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The Conservative Intellectual Who Laid the Groundwork for Trump
The January 2025 issue of National Review magazine featured, on its cover, a cartoon image of Donald Trump driving a campaign bus-cum-garbage truck into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a handful of Harris-Walz campaign posters tumbling out of its tailgate. 'After the Sweep,' read the triumphant headline. Over the course of eight-odd years, the publication that had once dedicated an entire issue to anathematizing Trump had moved from cool accommodation to warm, if not entirely reservationless, embrace. The February issue offered a study in dissonant juxtaposition: Gazing out beatifically from the cover was the magazine's late founder, William F. Buckley Jr., rendered in schmaltzy watercolor to mark the centenary of his birth. Sam Tanenhaus's marvelous, decades-in-the-making biography, Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, begins with an epigraph from John Keats's letters: 'Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory.' For many in the Trump era, looking back wistfully on an imagined past of comity and consensus, the Buckleyite allegory has been one of declension: from the sesquipedalian verbalist who gamely sparred with liberals on TV to the monosyllabic vulgarian occupying the White House. From Bach's bouncy Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, with which Buckley's Firing Line television show opened for more than 30 years, to the schlocky Trump-rally ballads of Lee Greenwood. From a movement helmed by a 'responsible' leader who made conservatism respectable by (as the story goes) cleansing it of its kooks and antisemites to one led by a man who enthusiastically welcomed them back in. Tanenhaus's biography complicates this narrative. It offers a deeply affectionate portrait of Buckley's personal life: of his munificence, his sense of humor, his extraordinary loyalty and capacity for friendship—what the ex-Communist intellectual (and early National Review staffer) Whittaker Chambers, the subject of Tanenhaus's first biography, called Buckley's 'special grace.' Yet Tanenhaus also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement that flourished even, and sometimes especially, in its most rarefied precincts. The political vision that Buckley helped forge was, as it is now, concerned not primarily with advancing a particular set of principles but with defining and rooting out perceived enemies. When Donald Trump rails against the 'Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS' who comprise the 'enemy within,' he inherits Buckley's legacy far more than he blasphemes a man who lived an infamously peripatetic life—winters skiing the slopes of Gstaad, summers sailing up and down the Atlantic Coast, decades criss-crossing America on a speaking tour so unremitting that it's a miracle he lived into his eighties—Buckley's politics never strayed far from his childhood hearth and home. 'Everything he learned, and all he became,' Tanenhaus writes, began in the hothouse environment delicately constructed by his father. A Texas-born lawyer turned oil wildcatter who made a fortune in Mexico, Will Buckley was later expelled from the country for 'secretly disbursing large sums of cash to insurgent caudillos and paying for truckloads of Winchester rifles to be smuggled into Baja California' on behalf of right-wing insurgents. Briefly bankrupt, Buckley struck black gold again in Venezuela, returned stateside, and, in 1924, purchased a many-acred property in Sharon, Connecticut, an idyll he christened Great Elm. The Buckley paterfamilias—'Father,' to his growing brood—intensely supervised the cultivation of his children, populating Great Elm with tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, a French mademoiselle, and Mexican nanas. The children were schooled in a curriculum of his own creation, emphasizing history, literature, and music. Tanenhaus writes beautifully of the extended household, which 'numbered more than twenty,' and was 'alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife.' (The pranks weren't always so innocent: In 1937, the elder Buckley siblings—young Bill was left out, much to his regret—burned a cross on the lawn of a Jewish resort. Years later, his sisters defaced a nearby Episcopal church.) The home often left visitors agog. Buckley's prep school roommate described 'a vast gaggle of smiling, brilliant children, all chattering—in several languages—at once, playing the piano, but, above all, laughing with each other … the whole place rang with music and laughter.' It would 'take Tom Wolfe to describe that scene,' one of Buckley's close college friends, Paris Review co-founder Tom Guinzberg, recalled. Since Buckley and Wolfe would only later become friendly, we are left to settle for the observations of a 19-year-old Sylvia Plath: 'How can I ever, ever tell you what a unique, dreamlike and astounding weekend I had!' she wrote to her mother after attending a coming-out party for one of Buckley's sisters, a college classmate of hers. 'A hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing inside my head.' Part of what made the Buckleys such excellent hosts was their ability, 'with no visible effort, to detach personal feeling from ideological passion.' But passion still burned. They were committed America Firsters, their anti-interventionism a species of their ardent anti-communism, their anti-communism a species of their Catholic piety. Bill, displaying a middle child's fear of parental inattention (he was the sixth of 10 children), parroted his father's extreme political opinions 'with remarkable felicity and alarming confidence,' earning him the dictatorial nickname 'Young Mahster.' Buckley's first formal political act, at age 14, was to join the America First Committee. His inaugural public speech, delivered in front of his classmates at the Millbrook prep school, was an argument 'In Defense of Charles Lindbergh.' It began, Tanenhaus writes, 'not as a defense of Lindbergh but as an attack on his critics'—a prelude to the vituperative style Buckley would later deploy as a consigliere to Joseph McCarthy. While still at Millbrook, Buckley came under the spell of the aristocratic thinker Albert Jay Nock. A friend of Buckley's father who engaged the family in 'evening-long denunciations of the New Deal,' Nock became, Tanenhaus writes, Buckley's 'lifelong hero and guide.' In an essay published in The Atlantic when Buckley was 10, Nock drew on the biblical story of Isaiah to distinguish the 'mass-man,' or the great democratic majority, which is devoid of the 'force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life,' from 'The Remnant,' the precious capable few charged with keeping alive the flame of those principles. 'Buckleys against the world' became the family version of Nock's slogan, and young William quickly adopted the requisite pose of condescending hauteur, writing essays against the cult of 'democratism' and sparring with his interventionist peers. 'It was, though a very nice audience, one of mediocre intellectual capacities, and I'm afraid that my thing was a little too complicated,' he reported to his mother after a visit to another prep school to debate Roosevelt's policies. Once at Yale, Buckley leavened his still-extreme beliefs (no longer a strict isolationist, he was equally fervent in his anti-communism) with what he discovered to be a great asset: his profound sociability. Once at Yale, Buckley leavened his still-extreme beliefs (no longer a strict isolationist, he was equally fervent in his anti-communism) with what he discovered to be a great asset: his profound sociability. He had begun to negotiate the gap between his 'two different selves, the rigid ideologue and the boon companion,' developing what the historian Gary Wills—one of Buckley's prized early recruits to National Review, who would later become an apostate over civil rights and Vietnam—described as his 'strange power to ingratiate even on the attack.' It made him popular and admired, even as he wielded his column in the Yale Daily News to 'fire volley after volley from his crossbow into the roaring multitude,' cataloging Yale's offenses against the eternal truths of Christianity and laissez-faire. Unsurprisingly, Buckley gravitated toward Yale's controversialist professor, the political philosopher Willmoore Kendall, a needler of liberal pieties and hard-nosed theorist of majority rule. (When Kendall later wrote that the 'true American tradition' was 'less that of Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks' than 'that of riding somebody out of town on a rail,' he meant it as a compliment.) Buckley was moved by Kendall's description of a faculty meeting in the early days of Joe McCarthy's rise, in which he'd repeated a conversation he'd had with a Black campus janitor: 'Is it true, professor'—Kendall, with his Oklahoma drawl, idiosyncratically Oxfordized while he studied as a Rhodes scholar in England, imitated the janitor—'Is it true, professor, dat dere's people in New York City who want to … destroy the guvamint of the United States?' 'Yes, Oliver, that is true,' Willmoore had replied. 'Well, why don't we lock 'em up?' Appearing to shed his Nockian pretenses, Buckley heartily agreed. 'Citizenship implies subscription to certain ideals,' he wrote in a paper for Kendall. 'Failure to adhere to these ideals means, in effect, renunciation of citizenship.' Kendall scribbled in the margins that the First Amendment 'will have to go one day.' All the while, Buckley kept in close contact with his father, whose interest in education was not confined to his own progeny. He had begun working with and financially supporting an activist named Lucille Cardin Crain, one of the most important leaders of a growing grassroots campaign to identify and attack 'subversive' educators and books. Buckley Sr. encouraged Crain to draw upon her 'wealth of knowledge and experience' and give his son 'a few pointers.' The book that Buckley published in 1951, God and Man at Yale, included a list of 'collectivistic' textbooks that largely came from Crain; Buckley's core proposal—a call for alumni and trustees to re-exert control over university hiring and curricula in order to 'narrow the existing orthodoxy' on campus—was an idea his father had already discussed with her. But it was Buckley who went on to attain unparalleled heights of public visibility. The year God and Man at Yale became a bestseller (thanks in part to a publicity blitz bankrolled by his father), Crain's Red-hunting publication was castigated by a congressional committee as redolent of the 'book burning orgies' of Nazi Germany; it folded soon after. While Buckley didn't fully avoid charges of fascism—'the methods he proposes for his alma mater are precisely those employed in Germany, Italy, and Russia' was The New Republic's assessment—the book's Latinate prose helped insulate him from the accusation that, to borrow a phrase thrown at a later right-wing polemicist, his work might have sounded better in the original German. His winsome tone—'not one of wild attack,' Tanenhaus writes, 'but of ironic, even amused forbearance'—set him apart from the 'heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy' that Richard Hofstadter would diagnose as the 'paranoid style' in American politics. His was a stylish voice, to be taken seriously, even if, in substance, little separated Buckley's arguments from those emanating from the febrile grassroots. In some ways, he went further than they Kendall believed there were two founding moments of postwar conservatism. The first was the publication of God and Man at Yale. The second was McCarthyism. Buckley might seem an unlikely advocate for the latter, a movement the moderate conservative writer Peter Viereck once described as 'the revenge of the noses that for twenty years of fancy parties were pressed against the outside window pane.' (Buckley's wife, Pat, a Canadian heiress whom he married in 1950, later became one of the most famous high-society hostesses in New York; the couple were a frequent item in the gossip pages.) Yet Tanenhaus describes Buckley as McCarthy's 'tireless champion, defending him on every platform and in every forum he could find,' most notably in McCarthy and His Enemies, published in 1954 and co-authored with Buckley's brother-in-law and former Yale debate partner, Brent Bozell. The effete, eminently clubbable Yale alum had acquired a populist flair for flouting what he derisively called 'the Racquet and Lawn Club rules for dealing with the Communists in our midst.' (When he spoke those words, Tanenhaus notes wryly, Buckley