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The Guardian
9 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
The genteel, silver-tongued thinker who fathered US conservatism - and paved the way for Trump
Back when the 'public intellectual' was still a thriving species in America, the conservative writer William F Buckley Jr was one of the most famous – of any political stripe. On the PBS television show Firing Line, which he hosted weekly until 1999, he debated or interviewed people ranging from ardent rightwingers to black nationalists. In between, he edited the magazine National Review, wrote three columns a week, wrote or dictated hundreds of letters a month, and was known to dash off a book while on vacation. He was photographed working at a typewriter in the back of a limousine as a dog looked on. In Aladdin (1992), Robin Williams's genie does Buckley as one of his impressions. Buckley's extraordinary energy is captured in a sweeping new biography that also uses its subject to tell a larger story of the American right. 'As far as I'm concerned, he invented politics as cultural warfare, and that's what we're seeing now,' the writer Sam Tanenhaus said. Tanenhaus spent nearly three decades researching an authorized biography that was published on Tuesday, titled Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America. Buckley is often remembered as the architect of the modern conservative movement. For decades he worked to unite anti-communists, free marketeers, and social conservatives into the coalition behind the Reagan revolution. Yet today, almost two decades since Buckley's death in 2008, the conservative landscape looks different. Free trade is out, economic protectionism is in. The Republican party's base of support, once the most educated and affluent, is now increasingly working-class. Even as Donald Trump remakes the right in his own image, however, Tanenhaus sees Buckley's thumbprints. One of the biggest is Trumpism's suspicion of intellectual elites. Although Buckley was a blue blood and loved the company of artists and literary people, he famously said that he would 'sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University'. His first book, in 1951, accused professors of indoctrinating students with liberal and secularist ideas – more than half a century before the Trump administration's bruising attempts to pressure Ivy League universities into political fealty. Tanenhaus, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review, spoke to me by video call from his house in Connecticut. He is a gregarious and funny conversationalist. At one point, he paused a digression about Joan Didion to observe: 'Wow. There's a vulture in my backyard. For God's sake.' He said he looked forward to reading my piece about him, 'unless you're saying bad stuff about me. Then send it to me and say: 'My editors made me write this.'' Our free-flowing, one-and-half-hour conversation gave me some sense of why Tanenhaus's biography took so long to write. It also made me better understand how the conservative Buckley was charmed into the decision to allow a self-described 'lifelong unregistered liberal Democrat' unfettered access to his papers, and to give that person the final – or at least most comprehensive – word on his life. The outcome is a lively, balanced and deeply researched book. At more than 1,000 pages, including end matter, the hardback is an engrossing, if occasionally wrist-straining, read. Tanenhaus was born in 1955, three weeks before Buckley published the first issue of National Review. Writing the book, he said, often felt like a kind of 'reconstructive journalism' where he relived history that he had experienced but never considered in its context. As a liberal and an 'unobservant, ignorant, secular Jew', he also had to try to understand someone with whom he had little in common, politically or culturally. Although Buckley's views on some subjects evolved over time, 'he was pretty and firmly entrenched with two foundational ideas,' Tanenhaus said. 'One was Catholicism, which was the most important thing in his life. The second was a kind of evangelical capitalism.' Unlike many of his mentors and allies, who tended to be ex-Marxists or ex-liberals, Buckley was not an ideological convert. His father, a wealthy, devoutly Catholic and rightwing oilman from Texas who raised his large family in Connecticut and across Europe, loomed large over his early life. Buckley and his nine siblings were desperate to impress their father. He was loving to his family and also racist, in a 'genteel Bourbon' way, and antisemitic, in a more vitriolic way. In 1937, when Buckley was 11, his older siblings burned a cross in front of a Jewish resort. He later recounted the story with embarrassment but argued that his siblings did not understand the gravity of what they were doing. Although Buckley came to make a real effort to purge the right of racist, antisemitic and fringe elements, Tanenhaus thinks his upbringing held sway longer than most