

. . .

[Torchlight]

1. Buckley was the most academic, erudite idiot I've ever read.

And yes.... I consider him an academic in much the same way I consider Reefer Madness a meaningful film

[LeftInTX]

2. I would not consider William F Buckley "fun", but to each their own! I was kinda young. Just someone on "Meet the Press"

[Wifes husband]

3. Buckley was a dick head