was wearing his own Racquet Club tie.) In 1955, with the peak of McCarthyism having passed, Buckley assembled an eclectic group of ex-Communists, libertarians, traditionalists, and Catholics to found National Review, a publication for 'radical conservatives.' What kind of magazine would it be? And given its indelible association with Buckley, who held a voting majority of stock ownership, what kind of public figure would he become? In its mission statement, Buckley distanced the magazine from the 'irresponsible' right, though he declined to name any names. In a letter quoted in John Judis's 1988 biography of Buckley, he responded to an early complaint that the magazine was too highbrow to be effective by explaining that he wanted to 'abjure the popular and cliché-ridden appeal to the 'grassroots'' and to target 'opinion makers.' But Tanenhaus shows that Buckley and the magazine were also pulled by countervailing impulses. In an early profile of Buckley, the literary gadfly Dwight MacDonald was surprised to hear him defend a crass book by 'two peephole Hearst reporters who trafficked in innuendo, smear, and sexual sensationalism' (the book alleged, for instance, that 90 percent of crime in the city of Cleveland was committed by 'darkies' and called the University of California, Berkeley 'a bed of sexual perversion, left wing teaching and narcotic addiction'). 'I don't like the way the book is written any more than you do,' Buckley admitted. 'But it's on our side.… And anyway you've got to write that way to reach a big public.' For an early issue, the magazine called on McCarthy himself to pan a book by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, though Bozell actually wrote the review, inserting enough schoolyard invective ('As 'Brains' Acheson sees it …') to impersonate Tailgunner Joe. Tanenhaus notes that National Review's editors may have striven 'for learned hyperliteracy, but as leaders of a nascent movement they were prepared to welcome almost anyone who wanted to join and sought them out, wherever they were to be found—including in groups with names like American Heritage Protective Committee, the American Way, Citizens Grassroots Crusade of South Carolina.' South Carolina was a state Buckley knew all too well. Some of the most revelatory parts of Tanenhaus's biography depict the family's second homestead in Camden, a small city in the middle of the state. At the behest of Buckley's mother, a 'proud daughter of the Confederacy' who never quite felt comfortable in Yankee Connecticut, his father had purchased a sprawling antebellum property that was once owned by the first senator to resign after Lincoln's 1860 election. There, the family befriended figures like the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, who garnered more than 80 percent of the vote in their county in 1948, and the archconservative textile magnate Roger Milliken, later the most munificent National Review donor outside the Buckley family. They employed a staff drawn from the area's population of Black sharecroppers and domestics, whom they treated relatively well, at least compared to their neighbors. The 'family seemed, and in many respects were, models of compassion and fair dealing,' Tanenhaus writes. Yet Buckley's parents were also the sole financial backers behind a new local newspaper associated with the white supremacist Citizens Councils. National Review's shameful defenses of white rule in the South, Tanenhaus shows, drew on Buckley's own complicated experience of it. On the one hand, he seemed incapable of grasping white supremacy in its vicious totality, given the more genteel and paternalistic form of racism he experienced within his family: 'Any suggestion, made to a [white] Southerner, that segregation is in fact a manifestation of 'race hatred' elicits from him an expression of sheer wonderment,' he wrote. Yet the magazine also exhibited a 'craze' for John C. Calhoun's defense of states' rights, and Buckley himself made arguments in public that were 'far more incendiary and racist,' according to one historian of the right, than anything said by Robert Welch, the conspiratorial John Birch Society founder whose banishment from the conservative movement Buckley considered a career-defining achievement. Tanenhaus shows just how much Buckley's approach to the 'kooks' to his right was 'strategic, a matter of weighing costs and benefits.' Tanenhaus punctures that self-mythology as well, showing just how much Buckley's approach to the 'kooks' to his right was 'strategic, a matter of weighing costs and benefits.' In print, he called Welch an 'amazing man' and assured him in private that 'we agree on essentials.' Tanenhaus generally concurs. 'The primary distinction between NR's reading of the world calamity and Welch's was that in NR's view the enemies were liberals and in Welch's they were Communists,' he observes. 'And since NR all but accused liberals of being Communist handmaidens the wall of separation between the two positions was so fine as to crumble into dust.' When Buckley finally ventured some temporizing criticisms of Welch, he spared the society's members, whom the Barry Goldwater campaign considered an essential source of grassroots support. It was only after Lyndon Johnson's electoral rout of Goldwater threatened to cast the conservative movement back into exile that Buckley attempted a full-throated excommunication. 1964 may have temporarily set back the cause of radical conservatism, but it was a boon to Buckley's intellectual celebrity. In an election postmortem published in Partisan Review, the sociologist Daniel Bell described watching Buckley—'an all-or-nothing theocratic zealot of the most dangerous kind'—address a college audience with an astonishing level of 'forensic power and control,' even as Buckley's 'simplism' appalled him. 'Forensic power and control' plus 'simplism' was a potent combination, one Buckley employed in his extraordinary 1965 campaign for New York City mayor—then the third-most-visible public office in the country. In his mind, he still maintained a Nockean disdain for the brute din of democratic politics—'I will not go to Irish centers and go dancing. I will not go to Jewish centers and eat blintzes, nor will I go to Italian centers and pretend to speak Italian'—yet Tanenhaus frankly summarizes the demagogic theme that gained him a surprising amount of support. 