OK, just read the Economist’s tribute to Bill Buckley. Hmmm. It

suffers from some of the chronic faults of the Economist’s U.S. reporting & thereby I think misses the main point: that Buckleyite conservatism

has, and likely can only ever have, a small base of support, mostly

among urban intellectual & college types, & that in the sphere of

mass-American-political phenomena, you can’t really get any closer to

Buckleyism than a mildly libertarian strain of good old U.S. populism,

with all the internal tensions THAT implies (e.g. on govt. spending).

And perhaps shouldn’t hope to.

I bet Jonah, whom the tweed jackets at the Economist diss shamefully,

has done a column on this.