American Conservatism Proceeded William F. Buckley Jr. to the Grave.

Republicans took control of . . . well, everything: both houses of Congress and the White House. Many conservatives hoped (and many liberals feared) that smaller government—a Republican promise since Ronald Reagan sat in the Oval Office—was just around the corner. How wrong they were:

Republicans increased federal spending by a trillion dollars in six years. They passed the biggest expansion of entitlements since the LBJ years. They federalized education. They gave unprecedented power to the executive. They launched a massive nation-building project thousands of miles from home, to do in Iraq what conservatives would never expect government to do in the United States.

Even worse, the conservative intellectual movement abandoned its limited-government roots. (David Boaz, San Francisco Chronicle, 02 . 28 . 2008).

The neoconservatives inspired by the grand and noble visions of liberals and the radical left came up with their own and

brought their commitment to an expansive government intimately involved in shaping the social and economic life of the nation. They transformed conservatism from rugged individualism to national greatness. The religious right demanded that government impose their social values on the whole country. Conservatives who had once rallied to a famous Reagan declaration — that government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem — became loyal supporters of George W. Bush, who said, rather differently, When somebody hurts, government has got to move. (David Boaz, San Francisco Chronicle, 02 . 28 . 2008).

Buckley and Libertarians were not oblivious to the shift of power from the states to the federal government, from Congress to an imperial presidency:

Conservatives also became cheerleaders for a presidency untrammeled by courts or Congress, especially in matters of foreign affairs. [Russell] Kirk [founding editor of National Review] once wrote that war must be a last resort, lest it make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal government in debt, (and) break in upon private and public morality. (Russell Kirk and James McClellan, The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft: A Project of the Robert A. Taft Institute of Government). But now conservatives insist that Congress stay out of Bush's way as he prosecutes an endless war. (David Boaz, San Francisco Chronicle, 02 . 28 . 2008).

Buckley, in a 2006 interview with CBS News, decried the degraded state of American conservatism and deplored Bush's absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending:

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign," Buckley told CBS News. No "successor would reenunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious." (Buckley: Bush Not A True Conservative, CBS News Exclusive: Buckley Criticizes President For Interventionist Policies).

At the dawn of the New American Century, mainstream conservatives, co-opted by 9-11 and neoconservatives, forgot about Buckley and Goldwater and Reagan, quickly lost their way, and then stampeded over the cliff into all the excesses and national disasters typically engendered by Liberals and The Left.

While it was the natural course of emphysema and diabetes that ended A Profoundly Consequential Life, it was the unholy chemistry of a moral philosophy based principally in liberalism, the passions of the Radical Left, and the dreams of National Greatness that killed conservatism.

R.I.P. William F. Buckley Jr., R.I.P. American conservatism.

Postscript: An Emotional Goodbye From Charlie Rose:

Part II: