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0 of 3 Premium Clicks used this month SUBSCRIBE Print + Online Subscriber Activation | Register x Forgot Password | Need an Account? e-edition | subscribe | newsletter | deals Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » The rise of Donald Trump suggests that William F. Buckley is sorely missed Comment About this blog Recent Posts Remember when wingnuts didn't want these Olympics held in Chicago? Aug. 12, 2016 2:38 p.m. The rise of Donald Trump suggests that William F. Buckley is sorely missed Aug. 11, 2016 5:28 p.m. Right-wing hero Antonin Scalia said gun rights have limits Aug. 10, 2016 11:38 a.m. Time is right to seal Trump's image as a darling of dimwits Aug. 9, 2016 10:08 a.m. Face it: You'll be voting in November, even if you think you won't Aug. 8, 2016 10:08 a.m. By Pat Cunningham Aug. 11, 2016 5:28 p.m. While plowing through some old stuff the other day, I came across a blog post of mine from a few years ago �on how the conservative movement has changed over the decades. It � got me thinking about how William F. Buckley, a conservative intellectual who died eight years ago at the age of 82, might have reacted to the dimwitted right-wing crap peddled these days by the anti-intellectual likes of Donald Trump. The centerpiece of my blog post was an excerpt from something Kathleen Geier wrote in The Washington Monthly. She said this: I �would argue that there is one important way in which today's conservatives differ from conservatives of the past. It's this: today's conservative movement is much more genuinely populist, in the sense that it is much less dominated by elites…[I]n the 1950s, the wildly popular libertarian novelist Ayn Rand was basically read out of the conservative movement. The most famous smackdown occurred in 1957 in the pages of William F. Buckley's National Review, when conservative icon Whittaker Chambers wrote a scathing review of Rand's magnum opus… Following that review, Rand, although she presided over a fervent cult… was marginalized within the conservative movement. And Rand wasn't the only extremist Buckley and the National Review crowd kicked out. They also denounced the John Birch Society, anti-Semites, and eventually (by the 1970s, anyway), extremist racists. This is not to say, of course, that Buckley and the National Review didn't continue to support many noxious, far-right ideas and policies. In one infamous example, Buckley took to the pages of the New York Times to advocate tattooing AIDS victims “on the buttocks.” But for the most part he did kick out the radical fringe. The main difference between the conservative movement then and now is that elites like Buckley have lost the ability to define the movement. Today, conservatism is less hierarchical, and more diffuse. It's not that conservative elites don't wield considerable power in the movement, of course. But within conservatism, there is no longer anyone of Buckley's stature who has the power to define the boundaries of the respectable right, and to purge certain individuals or tendencies. The closest thing to a leader today's conservative movement has is Rush Limbaugh, who delights in voicing extremist opinions and trafficking in the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that many voters find repellent. As a result, extremists within conservatism are much more empowered. This has had mixed results for conservatives. On the one hand, the conservative base, because it is far less interested in currying favor with the political establishment, has had some success in pursuing a much more aggressively partisan agenda. Conservatives in the House and Senate are far more obstructionist than previously, and have not shied away from opposing strongly popular measures (like background checks for gun owners), or to taking widely unpopular actions (like impeaching Bill Clinton). In other ways, though, the extremist populist base has hurt the party. Today, the Senate would probably be in Republican hands if the conservative base had not insisted in nominating extremist candidates like Todd Akin and Christine O'Donnell. Eventually, as America continues to experience demographic changes that tend to favor Democrats, conservatives may come to regret the extent to which extremists have taken over their movement. Whatever short-term gains this strategy has won for conservatism, it will likely turn out to be harmful to the movement's long-term interests. Tomorrow's conservatives may wish they'd had a Buckley-type figure who had drawn a line in the sand between 'respectable' conservatives and the fringe. 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