Was there ever anyone quite like William F. Buckley, Jr.? The founder of National Review, once the preeminent conservative magazine; the host of a talk show, Firing Line, that over its more than three decades on air formed a visual and oral history of the United States in the contemporary era; the author of popular tracts, memoirs, travelogues, and thrillers, more than one a year for stretches of his life; and the urbane and witty intellect behind the American conservative movement, Buckley embodied a style and a sensibility that belong to the last century. But he pioneered a mode of politics that came fully into power in the present one, in the person of Donald Trump.
For much of the post-World War II era, few Americans could name the precepts that defined conservatism, but they knew Buckley stood for them. Young men didn’t want to follow him so much as be him. Today, if younger conservatives have moved on in their admiration — to a right-wing provocateur such as Charlie Kirk or a supposedly straight-talking podcaster such as Joe Rogan — that is only because the posture and principles that Buckley represented have become the oxygen of the American right, invisible yet essential.
Buckley, who died in 2008, did not live to see the rise of Trumpism. But it is impossible to read Buckley, Sam Tanenhaus’s monumental, honest, fair-minded, and spectacularly enlightening biography — some 30 years in the making and undertaken with Buckley’s cooperation — without seeing in it the trailhead to our own time. Buckley was among the first to sense that American politics is downstream of culture, meaning that the drivers of political life are affect and positioning, not interests and policies. On the page and on the screen, Buckley didn’t so much articulate conservative ideas as perform them: a preference for order over voice, a desire to limit participation rather than enable it, a belief that public morality should have religion near its center, and a conviction that a new elite must remake the Republican Party as the first step toward retaking the United States.
Today, listening to what Buckley had to say — and, crucially, how he said it — can hit like a revelation. Trumpism is often characterized as a fractious coalition of techno-libertarians and populists or a new American version of older European authoritarianism. But through the prism of Buckley’s life, it looks more like a radical return to something more recent and closer to home. What Buckley saw more clearly than any conservative thinker of the twentieth century was the degree to which figures such as U.S. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were not fulfillments of the American rightist tradition of Buckley’s youth but aberrations from it. Mainstream conservatism, such as it was, had evolved from old-style liberalism, with its conviction that a good society would magically emerge if government got out of the way. What conservatives lacked, Buckley felt, was both a program for a rightly ordered America — hierarchical, suspicious of opposition, and protective of a civilization under threat — and the will to achieve it. That vision and its pamphleteering defense would be his life’s work. To understand the ideas animating Trump’s world, a good place to start is Buckley’s.
Buckley, born in November 1925, was his household’s sixth child and third son but the one his parents decided should carry the paternal name. His father, William Sr., was a Texas oilman who made his fortune in Mexico and Venezuela. His mother was New Orleans aristocracy. The Buckleys were old Irish rather than Yankee, weekend sailors and equestrians but also Catholic and fecund, and in the years before World War II, they were deeply America First. Their Connecticut estate, Great Elm, housed ten children and a cavalcade of heady guests such as Albert Jay Nock, the author, anti-New Dealer, and casual anti-Semite. (Another visitor, the jazz pianist Fats Waller, a cousin of the Buckleys’ butler, was left to entertain the servants.)
Large, loving families have their unique vices, among them self-satisfaction. At Millbrook, the New York boarding school, a teacher reported that Buckley was the kind of student who displayed the “dangerous habit of generalizing at times in order to prove a point without knowing the facts.” The problem in the South was not that Black Americans were denied the vote, Buckley wrote in one Millbrook essay, but that too many white citizens of low intelligence were allowed it. He would make the same point, decades later, in his famous debate with James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union.
