Is it just me, or are we having an unusual die-off among famous right-wingers in this country? William F. Buckley, Jesse Helms, Tony Snow, Trisha Buckley Bozell, Charlton Heston, and — if we go back a year — Jerry Falwell, all dead recently.
My guess: they all wanted to die while a Republican was still president.
Of course, we went through a rough patch for feminists a while back, when we lost Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Anzaldua, Betty Friedan and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in the space of about eighteen months. Do the great ones buy the farm in clusters?
Maybe these ideological die-offs happen in strange evolutionary waves.
I can’t speak to any sort of “wave” of die-offs in any context. What I often do find interesting, however, is the differing contributions and generations represented in these die-offs, and what a comparison with the present says about the state of any given movement and the influence of various lines of thinking to the present. Look at your lists above: among the feminists we see radical, queer/POC, mainstream 2nd wave, and conservative strains represented among the departed. Among the conservatives you listed, we see post-1964/Reagan era, Southern Old Guard, neo-con, gun rights and evangelical variants represented.
Looks like simple confirmation bias, to me. The people listed are all relatively close in age, and were near the end of the survival curve for their age bracket, and there are enough disconfirming examples out there, it’s just that your attention hasn’t been called to them by their deaths.