'That theme was race,' filtered through the topoi of welfare, taxes, schooling, and above all, crime and policing. Buckley set the tone for his campaign with an address to 5,600 Catholic NYPD officers, in which he inveighed against the media's coverage of Bloody Sunday in Selma and defended the brutal actions of the Alabama police. Later, he would acknowledge that his own distorted version of events had come from 'someone who misinterpreted a television comment.' Even his disavowals of racist intent—'I believe that young thugs are young thugs, irrespective of race, color, or creed'—smacked of racism. Buckley, Tanenhaus writes, was groping his way to a position as 'a leader of forgotten Americans'—of American mass-men. His mayoral bid ultimately did best in the city's white ethnic enclaves, especially in Queens, the home of a future Republican president whose early forays into political advocacy included an infamous full-page New York Times ad calling to 'Bring Back Our Police!'Tanenhaus presents the tempestuous 1960s as a crossroads in Buckley's public life. Would he grow into his own as a serious conservative intellectual, or would he succumb to the temptations of celebrity? Buckley had taken some tentative steps down the first path in 1963, when he began work on a book that would, Tanenhaus writes, be 'a definitive statement on the meaning and value of an authentic American conservatism,' and not just another archly written attack on liberals. The thesis was Nockean, a critique of 'the masses' and their demands for 'egalitarianism,' and an argument for the need to restrict the votes of lesser Black citizens as well as whites—a proposal Buckley made in his infamous 1965 debate at Cambridge against James Baldwin. But Buckley never made much headway on the idea, and not only because it complicated the Kendellian majoritarianism he'd evinced in his political life. The basic problem was, as Tanenhaus frequently points out, that Buckley was at his core 'a controversialist, not a thinker and still less a theorist.' He was a 'performing ideologue' who thrived on provocation and had trouble sitting still. As one contemporary of Buckley's put it, he responded to 'ideological battle like Pavlov's dog to the sound of the bell.' The argumentative bell wouldn't stop ringing, especially once the debate show Firing Line debuted in 1966. It would last for more than three decades, launching Buckley to new heights of fame. He was recognized in airports and hounded for autographs on the street, as his unmistakable televisual style—the improbably mobile eyebrows, the serpentine tongue, the ironizing drawl—became fodder for generations of late-night impressionists. Buckley, the talk-show host Jack Paar said, was 'the Tiffany lamp of television.' He was 'pure camp,' the sensibility that, as Susan Sontag famously wrote, converts 'the serious into the frivolous.' It also invited accusations of frivolity, of Buckley the theatrical persona overtaking Buckley the movement leader. The literary modernist Hugh Kenner, who briefly worked as NR's poetry editor and whom Buckley had asked to help him on his abortive book project, later wrote that Buckley had 'ceased to be a public outrage. He became an ingratiatingly unpredictable personality.' Kenner had compared Buckley's telegenic mayoral campaign to Andy Warhol's Pop Art creations and homemade films. Buckley, the talk-show host Jack Paar said, was 'the Tiffany lamp of television.' He was 'pure camp,' the sensibility that, as Susan Sontag famously wrote, converts 'the serious into the frivolous.' The most lacerating assessment of Buckley's celebrity persona came from Gary Wills, who, in his memoir, Confessions of a Conservative, charged that Buckley had become a 'dandy': He is the object of a personal cult subtly at odds with his own intentions. The very thing that charms even those on the left makes grimmer types on the right distrust him. Striving for objective results, he seems only interested in theatrical effects. What a curious trial for the aspiring ideologue: By restricting himself to combat, he floats above it—intending to strike blows, he is applauded for striking has become something of a cliché for liberal and left-wing observers of the Trump era to cite an aphorism now known as Wilhoit's law (after the musician and composer, not the political scientist). It reads: 'Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.' Does that capture the essence of Buckley? Temperamentally, no. He was a 'moderate, even a kind of liberal,' Tanenhaus writes, 'in his openness, in his curiosity, his ability to turn arguments around, look at questions from different sides.' But Tanenhaus also quotes from an assessment given by one of Buckley's prep school teachers, which could easily double as a summation of his politics: He 'has to be made to realize that rules are not merely made so he can invoke them in his favor.' Throughout his life, Buckley never seemed to learn this lesson. He invoked the value of principled dissent to protect the speech of America Firsters, but passionately defended McCarthyite repression. He attacked the credibility of an anti-war intellectual like Staughton Lynd for traveling to North Vietnam to meet with Communist leaders ('Here is an American idiot'), but displayed little compunction about embarking on his own junkets, including to Pinochet's Chile and apartheid South Africa, for whom he happily propagandized. He reproached liberal journalists for declining to testify before government inquiries but stayed mum about his extensive knowledge of Watergate's crimes (knowledge he acquired via his lifelong friend E. Howard Hunt, whom Buckley had met during a brief postgraduate stint working for the CIA in Mexico City). He was a stalwart defender of mass incarceration and the death penalty, but became the loudest voice proclaiming the innocence of Edgar Smith, an articulate fan of National Review (and Buckley's obsequious pen pal) who was convicted of murdering a young girl—and who would attempt to kill again after his release. In this inconstancy, Buckley was carrying on a family inheritance. 'On the one hand he had himself once been a revolutionary, or rather a counter-revolutionary,' Buckley reflected of his father. 'On the other hand, he was the conservative who believed in law and order.'
