[update: extended, but not revised]
He lived long enough to see the sweep of his ideas for what they are - episodic.
While left-liberal values the world over have been the enduring march of consciousness through time, almost everything that marked his lifetime crusade is dust, now, practically, even adjusting for the recent collapse of American Conservatism under the weight of its own essential contentlessness and freakish neo-conservative dry-hump. Even today, the conservative movement was captive to Bill Cunningham. The rest, let over to Limbaugh; Hannity; Clearchannel 'dominant market share' and the profound diminution of the public space in general; Roger Ailes and the chocolate factory; Coulter; and, of course, Dinesh and Regnery.
He did good things for conservatism, as Paul Gigot has rightly recognized, helping extricate it from its wildly antisemitic leanings and some of its other most grave excesses, as it existed when he came of age. For that, we can be thankful.
His public persona came with a preposterous diction and flashing eyebrows, the mock imitation of which once earned me an award.
His private discourse must have been softer, as he seems to have gleaned a list of true friends and admirers, even if the ills of the world that obtained beyond his fatted Stamford table he smugly and all too comfortably massaged as belonging to the sick alone or to "sickness", as defined by him in ways that would make Zarathustra blush:
"Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to prevent common needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of homosexuals.” h/t JMG
One gets the impression, even from his own musings, that his whole life was lived as a giant intellectual amusement, but almost utterly without a sense of divine comedy. On that score, that he ended life exhausted is understandable.
