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I’ve read a few pieces about the late William F. Buckley. But this one by Bill Kristol caused me to bristle…

In my high school yearbook (Collegiate School, class of 1970), there’s a photo of me wearing a political button. (Everyone did in those days. I wasn’t that much dorkier than everyone else.) The button said, “Don’t let THEM immanentize the Eschaton.”

There you see an example of the influence of Bill Buckley, who died last week at age 82. For it was Buckley who had promulgated this slogan, as an amusing distillation of the thinking of the very difficult historian of political philosophy Eric Voegelin. I’d of course not read Voegelin then (there’s a lot of him I still haven’t read, to tell the truth). But the basic thought was: Don’t let ideologues try to create heaven on earth, because they’ll deprive us of freedom and make things a lot worse.

Bill Kristol, of course, is one of the evangelising neo-conservative ideologues, who so passionately argued that we could create a heaven on earth in Iraq, if only we deposed Saddam. I wonder if he’s still got that button?