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Did Bill Buckley Really Lead a Successful Revolution?
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 1,040 pages, $40 For decades, William F. Buckley Jr.—journalist, editor, novelist, television host, mayoral candidate, high society bon vivant, and former CIA agent—was the undeniable intellectual head of the American right. Until the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, Buckley was likely the right's most genuinely popular exemplar as well: By no means restricted to the pages of National Review, the conservative magazine he founded in 1955, Buckley had a 33-year, 1,504-episode run of his TV show Firing Line and a syndicated newspaper column that at its height appeared in 350 publications. Fewer than 20 years after Buckley's 2008 death, few influential American conservatives act as though they are more than vaguely aware that he existed, at least from how often his spirit or words are explicitly invoked. But a careful read of Sam Tanenhaus' Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, a new biography that was nearly three decades in the works, suggests that more than one contemporary right-wing figure is in many ways recapitulating Buckley's early career, whether consciously or not. Tanenhaus does not spell that out explicitly. Buckley's position vis-à-vis the contemporary American right is not an obvious concern of this book, which mentions the name Donald Trump exactly once, in the future president's role as a real estate entrepreneur and supporter of Roy Cohn. But it's easy to come away from this book wondering just how many truly lasting victories William Buckley ultimately won. Buckley's father, who grew up in Texas but lived for many years as an oil wildcatter in Mexico, imbued his kids with a Catholic old-time conservatism that mistrusted the state and communists—and Jews, an enmity that led four of his kids (not young William Jr.) to burn a cross in front of a Jewish resort in 1937. The junior Buckley's first public speech, written in February 1941, was "In Defense of Charles Lindbergh." Specifically, Buckley defended the airman from accusations of Nazi sympathies while Lindbergh was agitating to keep America out of World War II. Buckley's first book, and first New York Times bestseller, was God and Man at Yale (1951), which denounced the regnant institutions of American liberal culture for turning their back on religious faith. God and Man attacked, as the conservative journalist John Chamberlain explained in its introduction, an "elite of professorial Untouchables" who were wedded to an "unadmitted orthodoxy" in the guise of objectivity: "agnostic as to religion, 'interventionist' and Keynesian as to economics, and collectivist as applied to the relation of the individual to society and government." Buckley, a free speech absolutist for those who wanted to keep the U.S. out of World War II, adopted a more authoritarian mindset in the Cold War, and had colleagues who thought espousing communism should be straight-up illegal, though Buckley did not go quite that far. But in his second book, co-written with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, he predicted that even liberals in America would someday find "the patience of America may at last be exhausted, and we will strike out against" them. He cooperated with the FBI in investigating the feared communist presence at Yale. In 2025, this sounds like a prototype for the academic activist Christopher Rufo, or maybe the podcaster Ben Shapiro: Like them, young Buckley decried and strove to defeat a smug intellectual elite barricaded into educational institutions that he accused of annihilating American values. Buckley's early days also summon thoughts of the neo-reactionary writer Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. "Mencius Moldbug." Both men feared what Yarvin calls "the Cathedral": a complex of institutions and ideas trying to convince the world that only progressivism can be tolerated. In a 1949 speech, Buckley complained that "hundreds of thousands of students leave the universities every year, and their influence pervades the entire country. They get jobs with the government, with newspapers, with the civil service. In a very few years the intellectual collectivist drive of the universities is translated into legislative and public policy." In a 1950 speech at Yale, he declared the university "is very, very allergic to criticism from the liberal, who is the absolute dictator of the United States today." In God and Man, he wrote that "there are limits within which [Yale's] faculty members must keep their opinions if they wish to be 'tolerated.'" He wondered "how long a person who revealed himself as a racist, who lectured about the anthropological superiority of the Aryan, would last at Yale." Buckley was also a premature exponent of worries about the sinister machinations of a "deep state." McCarthy and His Enemies defended Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisc.). As Tanenhaus notes, McCarthy's "vigilante crusade went after a second group—not Communists (everyone already knew about them) but the much bigger universe of treasonists, shadowy functionaries in the State Department, the CIA, even the U.S. Army—what later came to be called the 'deep state'—always abetted by their handmaidens, the 'intellectuals and the "liberal press."'" Especially the press: "It was the lords of media who put the most vivid pictures in people's heads and expertly applied the instruments of social pressure to shape and direct public opinion." In a pre-publication fundraising letter for what became National Review, Buckley