Sowell: William F. Buckley (1925-2008)

[Terri]

By Thomas Sowell
March 6, 2008

Writing in 1954, Lionel Trilling said that most conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

One of the perks of being a liberal is disdaining people who are not liberals. However, as of 1954, Trilling's dismissive attitude toward conservatives' intellectual landscape was painfully close to the truth.

Trilling wrote ten years after Friedrich Hayek's landmark counterattack against the left in his book "The Road to Serfdom." But that was a book with great impact on a relatively small number of people at the time, though its influence spread around the world over the years.

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