CNA Staff, Mar 8, 2025 / 10:00 am (CNA).
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) this week announced that celebrated Catholic writer and public intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., who shaped U.S. political discourse for decades, will receive his own commemorative stamp for his contributions to American public life.
Hailing him as “one of the most influential public intellectuals in modern U.S. history,” the USPS said in an announcement that Buckley “defined the conservative movement of the mid-20th century and was one of its most recognizable spokesmen.”
Buckley, who died in 2008, founded the conservative commentary magazine National Review in 1955. Known for his unique northeastern accent and erudite commentary, he further served as the host of the public affairs television show “Firing Line” from 1966–1999.
Buckley was raised Catholic and was a member of the Knights of Malta. In his book “Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith,” he wrote that he was “baptized as a Catholic and reared as one by devoted parents” and that his faith had “not wavered” over his life.
The Catholic Church “is unique in that it is governed by a vision that has not changed in 2,000 years,” he wrote. “It tells us, in just about as many words, that we are not accidental biological accretions, we are creatures of a divine plan; that the God who made us undertook to demonstrate his devotion to us as individual human beings by submitting to the pain and humiliation of the cross.”
“Nothing in that vision has ever changed, nothing at all,” Buckley continued, describing it as “a mind-shaking, for some a mind-altering certitude.”
The Buckley stamp was created by artist Dale Stephanos. It was drawn “by hand with graphite and charcoal on hot-press watercolor paper, then refined digitally,” the post office said. It was designed by USPS art director Greg Breeding.
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The Betty White stamps are out too.
Life is good.
Buckley was a classic conservative, not a right wing populist. They are not the same thing.
A classic conservative believes in the Constitution, the separation of powers. Right wing populists seem to want an all powerful executive, unrestrained by the Constitution.
Yes, Buckley wanted a smaller Federal Government, but he also wanted a Federal Government that operates within the law.
Both definitions serve only to create dismissive means of understanding by the enemies of conservatism. The driving factors of anyone gravitating towards an identification as a conservative have always been culturally based and intuitively based on religion. Despite how many bad historians falsify history by associating leftist tyrannies with the political right, conservatives, not progressive secularists, value, innate truth, natural law, and rights as divine endowments rather than political inventions.
Hitler and Mussolini were”Leftists?” I don’t think so. They were Fascists. Ditto Franco, Peron, etc.
Fascists are leftists. Don’t be swayed by the preposterous projections of leftist history.
So, there is no Extreme Right? I don’t agree that Fascists are Leftists. Communists are indeed extreme Left, but Fascists are extreme Right.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is a Leftist, not a classic Liberal. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a true Conservative, but a Right Winger. I wish the media would get this right.
It really matters little to those suffering under a totalitarian regime what the regime leadership identifies as. Totalitarian is as totalitarian does.
Who are those who deny objective morality. Those who actually deny it, such as all leftists including all communists and fascists, or those who affirm objective morality, such as those who value conserving immutable truths, such as all right wing anti-fascists and anti-communists. Reconsider your knowledge of history in place of the cliched assumptions of airheaded academics, journalists, and historians.
William: Your definitions are the accepted conventions, so they can’t be faulted for their intent.
Nonetheless, as the post war Austrian historian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and others pointed out, the very concept of an ideological political spectrum is an invention of religion hating revolutionaries who always stood to salvage respectability by creating the fiction of moral equivalency between those competing socialist factions who identify themselves differently whether they see nationalized tyrannies or internationalist tyrannies as primarily the means to social utopia, which they assume, everyone desires.
Liberals believing they have been fair to conservatives place their ideas at some place on this fictional spectrum but are not fair enough to know that conservative arguments revolve around denying this spectrum. Conservatives might grudgingly concede the language of the revolutionaries at times, for purposes of rebuke, while making the religious argument that only a moral people can create honor and justice in society, and there can never be anything “revolutionary” in the human condition. Conservatives don’t see government as their savior, nor do they even view conservatism as an “ideology” since that term assumes truth is manmade rather than divinely endowed. Buckley’s famous quip for original sin and against the myth of progress in the human condition was his plea to stand atop history and yell, “Stop!”
Buckley on a stamp! A great move, although on his “Firing Line” he immediately would have debated the reasons behind today’s inflated price of stamps. His Stamp Act, for sure.
And, this commemoration is much to be preferred over placing Obama on Mount Rushmore as some fantasized earlier.