From Millbrook and then a stint in the U.S. Army after the war, Buckley went to Yale. It didn’t take him long to find his calling as a talker and writer. He excelled in debate, discovered his favorite subjects, and honed his personal style in the Yale Daily News. A university fundraising campaign had yielded extra money that undergraduates proposed should be used for scholarships for “deserving Negro students.” But how would donors feel, Buckley complained in print, if they didn’t have full say in how the funds were spent? That rhetorical sleight of hand would become characteristic. Liberal schemes for improvement might not be bad on their face, but they rested on some deeper principle that was ultimately self-defeating.
Today, listening to what Buckley had to say can hit like a revelation.
Today, more young people aspire to be influencers than public intellectuals, which is why it is hard to re-create how astonishing it was, in 1951, to read God and Man at Yale, which Buckley published when he was in his mid-20s. The book, a broadside at Yale’s faculty and administration, would define the genre of academic jeremiad. Buckley’s diction was twisty, his sentences often a yard short of the target, but his core arguments were clear. Yale claimed to be a place of free expression, yet the curriculum demonstrated a preference for the relativistic, the atheistic, and the collectivist. If universities were schools of indoctrination, as they seemed to be, then Americans should have a chance to decide which doctrines were worth instilling.
A review in The New York Times chastised Buckley for being too young to have earned a conservative outlook on the world, but the attention helped catapult the book, and Buckley, to fame. God and Man at Yale “contained the seeds of a modern movement,” Tanenhaus observes. A manifesto rather than a playbook, it redefined conservatism by leaping back over World War II and repackaging the prejudices of Great Elm for the coming television age.
In the years that followed, Buckley would intuit that the political battles of the 1950s and 1960s, not least those over civil rights, might be profitably framed as constitutional. White Southerners were already trying out the claim that resistance to desegregation was about state-federal relations, not race. (Confederates and Southern Redeemers had been blindingly clear during the previous century: it had always been about race.) Buckley perfected the argument. Racial politics, it went, was just one symptom of a political tradition and constitutional order in crisis, beset by ungrateful minorities and socialist malcontents at home and mobilized communists abroad. What America deserved was a movement, then a party, then a government with the courage to defend a civilization under threat.
One of the vehicles for Buckley’s ideas was the magazine National Review, which he founded in 1955 with the famous editorial promise to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.” Every excess of the political right became an excuse for enumerating the greater sins of the left and then focusing on deeper principles, a technique he had already used in a book-length defense of Joseph McCarthy the previous year. On the pages of National Review and, after 1966, on Firing Line, Buckley pioneered the do-your-own-research rhetorical style: whataboutism and verbal misdirections that often slipped into intellectual nihilism. McCarthy might have been guilty of “oversimplification” on occasion, Buckley said on an early episode of Firing Line, but what was the difference between his exaggerations and similar overstatements by, say, Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson? The distinction, of course, was that it was one thing to exaggerate for political gain and quite another to say things about real people and real events that were plainly false, as Buckley’s guest, the lawyer and refugee advocate Leo Cherne, pointed out. That Buckley couldn’t — wouldn’t — admit the difference was a Yale debater’s trick. Diffused in American media and civic life, the same rhetorical move would turn out to be corrosive.
Buckley’s commitments would often place him on what American schoolchildren, at least until recently, were taught to think of as the wrong side of history: standing by McCarthy, opposing much of the civil rights movement (he called Barry Goldwater’s vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act a “profile in courage”), and callously grandstanding during the AIDS crisis. “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm . . . and on the buttocks,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 1986. He attempted once to turn his notoriety into votes, with an unsuccessful bid for mayor of New York City in 1965. But Buckley was a performer, not a policymaker, and in any case, the great affairs of the day — civil rights, Vietnam, the counterculture, Watergate — cried out for copy. Then came Ronald Reagan.
“We have a nation to run,” the editors of National Review wrote after Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election. Buckley had supported Reagan and served as a bridge between the California governor and the Republican Party’s East Coast establishment. But it was the harder Reagan (fiercely anticommunist, friendly to the extremists), rather than the softer one (avuncular, enamored of “peace through strength”), that most attracted him. During the campaign, Buckley hosted Reagan on Firing Line. His first question was about how Reagan might deal with a hypothetical “race riot” in Detroit. Reagan responded that handling a riot was the responsibility of local authorities but that the federal government might step in to protect citizens against overzealous policing. Buckley looked visibly disappointed.
