Friday Firing Line: Standing Athwart a Shutdown

William F. Buckley Jr. taught conservatives the courage to say “Stop”, even when the Left insists compassion requires surrender

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said that a conservative is “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” It’s a line so often repeated that it risks being reduced to a bumper sticker. But this week, with Democrats shutting down the government over healthcare for illegal immigrants, Buckley’s warning couldn’t feel more urgent.

Democrats have tried to spin the shutdown as a defense of “compassion,” claiming Republicans are heartless for refusing to extend taxpayer-funded benefits to people who broke our laws to be here. CNN, MSNBC, and the usual media allies have parroted this line, fact-checking Republicans by insisting that federal Medicaid “can’t” go to illegals. But as we’ve seen in California, New York, and elsewhere, money is fungible, safeguards are weak, and in practice the system gets gamed with the taxpayer footing the bill.

Buckley understood this game long before Obamacare or the latest “qualified alien” language snuck into a funding bill. He saw the Left’s tactic of advancing policy under the guise of inevitability. “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views,” Buckley once observed, “but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” The “other view” here is common sense: America cannot provide free, unlimited healthcare to the entire world without bankrupting the very system our own citizens rely on.

The Democratic gambit is classic. Take a deeply unpopular policy, dress it up as compassion, and then dare anyone to oppose it, while the media shames dissent as cruel or racist. This is precisely the kind of “political moralism” Buckley warned about, where slogans override facts. He wrote that the Left’s posture was always toward “political solutions that ignore the social, cultural, and moral reality of the people who must live under them.”

That’s where conservatives must, quite literally, stand athwart. The conservative task is not to slow history’s “inevitable” march toward ruin but to halt it entirely when the cost to American sovereignty, culture, and solvency becomes existential. As Buckley insisted, there is a moral duty to say “no” even when the cultural elites mock you for it.

This shutdown fight is about more than budgets. It’s about whether compassion is defined by discipline or by indulgence. True compassion is not open-ended welfare for the world. It is safeguarding the resources of a nation so that we can care for our own citizens, protect our workers, and preserve the possibility of ordered liberty. “Idealism is fine,” Buckley once said, “but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.” That’s exactly where we stand today.

Republicans are right to draw a hard line. They should embrace Buckley’s spirit, not apologizing for protecting Americans first, but making the case loudly, relentlessly, and unapologetically. To retreat now would be to validate the very strategy the Left relies on: create chaos, declare compassion, and watch conservatives blink.

Buckley’s genius was that he never blinked. He understood that conservatism wasn’t about being popular in polite society. It was about preserving the conditions that make a society worth living in at all. That requires courage, clarity, and above all the willingness to stand up in moments just like this and to stop what must be stopped.

So today, as Democrats howl and the media scolds, it’s worth remembering Buckley’s line not as historic conservative theory but as marching orders: stand athwart this reckless shutdown, yelling Stop, and mean it.