Mr. Buckley and Mr. Trump
The Success of Radical Conservatism
Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of History at Boston College, and Yale University Professor of History Dr. Joanne Freeman, had a discussion recently in which Dr. Richardson briefly mentioned the importance of William F. Buckley Jr. to what is known as Movement Conservatism, which is a blend of traditional conservative values and classical liberalism that emphasizes individual freedom, often at the expense of other people and the community as a whole. After listening to her discussion with Dr. Freeman, it occurred to me that Mr. Buckley was a representative of several themes Dr. Richardson explores in her book, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. (A review of the book is here.)
William F. Buckley Jr. was crucial to the development of one flavor, as it were, of conservatism, the now dominant flavor of Movement Conservatism. But Mr. Buckley himself was far from vanilla, the most popular ice cream flavor; he was more like Rocky Road, a flavor that required a good bit of chewing before you could swallow it. He was eloquent and acerbic, comfortable with $100 words and intricate phrasing that he knew befuddled many people. And once you swallowed his words, they were likely to give you heartburn.
He excelled at crafting messages designed to achieve maximum political effect by shaping conservative, if not the general public’s, opinion. A staunch anti-communist, Mr. Buckley once opined, “It is safe to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara Desert tomorrow, two things would happen. First, nothing. And second, with their centralized approach to the market, there would be a shortage of sand.” He could hide the most horrendous of ideas, such as the natural servitude of “Negroes,” beneath layers of “civilized” language. He was, in other words, a good propagandist. As Dr. Richardson has noted, being able to frame a message is important to the success of political movements, and Mr. Buckley served conservatism well. His most famous aphorism is his definition that a conservative “is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop.” This definition is disingenuous, because Mr. Buckley was more interested in destruction than he was in preservation.
Mr. Buckley was the embodiment of what Dr. Richardson calls the American Paradox, the idea that for some people to be free other people must be unfree. Mr. Buckley’s inherited wealth and coded racism made him a representative par excellence of an aristocratic class that preserved its privileges at the expense of the working class in general (his opposition to organized labor) and black people in particular (his opposition to civil rights and Martin Luther King’s socialism) .
Mr. Buckley was the son of an oil developer who made his fortune in Mexico during the Huerta dictatorship. Born into wealth, Mr. Buckley was one of ten children in a devoutly Catholic family, and Catholicism was one of the sources of his conservatism. Growing up, Mr. Buckley experienced a cosmopolitan life, living in Mexico and Paris before his family settled in Connecticut. He received what could be termed a 19th century education, or at least an education similar to that described by the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill (although Mr. Buckley’s was perhaps a bit less intense). Both men were homeschooled during their early years, both were encouraged to read widely and deeply, and both grew into erudite, accomplished adults who had read everything and could talk about anything. Mr. Mill, however, developed some misgivings about his powerful intellect; Mr. Buckley never entertained any such doubts.
He spoke three languages, went to a prep school in England, and then spent a year at a university in Mexico. He served as an army officer toward the end of World War II, although he didn’t see combat. After the war, he attended Yale University, where he was an FBI informant and an active participant in conservative politics on campus. Upon graduation, he worked as a CIA case officer in Mexico, where his boss was Mr. E. Howard Hunt of (later) Watergate fame.
Mr. Buckley began his intellectual and political career by writing McCarthy and His Enemies and God and Man at Yale (review), followed by the establishment of the still important conservative magazine, the National Review. He spent his career working as a conservative gatekeeper, fighting not only liberals but other conservatives of whom he disapproved (the John Birch Society, for example). Much like socialists, conservatives relish fighting among themselves.
On a post in a private Facebook group linking to an article considering Mr. Buckley’s views on race, I read an interesting comment. The commenter wasn’t reacting to Mr. Buckley’s specific views (which were truly deplorable); rather, knowing of Mr. Buckley’s sophistication, the commenter wrote, “Buckley must be rolling over in his grave,” presumably because Donald Trump is president.
Is Mr. Buckley, who is, like Mr. Trump, a scion of wealth and privilege, rolling over in his grave because of Mr. Trump’s presidency? That’s an interesting question, and in at least one sense it can be answered affirmatively, as the commenter did. Mr. Buckley would have rejected Mr. Trump’s venality and dishonesty, his anti-intellectualism, and his fact-free boasting of phantom accomplishments. Mr. Buckley was infinitely more intelligent and cultured than Mr. Trump, who is always a buffoon (albeit a deadly one). But Mr. Buckley was just a cocksure of himself and his own intelligence (with some justification, but still) as Mr. Trump is (with no justification), and Mr. Buckley despised government, especially government controlled by “do-gooders,” as much as Mr. Trump does. Do-gooders do harm to the ruling class by threatening their right to privilege and wealth that is unavailable to the demos, the common people. “I will not cede more power to the state,” Mr. Buckley famously declared, nor “… to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.” Democracy, in Mr. Buckley’s mind, had limits, primarily because it was composed of people one would be reluctant to invite into one’s home for luncheon, fearing they would soil the carpet with their muddy boots.
