Since the death of James L. Buckley on Friday, tributes have made his sterling character and incredible legacy clear. One can also learn something about our politics from the trajectory of the New York Senate seat he held.
Buckley was defeated in 1976 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a respected public servant in both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations. A thoughtful man whose writings could challenge left-wing orthodoxy, Moynihan nonetheless often — though not always — voted party line. But as far as Democrats go, we could get far, far worse than he.
And indeed, we did. In 2000, Democrat Hillary Clinton, about whom there is little left to say, won the seat, becoming Moynihan’s successor. She had never lived in New York before deciding to run for Senate there. Nor had she been involved in politics in the state meaningfully. She left the Senate in 2009 to become President Obama’s Secretary of State, a position that transitioned seamlessly, just as was intended, to her tenure as president of the United States.
After Hillary came Kirsten Gillibrand, about whom little could be said in the first place. But I’ll try. Appointed to the position in 2009 by New York governor David Paterson, she won it in her own right in a special election in 2010 then in regular elections in 2012 and 2018. Once something of a moderate Democrat representing an upstate House district, Gillibrand abandoned any pretense of moderation in the Senate, claiming in a 2018 interview that she was “embarrassed” by her prior defense of gun rights and “ashamed” of her previous dissents from the left-wing line on immigration. During the Trump years, she became exhibitionist about her views and her opposition to Republicans, especially to Trump himself. It was an obvious prelude to a 2020 presidential run. That run ended in failure about five months after it began. She had failed to gain any real traction, despite her enthusiastic support for “GAY RIGHTS!”
So, there you have it: From Buckley to Gillibrand, a demonstration of the downward trajectory of our politics, illustrative of at least some of the trends that have fed into that decline. But don’t worry: Things could always get worse.