How much is William F. Buckley, Jr. responsible for modern conservatism?
William F. Buckley, Jr. often was called the “high priest” of the conservative movement.
That term, for me, always conjures up the image of the Hierophant (on the tarot card and elsewhere) with his triple crown, because it underscores the three dimensions of Buckley’s existence.
Illustration of the Hierophant card from “The Pictorial Key to the Tarot” by A. E. Waite (1910).
There was Buckley’s public life as a celebrity, mixing with high society and entertaining the nation on television; there was his work in leading and defining the modern conservative movement, particularly in his role as editor-in-chief of National Review, the nation’s most influential conservative magazine for decades after he founded it in 1955; and there was his private and personal life, which certainly informed his other dimensions but was truly known only by family and intimate friends.
From the languid drawl, darting eyes and sesquipedalian vocabulary that made him such a beguiling media figure to his zest for life, Buckley radiated as a writer, debater, skier, yachtsman, harpsichordist and even as a candidate for New York City mayor in 1965. But his role as conservative movement-builder is harder to assess because so much of it took place off-camera and behind the scenes. It’s also difficult to measure its significance, in historical hindsight, because many of the debates involved complicated political and philosophical currents, because Buckley’s views on certain subjects changed over time, and because so much of Buckley’s project for the conservative movement now lies in ruins.
Buckley’s principal goal, starting in the early 1950s, was to forge a unified New Right that would purge the conservative movement of many of the worst features of the Old Right, particularly its antisemitism, isolationism, sectarianism and associations with Nazism. It’s fair to say that he largely succeeded. He banned individuals associated with antisemitic publications from appearing on his magazine’s masthead, and brought in many Jewish writers and thinkers who played critical roles in defining the New Right. He presided over a political and philosophical fusion of traditionalist and libertarian strains of conservatism. There were obvious tensions and contradictions between advocates of timeless truths and deeply rooted communities versus the advocates of unfettered individual freedom and an unregulated free market. Buckley kept them joined in an unhappy but productive “fusionist” coalition as few other leaders could have.
William F. Buckley, Jr. Papers (MS 576). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
Buckley moved the political right away from its prewar isolationism — even though he himself had supported the America First Committee’s effort to keep the United States out of World War II — and focused its energies on the great ideological struggle against communism and the Soviet Union. Despite his initial attraction to Joseph McCarthy, he came to feel that the Senator’s populist demagoguery damaged the anti-communist cause.
Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, Jr., Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
For the same reason, he at least attempted to separate the conservative movement from the paranoiac John Birch Society, which claimed that even Republican president Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the communist conspiracy. Buckley arguably moved too slowly to excommunicate the Birchers, but he incurred real costs for his stand in terms of lost subscribers, alienated supporters and donor defections. Buckley succeeded in creating a conservative movement that was in many ways in his own image: intellectually curious, fun, appealing to a broad swath of Americans (including the young), but also respectable and responsible.
Ronald Reagan championed Buckley’s ideas and put them into political practice, first as California governor and then as president. Buckley-Reagan conservatism dominated the Republican Party, did much to revive the American economy and national morale during the 1980s, and helped win the Cold War.
But what has become of Buckley’s legacy?
“The Incomparable Mr. Buckley” closes with images of President Donald Trump on January 6 and the assault on the Capitol. Did Buckley pave the way for Trump and insurrection? It’s a more complicated question than it might appear.
On the face of it, Buckleyism and Trumpism would seem to have nothing to do with each other. Trump’s brand of populist-authoritarianism is wholly at odds with Buckley’s vision of a responsible, governing-minded Republican Party. Trump and his supporters reject key principles of Buckley-Reagan conservatism including free trade, restrained government and global support for democracy. Buckley consistently maintained that conservatism was “the politics of reality,” and it’s hard to believe he ever would have indulged Trump’s election denialism, let alone the pathological fantasies of QAnon. In a 2000 essay, Buckley branded Trump a “narcissist” and a “demagogue,” and it’s unlikely he would have revised that judgment.
William F. Buckley (1925-2008) ran for mayor of New York City as the candidate for the young Conservative Party. 1965.
But modern American conservatism was forged not only from high-minded intellectual debates and constitutional principles but also from some of the country’s darkest impulses. In his early career, Buckley trafficked with isolationists, McCarthyists, racists and anti-government obsessives. He ultimately distanced himself from them. He regretted his opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, telling Time magazine in 2004 that “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.”
But Buckley knew that his movement depended to a considerable degree on conservatives who still held many of the beliefs he had rejected, much as Richard Nixon depended on George Wallace’s populist and segregationist supporters to win the 1968 presidential election. Buckley’s warnings against conservatives’ tendencies toward ideological delusion, anti-intellectualism, doctrinal purity, and fanaticism amounted to a tacit admission that the movement he had created could become dangerous.
And now it has. A modern-day version of the Old Right that Buckley did so much to marginalize is now the conservative mainstream. Trump has driven Buckley-Reagan conservatives out of the Republican Party, much as the most zealous and less pragmatic of Reagan’s followers drove moderates out of the party a generation ago.
One at least has to ask whether Buckley, for all his brilliant virtues and leadership talents, could have done more to impress upon his successors the need for red lines and gatekeepers to keep the conservative movement from becoming what it has in fact become.
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