argued, Yarvin-style, that opinion makers "control the elected," by which he meant "not merely our political office-holders" but "everyone who administers any form of public trust, such as government, schools, churches, civic organizations, and our channels of communication, information, and entertainment." Though in this case, Tanenhaus notes, Buckley perceived "not a secret conspiracy but a coordinated duplicity of the like-minded." Buckley's patrician reputation and his ability to befriend intellectual opponents have led some to think he'd disapprove of Trump. But it seems unlikely that the Buckley of the 1950s would have felt that way. When National Review launched, one of Buckley's most influential mentors was Willmoore Kendall, who then was a political philosophy professor at Yale. Kendall helped turn the firebrand who started his public career as a critic of American involvement in overseas wars into someone who thought the battle against communism was the highest public policy concern—and that it might demand, in Buckley's own words, "native despotism" and nuking millions of innocents. For Kendall, McCarthy exemplified "the true American tradition…less that of Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks, with their cluck-clucking over the so-called preferred freedoms, than, quite simply, that of riding somebody out of town on a rail." That's Trump's stance on immigrants and leftists right there. It was easier for Buckley to seem like the king of American conservatism before National Review–era conservatives started achieving real-world political victories. Their first major win was the ascension of Barry Goldwater to the GOP nomination in 1964—followed by his crushing defeat in November, which many assumed was the death of the American hard right in the party. Buckley knew better than to put all his project's weight on Goldwater; he doubted the Arizona senator's intellectual and ideological bonafides and thought the man wasn't "smart or educated enough to be president," as Tanenhaus summed it up. (Goldwater believed the same about himself.) Buckley wasn't comfortable getting fully behind him with an endorsement until after he won the California primary in June 1964. But Goldwater's political success, such as it was, put a fire in the belly of a new generation of conservative activists, many organized under the banner of Young Americans for Freedom, famously born in 1960 at Buckley's Connecticut home. Buckley, who believed his was a fully oppositional movement when he launched National Review to "stand athwart history, yelling stop," was amazed to find the activists who arose around the Goldwater campaign "talk about affecting history." Buckley's crew was generally not very excited about Richard Nixon, the 1968 Republican nominee. They hadn't even officially endorsed him in his first go-round as the Republican nominee, back in 1960. But Buckley came around in 1968, becoming a major media defender bordering on lackey to Nixon and his foreign policy maven Henry Kissinger. (He was then bitterly disappointed when President Nixon, who he thought was at least staunchly anti-Communist if not sufficiently conservative at home, opened relations with China.) Bozell, who became a Catholic traditionalist, saw the embrace of Nixon as the death of the original Buckleyite conservatism. As Tanenhaus paraphrased Bozell, under Nixon "all the old targets—big government, Keynesian economics, 'compulsory welfare'—had been left untouched. And all the high values—states' rights, 'the constitutional prerogatives of Congress,' a militant anti-Soviet foreign policy…had been betrayed." But Ronald Reagan's ascension to the presidency in 1980 felt like the apotheosis that Buckley had been working toward: an anti-Communist who espoused free markets now ruled America. Curiously, that's exactly when Tanenhaus' narrative momentum falls apart, with the last 27 years of Buckley's life getting 30 pages after Reagan strolls into the Oval Office. While this book is very long, and very long in the works, it could leave devotees of American right-wing history wishing Tanenhaus had reported more on, say, the relationships between Buckley and other National Review staffers over the years, or how the flagship conservative magazine's concerns and approaches changed during the years Buckley managed it. One could also wish Tanenhaus gave us more details about Buckley's relationship with the CIA, where he officially worked—under the tutelage of future Watergate burglar Howard Hunt—from July 1951 to March 1952. Specifically, it would be good to either reinforce or dispel suspicions about how much, if anything, the CIA had to do with Buckley's later choices as a public figure and as editor of National Review. (Hunt, as various figures suspicious of Buckley have noted, had a career largely devoted to clandestine psywar and disinformation.) During his time on the CIA payroll, Tanenhaus reports, the agency assigned Buckley to seek out student activists in Mexico "to lure away from Communism and into the non-Communist left. It was not the ideal task for Buckley, who deemed liberals 'far more dangerous' than Communists." Tanenhaus does take the time to explicitly reject the suspicion, nursed even by the early and important National Review contributor Frank Meyer, that Buckley's magazine was essentially a CIA operation. But he also notes that in the 1970s, as the agency was tarred by a series of scandals, "Buckley supported the CIA in its growing time of crisis, publishing essays by former operatives who not only defended the CIA at every turn—even after reports of illegal domestic spying— but also drew on information and