**Edmund Burke's affirmation of the sanctity of established traditions. **"Market absolutism:" an unregulated marketplace of self-serving "utility maximizers" will, in almost all circumstances, yield better results than the deliberations of public policy-makers. **Accordingly, "government is not the solution, government is the problem." (Ronald Reagan). Taxation for any purpose other than the protection of life, liberty and property, is theft. **Poverty is a sin and not the result of economic injustice. People are poor because they choose to be. Welfare assistance only encourages indolence. There are no "victims of society." **The wealth of the privileged few "trickles down" to benefit the masses. Only these privileged, the trustees and protectors of received "culture" and "traditions," are fit to rule. **If carefully "cultivated" by an elite mass media and an official "Ministry of Truth," the masses have a boundless capacity to tolerate their political and economic oppression. Those workers who create and sustain the wealth of people like William Buckley have no claim on that wealth and no right to share it fairly with the owners of the capital that is equally essential to the production of that wealth. **Those who disagree with the above precepts are "communists" (or, at the very least, "socialists") who, as such, are enemies of the state whose ideas must be suppressed and whose citizen rights must be forfeited.These dogmas amount to what Friedrich Nietzsche called a "master morality" - an ethos devised and functioning to rationalize and secure the status of wealth and power in society. In this regard, Buckley's conservatism is similar to the Calvinist doctrine of wealth as the sign of divine grace, the doctrine of the divine right of kings, and Carnegie's and Rockefeller's "Social Darwinism." (This is not to say that Buckley was a "Nietzschean" - he most emphatically was not. But the concept that class privilege generates a justifying moral theory, an idea shared by Machiavelli, Marx, and virtually all sociologists, applies in this case). All of these articles of faith can be readily demonstrated to be false, immoral, or at best half-truths lending credence to abominable falsehoods. And with the dissolution of these dogmatic foundations, the entire eloquent logical structure of "conservatism" collapses in a heap, reducing the Bucklian rhetoric to sound and fury, signifying nothing. (I cannot, in this space, justify these bold assertions. However, I can refer you to my almost completed book that attempts that justification: Conscience of a Progressive - still in search of a publisher, by the way). Buckley's conservatism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and Buckley lived long enough to see the germination of those seeds. Despite the awesome propaganda mill of the corporate mass media, ordinary American citizens are finally beginning to understand full-well that they have been had. They are losing their jobs, their homes, their health care, and their pensions, while the cost of essentials such as food, home heating and transportation fuel rise. They can no longer afford to send their children to college to obtain the skills necessary sustain a tolerable standard of living. Instead, many of those children are forced to join the military to fight and die in imperialistic foreign wars. The citizens' privacy and civil rights are being dismantled along with the Constitution that once secured them. After years of GOP fiscal policy of "borrow and spend," the U.S. economy is on the brink of collapse, with nothing left in the federal treasury with which to effect a rescue. At long last, the public is beginning to realize that with the privatization of elections and with it the use of unverifiable "black-box" voting machines, the right to vote is no longer a reliable instrument of political change and thus that the government is out of their control - it no longer "governs with the consent of the governed," as demanded by the founding Declaration of the American republic. The radical change that William F. Buckley Jr. resisted throughout his life is imminent, brought on by the very success of the conservatism that he championed. It remains to be seen how the ruling conservative elites will respond to the magma of public discontent that is rising beneath their feet. We can, at the very least, be confident of the validity of John F. Kennedy's warning: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable." Copyright 2008 by Ernest Partridge