It turns out, William F. Buckley would probably have been fun to party with:
Buckley famously smoked marijuana — after sailing his boat outside the U.S. territorial limits, where it would no longer be illegal.
He had it on his boat, anyway, so isn’t that illegal? Oh, nevermind.
At any rate, when he died, there were a lot of jokes along the lines of, “He died because he finally realized what happened to his party and the conservative movement, and his heart couldn’t bear it any more.” This is probably more true than people realize:
“Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.”
He’s 100% right; and near as I can tell, has been marginalized by the new wing of conservatism for some time. He’s paid the appropriate deference as an elder, but any time he said “ok chaps, time to reassess things” he was patted gently on the head and told to go away and have a hard candy.
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