William F. Buckley, Jr.
"The Conservative Spirit"
Keynote Address

The Philadelphia Society
40th! Anniversary Gala
Chicago, Illinois April 30, 2004

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary: The trouble with this assignment is that there is so much to do, at least so much that I want to do. And since the auspices tonight are libertarian, that which I want to do, I shall of course proceed to do.

It will strike cynical members of this assembly that I speak kindly of Lee Edwards immediately following his speaking well of me. But he should not be penalized by my ignoring him, simply because he has not ignored me.

I keep wondering when Lee Edwards will receive the critical attention he has earned with his continuing work as historian of our movement. His most recent book, the history of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is wise, penetrating, and readable. His brief history of the Philadelphia Society, published in this weekend’s program, is a remarkable feat of research and organization. Among other of his revelations, I am pleased to be reminded that I put up one hundred dollars to launch the Philadelphia Society’s bank account, forever rupturing my relations with the bank, which used to be friendly to me, but now spent its time coping with the Society’s overdrafts.

Indeed, my concern over the Society’s financial distresses is more regular than my irregular participation in our proceedings. That concern has been at one level steadfast, at another, reckless. I remember trying anxiously to reach Senator Goldwater on the phone years ago because I needed his vote before the end of a trustees’ meeting at noon the next day, in order to effect a grant for the Philadelphia Society.

I couldn’t locate him. He was off somewhere flying his airplane. In desperation, I sent a telegram to all seven of our fellow trustees, registering approval of the proposed grant to the Philadelphia Society. I signed it, “Best regards, Barry M. Goldwater.”

I was enormously relieved, when his airplane finally landed and I was able to tell him what I had done, to hear him say, “Fine, okay.” He added, “When I’m not at the Senate, you can just send a telegram registering my vote.” It was an enormous relief to me that he approved retroactively my use of his name, which also lightened prosecutorial obligations of the FBI.

You think you can stop me naming names?

Well, you can’t. The most economical way to put it is, What would our movement have done if Ed Feulner had never been born?

There is of course the popular fiction that he has wandered about all these years with three twin brothers, attending to our needs, introducing our meetings, writing our books, congratulating us on our good deeds, lamenting the causes of our misfortunes, and arranging for a Mass when we die. But enough of that. He is the most remarkable biological phenomenon since Pithecanthropus erectus, and I hope that, before too long, they will name a tower, a city, or a state after him. When that happens, I hope to be alive and to be there, as, I know, all of you fellow Philadelphians will be, including Stan Evans, if he has finished his book on McCarthy.

There are others bound to this Society whom I admire and am indebted to. But I tax the limits of your time, and my own patience, and so close with a full-fledged note about the Commodore.

Consider only the mentions of Don Lipsett already made in the program. I know of nobody anywhere whose personality so suffused the organization he represented. And, in his case, this did not mean only the Philadelphia Society. His affiliations with light and truth had stretched back to the Foundation for Economic Education. He went from there to National Review, where in 18 months he created absolute chaos in the Circulation Department; but when he left, he left us tearful at the prospect of life without his inattentions, and without him in the office every day.

His illustrious career, with Vice Commodore Norma Lipsett, who is here tonight, is recounted in Bill Campbell’s essay in the program, and I have to add only that his character truly affected this organization. There was a benignity there which seemed to detoxify any malign culture that was stirring. The puffs from his pipe didn’t exactly dissipate ideological or historical or philosophical differences, but they managed to convey to us that life would go on, strengthening the one impulse dormant in all of us, namely that we would never permit anything that would disappoint Don Lipsett.

Don’s powers of persuasion, quietly, sweetly exercised with a smile and a little self-effacement, could wring manna from desert soil. It was, I think, his ability to produce a corporate jet at just the right moment, to address this or that emergency which, untended, would keep a desperately desired guest speaker from going or from coming, that brought on his designation as the Commodore. He went along with the act, to the point of emblazoning an admiral’s insignia on his stationery.

Don Lipsett never asked too much, which is why when he did ask for something, it was granted as the only alternative to lifelong self-hatred. The Commodore of course did not tell his friends, not even Ed Feulner, that leukemia had been detected, and no one had had any advance notice when the news came that he was gone, the most attractive and selfless American to figure prominently in the revival of the conservative spirit.

Am I done? Well yes. I have nothing left over for Milton Friedman or Russell Kirk or Adam Smith or Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

You hardly want, let alone need, a catalogue of unfinished national business. For one thing, that which is unfinished will remain so. One reason for this is that the reduction in the size of the state is an asymptotic enterprise. Eliminate the state, and one has only ugly anarchy and the absolutely predictable loss of liberty. So that exercises in the limitation of the state have to be done on finer canvases than some, even some members of this Society, have enjoyed drawing on for substitute constitutional blueprints.

Here is a focus I find both useful and elusive. It begins by asking how we objectify privations that are traceable to state activity.

I have in the past recommended that conservatives take advantage of the popular acceptance of the theory of the slippery slope. We should adopt the metaphor for our own purposes. The critical intelligentsia have argued, since the initial prohibition of the novel Ulysses, that if you set out to censor Deep Throat, the next thing you know you will—inexorably—be censoring James Joyce.