Buckley was by that point an institution rather than a barricade stormer, and the years of Reagan and his successor George H. W. Bush were a time of valedictions as much as victories. He handed off the editorship of National Review. His wife, Patricia, rose to fame as a socialite and tireless fundraiser for charitable causes, including AIDS research. The Berlin Wall fell. Buckley was “an aesthete of controversy,” in Tanenhaus’s phrase, and with Republicans in power, communism defeated, and the Western left soon to be reshaped by the third-way politics of President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his canvas shrank.
In an ambitious (and sometimes antic) life, there were plenty of misses, from the disappointing to the tragic. Buckley would never finish his magnum opus of political philosophy, to be titled The Revolt Against the Masses, a reference to the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s classic Revolt of the Masses. He helped secure the release of a death-row murderer, Edgar Smith, largely because Smith was a National Review reader and loved Barry Goldwater — only for Smith to try to kill again. Buckley had turned “owning the libs” into a profession before anyone had invented the term, and when he slipped, he did so spectacularly. At his debate with Baldwin in 1965, on the proposition “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro,” the audience saw him outmaneuvered by Baldwin in peak oratorical form. Buckley lost by a vote of 544 to 164.
He could be rattled by people who were “wittier and sharper” than he was, an old friend, the historian Alistair Horne, reported to Tanenhaus. The rattler in chief turned out to be the novelist and gadfly Gore Vidal. Buckley had reluctantly agreed to join Vidal as an on-air commentator for ABC News at the 1968 Democratic Convention. At one point, Vidal and Buckley were in the middle of arguing about demonstrators who raised the Viet Cong flag at the Chicago convention site. The moderator wondered how Americans would feel if it were the Nazi flag. Buckley endorsed the comparison (his whatabout stratagem, again), and once he had taken the bait, Vidal set the hook. “The only crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself,” Vidal said. Buckley lost it. “Now, listen, you queer,” he spat at Vidal, who was bisexual at a time when one didn’t announce that fact. “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” Vidal smiled like the Cheshire Cat. It was the greatest public disaster of Buckley’s career.
Buckley could be generous, charming, and funny, especially with people he liked and, better yet, respected. He made a habit of conversing publicly with his political and cultural opponents, a practice that now seems ancient and utterly lost. But the role he nurtured was that of an instigator. What he offered was a credo tethered to a pose — a conviction that his job was to “say no to the barbarians,” as he once phrased it, and that a posture of insouciant ridicule was the hallmark of a winner. Earnest moral outrage belonged to the weak.
What is most striking, however, is that, in a long life of reading and conversation, in interviews with everyone from the antipoverty activist Michael Harrington, his first Firing Line guest, to Henry Kissinger, one of his last, it’s not clear what Buckley felt he had learned. From Millbrook to the Cambridge Union, from Yale to the television studio, he often seemed to be ill prepared and winging it. As he aged, he rethought some of his earlier positions, including on civil rights. But nowhere in Tanenhaus’s account is there anything that approaches a turning point or moment of reckoning that helps us make sense of Buckley as a thinker. Few people have a Rosebud, an experience that explains everything that comes after. But for an essayist, editor, and movement leader who could radiate maturity, it is remarkable how much of the precocious child remained alive in him. He never quite gave up performing for the adults in the room.