arguments supplied by the Agency." Tanenhaus is out to tell stories about his subject, not to sit in judgment. Still, he devotes a thick throughline to Buckley's attitudes about African Americans. The Buckley family appears to have treated black people decently on a personal level. (When a black schoolteacher wanted to buy some land from William Sr., he gave it to him as a gift.) But in 1957, Buckley infamously argued for denying black southerners meaningful electoral participation, declaring that "the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage." He took a long time to stop downplaying or ignoring the violence inherent in efforts to keep African Americans down, and to stop blaming Southern racial troubles on outside agitators. Buckley, his former protégé Garry Wills once wrote, "could turn any event into an adventure, a joke, a showdown." This book's tone and feel rarely hit with the best of Buckley's fizz or verve. Despite its length, it feels too thin rather than too thick when it comes to the question of whether Buckley did in fact effect a revolution in America. Decades after Reagan won office, America's current president is a trade-hating Republican who is consistently soft on the Soviet Union's heir, Vladimir Putin. Given that, one might question whether Buckley truly had enough lasting impact to warrant a book this size. The best of Buckley's ideas—restraining much of the government and protecting market liberties—do hopefully have a future. The worst, such as his attitudes on how to wage war and how to handle America's racial troubles, we can only hope remain a part of the past. The post Did Bill Buckley Really Lead a Successful Revolution? appeared first on
Fox News
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Hillary Clinton is back and doing what she does best -- trashing women
Hillary Clinton is back and doing what she does best: trashing women. She wants to make sure we know that the basket of deplorables is also sexist. During a conversation at the 92nd Street Y in New York City last month, Clinton was asked by Margaret Hoover, host of "Firing Line" on PBS, if she had any advice for the eventual first female president of the United States. Clinton took this opportunity to take a swipe at Republican women. "Well, first of all, don't be a handmaiden to the patriarchy, which kind of eliminates every woman on the other side of the aisle, except for very few." Most Republican women are just "handmaidens to the patriarchy," just there to support the men, according to her. Would Hillary Clinton ever do such a thing? Clinton first rose to prominence because her husband was governor of Arkansas and then president of the United States. On his coattails she later became a U.S. senator from New York. After she ran for president and lost the nomination to Barack Obama, she was appointed Secretary of State, yes, by a man. While president, Bill Clinton carried on an affair with a White House intern and then lied about it under oath. He was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstructing justice. During the time that he engaged in this cover-up, his wife Hillary was out in front lambasting Republicans for daring to challenge her husband. She coined the phrase "vast rightwing conspiracy" to wave away the charges against him. In later years Hillary denied that Bill's relationship with Monica was an abuse of power since Monica was "an adult," despite the fact that he was leader of the free world and she was a recent college graduate doing an internship. This wasn't the only time Hillary Clinton snuggled right up to the patriarchy. When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, he was dogged by accusations he had had a longtime affair with Gennifer Flowers. Hillary Clinton, no girl's girl, denied that her husband would do such a thing and added "You know, I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette." It wasn't enough to defend her husband. Hillary had to take a shot at women who made the same choice she would end up making, to stand by her man. Criticizing other women to defend a man, is there anything more patriarchal? Her husband wasn't the only man Hillary Clinton would protect and defend in this way. In a New York Times story after Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a sexual predator, two well-known women said that they warned Hillary Clinton's team about her close relationship with Weinstein. Actress Lena Dunham and magazine publisher Tina Brown both made explicit warnings about Weinstein to Hillary Clinton's team during both of her presidential races. After the accusations against Weinstein became public, Hillary's team issued a statement hitting back at Dunham specifically for contacting them instead of going to authorities, noting "Only she can answer why she would tell them instead of those who could stop him." Some champion of women. Hillary doesn't like when women won't do as they are told. In 2018, still bitter over her drubbing in the 2016 presidential election by Donald Trump, Clinton said women who didn't vote for her were just doing the bidding of the men in their lives. "We do not do well with white men and we don't do well with married, white women," Clinton said. "And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should." It couldn't be that women had considered her candidacy and found it wanting. According to her, it must be that men had told these women how to vote. Hillary always took swipes at women so her latest comments are nothing new. The eventual female president should consider not using women as a punching bag to attain her goals. Thankfully, that president won't be Hillary Clinton.