There is probably some grave turbulence beneath Mr. Buckley’s tombstone, perhaps enough uproot a few dandelions at the surface, but the distance between Mr. Buckley and Mr. Trump on matters of life and death for Americans (and others) is less than we might imagine. Mr. Buckley was as capable as Mr. Trump of callously ignoring the suffering of others. Mr. Buckley, for example, dismissed complaints about the historic suffering and lynching deaths of blacks under the brutal Jim Crow regime of the American South, asserting the repression was justified; he rejected black demands for the equal right to thrive, citing their lack of awareness of the values of Western civilization. Today, Mr. Trump dismisses the likelihood of preventable suffering and death for all Americans, but especially black Americans, in his reelection-driven push to “reopen America for business” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mr. Buckley, as the title of an article in the Nation magazine put it, “lived off evil as mold lives off garbage.” I think it’s safe to say the same is true of Mr. Trump.
Beyond Mr. Trump is the success of the Republican Party in seizing power despite its status as a party of declining numbers. Mr. Buckley valued power, and he especially relished power wielded by conservatives intent on dismantling government, so I think he’d be satisfied with the position of the Republican Party today, even if he found (as he certainly would) Mr. Trump to be boorish. At least Mr. Trump, for all his manifest faults, knows which fork to use for the salad and which fork to use for the salmon, so one could imagine inviting him to dinner.
Mr. Buckley would wholeheartedly cheer for Senator McConnell’s work of ramming the approval of conservative judges through the Senate because that has been a long-standing goal of conservatives. Mr. Buckley would be less happy about the budget deficit, unless his views “evolved,” as did those of many of the denizens of Mr. Bush’s administration, some of whom (Vice President Cheney) insisted that deficits no longer mattered. Mr. Buckley was a national defense hawk who righteously celebrated the dirty work of overthrowing leftist governments (remember, he once worked for the CIA), thereby enabling debt slavery to U.S. banks and multinational corporate domination of resource extraction. He might have tolerated defense-related deficits until he discovered a stealthy way to cut SNAP, Medicare, and Medicaid, which siphoned money from the makers and gave it to the takers, some of whom were black people (another of Dr. Richardson’s themes).
Is it informative to remember that Mr. Buckley’s son Christopher left the National Review because he decided, once he saw the spectacle of Sarah Palin, that he could no longer stomach the Republican Party’s flavor of the day, choosing to vote for Barrack Obama instead of John McCain? And that David Frum, an important conservative writer, left the magazine for the same reason (as well as over dissatisfaction with Mr. Bush)? Would either of those events happened if Mr. Buckley were still alive?
I don’t know. Perhaps Mr. Buckley, with an abundance of justification, would have refused to support Senator McCain because of Mrs. Palin. But to be honest, I don’t think that’s likely. First, because “Buckley’s Rule” states “… that [the] National Review ‘will support the rightward most viable candidate’ for a given office,” and Mr. McCain was to the right of Mr. Obama (on paper, if not always in reality). Second, because Mr. Buckley was a racist (even if he mellowed a bit as he aged), I don’t think that he could have found it within himself to vote for a black man to be President of the United States. After all, he once asserted the right of white people to violently overthrow any attempted rule over whites by black people, who were less culturally developed and therefore incapable of upholding the values of Western civilization.
As far as I’m concerned, politically Mr. Buckley is a pariah, but I like to read what he has written, because he’s an adept, versatile writer (he wrote over 50 books) on politics and a variety of other subjects (sailing, tennis). He even composed spy novels, which aren’t bad, although the moral certitude of his main character, a spy named Blackford Oakes, prevents Mr. Buckley’s novels from rising to the same level of literary greatness as do the morally ambiguous spy novels of Graham Greene. Mr. Buckley’s TV show, Firing Line, is worth watching, because Mr. Buckley was an informed and entertaining, if frequently mean-spirited and overbearing, host of one of the few truly intellectual programs to have ever been broadcast on national TV. Mr. Buckley also had a sense of humor. When asked what he would do if he won the mayoral election for New York City he quipped, “Demand a recount.”
Mr. Buckley, it seems to me, was really nothing more than a more sophisticated and learned version of the less talented, infinitely more tedious novelist and “philosopher” Ayn Rand. He denounced her, primarily because of her atheism, but also because he believed her faith in capitalism — her true religion — was excessive. Mr. Buckley valued capitalism, to be sure, but he never mistook it for the God his Catholicism assured him existed. Both Ms. Rand and Mr. Buckley had domineering, intolerant personalities, although Mr. Buckley was apparently charming in private, while Ms. Rand was not.
Except for religion-driven morality and defense, Mr. Buckley wasn’t a conservative in the Russell Kirk sense of the word, even if Mr. Buckley believed that he was within the Burkean/Kirkean tradition. Mr. Buckley was a radical Movement Conservative — indeed, he began the Movement — interested in the capture of the Republican Party and the destruction of “activist” government, “activist” meaning a government that dared to defend its less-than-wealthy citizens from the depredations of Mr. Buckley’s ruling class. Mr. Buckley believed in the aristocracy of wealth and education more than he believed in democracy, a trait he shared with many of the Founding Fathers, who adopted the idea of the Senate to check the power of unwashed commoners. Mr. Buckley devoted his wealth and his considerable facility with language toward the achievement of those goals. Donald Trump, incoherent and chaotic and boorish as he is, has accomplished the aims of Movement Conservatism, so perhaps Mr. Buckley, aside from grimacing each time Mr. Trump butchers the English language, can resume enjoying (or enduring) whatever eternal reward he has merited.