I have pondered skeptically this teleological enormity, the assumption that we can’t define a difference between the two, but I grant the usefulness of that line of argument, the perils of the slippery slope.

An attempt to appropriate it wholesale in the matter of taxation introduces correlative questions. The corresponding position to zero censorship would be zero taxation. Since we cannot have that in any earthly enterprise, we have played with variations of this ideal.

One of us, in a lovely fantasy, proposed that taxes should be paid voluntarily. The proposal, as will not surprise, proved to have no legs.

The alternative of the flat tax incorporates as its dynamic engine the assumption that no tax can ever be enacted, in a democratic society, which imposes inordinate taxation on anyone. Anyone, under the flat tax, is—everyone. It is impossible to single out for victimization anybody, or any class, under strict flat-tax dispensations.

That of course is the primary reason why the flat tax has not been written into law. That, plus the sociological point made by Milton Friedman, which is that the great national lobbying enterprise, in which are engaged not only individual lobbyists, but also federal agencies, corporate agents, and state legislatures, would suddenly face disfranchisement, if there were no tax code on which to practice their pressures and seductions.

But there is no reason not to get on with producing a tax index that would convey, state by state, the fiscal statist impositions on citizens’ lives. Which is to say, a number that informs the resident of every location what is the level of taxation where he lives, adding together federal and state income taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes.

It is likely that the whole, hypnotic process of assimilation is at work, even as the withholding of taxes, including the payroll tax, succeeded in concealing to the point of near invisibility what it is that is actually being extracted at the source.

The tax allotment in America is the easiest to objectify. Much much more difficult are the regulatory impositions. They can’t be weighed, often cannot be seen, and sometimes are not even suspected, that flypaper that attracts impediments to your catching a flight, building a house, mowing your lawn, or educating your child.

The relatively scant popular reaction to those impositions on us by taxation and regulation calls up thought on why there is this insensibility. The most obvious reason is that people get used to things. Those of you who ever saw the play My Sister Eileen will remember how Eileen and her sister suspended unquestioningly all conversation every four minutes, to let the elevated train pass by.

But there is another perspective at hand which we need to consider, not merely to criticize, but to deliberate deeply. It is that an affluent society can afford extravagances ill-suited to poorer nations.

I noticed some months ago the remark of a cosmopolitan Englishman who had been asked about persistent British unemployment, which had sat there for many years at about 10 per cent. He said that all that those figures revealed was that some of his fellow citizens preferred not to work. “I think,” he said, “that unemployment is something we can afford.”

Well of course it is, and we in America can “afford” subsidies of various kinds, which is different from saying that, in detached thought, we approve exactions from the public purse extrinsic to safety and justice.

Adam Smith did teach us that we correctly impose upon the state the burden of paying for public monuments.

The image sneaks its way into the imagination: Are the unemployed, in an expanded focus, entitled to pass as a monument to what an affluent society can sustain? As a kind of testimonial to its latitudinarian impulses?

The easiest answer to that question, and almost certainly the correct one, is No. Such extensions of what Adam Smith acknowledged as social embellishments are the business not of the state, but of the YMCA. Still, a fugitive thought to take to bed tonight—or another night, tonight’s thought being reserved for gratification at having spent time in one another’s company.

So we must sleep well, even though there are always grounds for discouragement. But those who, staring the data hard in the face, are driven to inconsolability, do well to guard against that temptation.

Richard Posner observed in a column in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that conservatives have a duty to be cheerful, because we have no right to be disappointed by failures, knowing as we do about the limitations of the state, and the weaknesses of human beings. Mr. Posner is surely correct, and surely that counsel of his shone always through the face and the attitude toward life of Don Lipsett.

We have many forebears; Albert Jay Nock is but one, and his investment in pessimism is not for us. In later years I have come to admire Mr. Nock more for how he said what he had to say, than for what he had to say.

We are devoted here to the proposition that what we do and say and write does matter, does have effect. Mr. Nock wrote in the closing pages of his book Our Enemy the State, “I would be the first to acknowledge that no results of the kind which we agree to call practical could accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it a hundred times as cogent as this one—no results, that is, that would in the least retard the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement, and thus modify the consequences of the State’s course.”

But manifestly there has been a slowing down of statist impositions, even if not on the scale the Philadelphia Society seeks. Mr. Nock was the total platonist in respect of what can be achieved on earth. As for the efforts all of us here undertake, we “might indeed,” in his language, “be thought bound to do [such things] as a matter of abstract duty.” He says of the remnant that they—we—do indeed “have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august order of nature”—never mind that what we do is of no purpose.

But of course it does have purpose. It could even be held, with utmost seriousness, that the work of the Philadelphia Society—and this is testimony primarily to our meetings here with one another—is itself proof of our substantiality. I have been with you from the beginning, and my investment of one hundred dollars in our Society, I insist—and I tell this to our cherished bankers—has surely yielded a historic harvest. I am in your debt, and so is the Republic.