Sky News AU
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Sky News AU
Hillary Clinton frets that a female Republican president would be ‘handmaiden to the patriarchy'
Former Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton bristled at the prospect of a female Republican winning the White House, fretting that it would condemn women to be subordinates of the patriarchy. Clinton, 77, argued that, with few exceptions, female Republicans tend to undermine feminist ideals while reflecting on the advice she'd give to women seeking the presidency. 'Well, first of all, don't be a handmaiden to the patriarchy, which kind of eliminates every woman on the other side of the aisle, except for very few,' Clinton sniped with a sigh during a forum at The 92nd Street Y in New York City earlier this month. Clinton's remarks were made on May 1, but footage of the exchange didn't surface until last week and was unearthed by the Daily Caller. Examples of Republican women who aren't 'handmaidens to the patriarchy' include Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), according to Clinton. 'There's a few,' she admitted. Moderator Margaret Hoover, a Republican pundit and host of PBS' 'Firing Line,' refrained from pushing back against Clinton on that point. Hoover's husband, John Avlon, unsuccessfully challenged Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY) last year. The former secretary of state and first lady also lamented how women haven't yet been able to punch through the glass ceiling and win the presidency, referencing both her and former Vice President Kamala Harris' defeats. 'Look, first we have to get there, and it is, you know, obviously so much harder than it should be,' Clinton continued. 'So, you know, if a woman runs who I think would be a good president — as I thought Kamala Harris would be, and as I knew I would be — I will support that woman.' Unlike Clinton, Harris largely refrained from harping too much on gender politics during her 107-day sprint for the presidency in the 2024 election cycle. Harris also significantly outperformed President Trump with female voters, according to exit poll data. Beyond Harris and Clinton, former presidential hopeful Nikki Haley had made inroads on the Republican presidential primary in 2024 but fell far short of beating Trump for the party nod. Clinton has previously dissed GOP women. In 2019, she published a book titled 'The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience,' which listed over 100 women. Clinton later defended her decision not to include former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the tome. 'She doesn't fit the other part of the definition in our opinion, which is really knocking down barriers for others and trying to make a positive difference,' Clinton told BBC radio at the time. 'I think the record is mixed with her.' Clinton infamously landed in hot water during the 2016 campaign cycle for placing a large swatch of Trump supporters in what she called the 'basket of deplorables.' She later expressed 'regret' over that comment. Originally published as Hillary Clinton frets that a female Republican president would be 'handmaiden to the patriarchy'
New York Post
19-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Hillary Clinton frets that a female Republican president would be ‘handmaiden to the patriarchy'
Former Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton bristled at the prospect of a female Republican winning the White House, fretting that it would condemn women to be subordinates of the patriarchy. Clinton, 77, argued that, with few exceptions, female Republicans tend to undermine feminist ideals while reflecting on the advice she'd give to women seeking the presidency. 'Well, first of all, don't be a handmaiden to the patriarchy, which kind of eliminates every woman on the other side of the aisle, except for very few,' Clinton sniped with a sigh during a forum at The 92nd Street Y in New York City earlier this month. Advertisement Clinton's remarks were made on May 1, but footage of the exchange didn't surface until last week and was unearthed by the Daily Caller. Examples of Republican women who aren't 'handmaidens to the patriarchy' include Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), according to Clinton. 3 Hillary Clinton was the first female presidential nominee of a major political party. James Messerschmidt Advertisement 'There's a few,' she admitted. Moderator Margaret Hoover, a Republican pundit and host of PBS' 'Firing Line,' refrained from pushing back against Clinton on that point. Hoover's husband, John Avlon, unsuccessfully challenged Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY) last year. The former secretary of state and first lady also lamented how women haven't yet been able to punch through the glass ceiling and win the presidency, referencing both her and former Vice President Kamala Harris' defeats. 3 Clinton pointed to moderate Republicans such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski as GOPers who aren't servants of the patriarchy. CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Advertisement 'Look, first we have to get there, and it is, you know, obviously so much harder than it should be,' Clinton continued. 'So, you know, if a woman runs who I think would be a good president — as I thought Kamala Harris would be, and as I knew I would be — I will support that woman.' Unlike Clinton, Harris largely refrained from harping too much on gender politics during her 107-day sprint for the presidency in the 2024 election cycle. Harris also significantly outperformed President Trump with female voters, according to exit poll data. Beyond Harris and Clinton, former presidential hopeful Nikki Haley had made inroads on the Republican presidential primary in 2024 but fell far short of beating Trump for the party nod. Advertisement Clinton has previously dissed GOP women. 3 Hillary Clinton has previously bashed conservative women. csuarez In 2019, she published a book titled 'The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience,' which listed over 100 women. Clinton later defended her decision not to include former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the tome. 'She doesn't fit the other part of the definition in our opinion, which is really knocking down barriers for others and trying to make a positive difference,' Clinton told BBC radio at the time. 'I think the record is mixed with her.' Clinton infamously landed in hot water during the 2016 campaign cycle for placing a large swatch of Trump supporters in what she called the 'basket of deplorables.' She later expressed 'regret' over that comment.