A reason for that is right at the top of Tanenhaus’s book. “Everything he learned, and all he became, began at home,” reads the second sentence of Buckley. It is a thesis that Tanenhaus earns. People often took Buckley’s affectations — the patrician languorousness, the liquid consonants — for Briticisms, and he could certainly seem like an Oxford don. But he was actually closer to a don. The Mexican revolution of 1910 and the overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz had been ruinous for the oil business overseen by William Sr., but he had gained a love for the culture and class of his local partners. William Jr. would learn Spanish before English and grow up in a household where attitudes toward history and human nature chimed with those of the wealthy, European-descended Mexican elite: intensely caste-conscious and fearful of the ethnically mixed, teeming mass below. Buckley would gain his own experiences in Mexico briefly as a student in the 1940s and again as a CIA operative in the early 1950s.
What all this produced in Buckley was a quiet sense that the truly compelling models of society and governance lay in the Spanish-speaking world. Francisco Franco was “an authentic national hero,” he wrote after a visit to Spain in 1957, and “only as oppressive as it is necessary to be to maintain total power.” Buckley’s interview with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in 1977 is one of Firing Line’s most boring episodes, in part because he and Borges — who welcomed the military coup that had unseated President Isabel Perón a year earlier — found so little to disagree about.
“Connecticut Yanquis” is Tanenhaus’s label for the clan at Great Elm, and it is suggestive. Via Buckley, the great unappreciated thread in American conservatism may well be the Hispanic one. Trump’s second administration is America First, revanchist, and McCarthyite — not so much New Right as Very Old Right — which the young Buckley, at least, would have applauded. But it is also the first American presidency to have yielded a genuine strongman, a would-be caudillo.
Buckley was “a founder of our world,” Tanenhaus concludes, but “he speaks to us from a different one.” The book runs to around a thousand pages with notes, but it rolls up quickly, with little in the way of grand conclusions about its subject’s legacy. Trump is mentioned only once, for example, in a passage about his mentor, the disgraced lawyer (and McCarthy’s chief counsel) Roy Cohn, a friend of Buckley’s. Part of Tanenhaus’s message is that the line of succession in American conservatism ended with Buckley. There has been no one since his death of similar stature on the right — or, for that matter, on the left, a fact that says as much about the state of political ideas in the United States as it does about conservatism. If the alternatives in politics are now reduced to either defending every federal program or becoming a national version of Florida — shaped by permanent culture war, single-party government, and an administrative system of patronage and payback — Americans will have lost sight of the great debates that drew Buckley’s generation into civic life.
Buckley was not always a creature of practical politics. His movement was built for poking fun and pointing out contradictions, not governing. But he bequeathed one big idea to the conservatism of today: The problem with liberals wasn’t just that they wanted more government. It was that they wanted to share government with people who, out of ignorance, indoctrination, or natural inadequacy, could be relied on to muck it up. That view, even in the absence of a post-Buckley torchbearer, became Trumpism.
Buckley’s genius was to see that, from the New Deal to the Cold War, American conservatives had bent themselves into timid naysayers. They knew they were opposed to “big government,” but in all the great battles of the twentieth century — over everything from the social safety net to civil rights — they had been cowed into accepting a liberal understanding of the ends and means of governance itself. What they lacked was a dream for what their country could become once it was freed from the barbarians. Since returning to the White House, Trump has begun to implement a substantive program in ways Buckley could have only imagined a Republican president would. The executive branch has dismantled decades-old government programs inherited from liberal administrations; sought to control universities and silence the professional media; made common cause with repressive regimes abroad; denied due process to alleged radicals and noncitizens; suspended refugee admissions (except for white South Africans); and elevated loyalty and “national masculinity,” as Buckley once put it, above competence and decency as political virtues. These moves are not attempts to manage a “new fusionism” of traditionalist and libertarian conservatism, but expressions of the same American rightist heritage that formed Buckley, one whose roots run back to the isolationism of the 1930s, to the Old South, and to continental European ideas of natural orders and social castes. Buckley imagined a conservative future that would resemble his own experience of the journey toward it: liberating, raucous, and full of energetic joy. What is so maddening about Buckley’s life is that he embraced the transgressive fun of an opposition movement without thinking too hard about the cruelty it could produce once it held power.