people realize. One of the most interesting sections of the book concerns Camden, South Carolina, where Buckley's parents had a home. In the 1950s the town became notorious for violence against black people and white liberals. During his research, Tanenhaus discovered that the Buckleys – who were considered by their black domestic workers to be unusually kind relative to the white people of the area – also funded the town's pro-segregation paper and had ties to a local white supremacist group. After a spate of racist attacks in Camden, Buckley wrote a piece in National Review condemning the violence, but not segregation itself. He defended segregation on the grounds that white people were, for the time being, the culturally 'superior' race. Buckley's views on race began to change in the 1960s. He was horrified by the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls. During his unsuccessful third-party campaign for mayor of New York in 1965, he surprised both conservatives and liberals by endorsing affirmative action. In 1970 he argued that within a decade the United States might have a black president and that this event would be a 'welcome tonic'. Despite his patrician manner and distinct accent, Buckley had a savvy understanding of the power of mass media and technology. National Review was never read by a wide audience, but Buckley and his conservative vanguard fully embraced radio, television and other media. A technophile, he was one of the first to adopt MCI mail, an early version of email. Tanenhaus thinks he would thrive in the age of Twitter and podcasts. Yet the current era feels a world away in other respects. For one, Buckley's politics rarely affected his many friendships. 'His best friends were liberals,' Tanenhaus said. He greatly admired Jesse Jackson. It was not strange for Eldridge Cleaver, the black nationalist, and Timothy Leary, the psychonaut, to stop by his house. Buckley was deeply embarrassed by the notorious 1968 incident in which Gore Vidal called him a 'crypto-Nazi', on-air, and Buckley responded by calling Vidal an alcoholic 'queer' and threatening to punch him. It was an exception to a code of conduct that Buckley generally tried to live by. 'If he became your friend, and then you told him you joined the Communist party, he would say: 'That is the worst thing you can do, I'm shocked you would do it, but you're still coming over for dinner tomorrow, right?'' Tanenhaus laughed. 'It's just a different worldview, and we don't get it because we take ourselves more seriously than he did.' Being the authorized biographer of a living person entails a special relationship. You become intimately familiar with your subject – perhaps even good friends, as Tanenhaus and his wife did with Buckley and his socialite wife, Pat. Yet you also need critical distance to write honestly. It was impossible to finish the book 'while he was still alive', Tanenhaus said. He realized in retrospect that Buckley's death was 'the only way that I could gain the perspective I needed, the distance from him and the events that he played an important part in, to be able to wrap my arms around them'. He thinks Buckley also understood that a true biography would be a full and frank accounting of his life. 'I think that, in some way, he wanted someone to come along and maybe understand things he didn't understand about himself.' Despite his disagreements with Buckley's politics, Tanenhaus was ultimately left with a positive assessment of him as a person. 'He had a warmth and generosity that are uncommon. When you're a journalist, part of your business is interacting in some way with the great, and the great always remind you that you're not one of them. They have no interest in you. They never ask you about yourself. Buckley was not like that.' He is not sure what he would have made of Trump. Buckley was willing to criticize the right, and was an early critic of the Iraq war, Tanenhaus said. Yet 'conservatives can always find a way to say: 'Whatever our side is doing, the other side is worse.'' This is Tanenhaus's third book about conservatism. I asked what he thinks the left most misunderstands about the right. He instantly responded: 'They don't understand how closely the right has been studying them all these years.' He noted that Buckley surrounded himself with ex-leftists and that he and other conservatives made a point of reading left and liberal books and studying their tactics of political organizing. But that doesn't seem to go the opposite direction. Leftists and liberals 'don't see that the other side should be listened to, that there's anything to learn from them. And they think, no matter how few of them there are, that they're always in the majority.' Buckley once said that his 'idea of a counter-revolution is one in which we overturn the view of society that came out of the New Deal', Tanenhaus said. Today, Trump is aggressively moving, with mixed success, to roll back the federal administrative state – a vestige of Buckley's vision of unfettered capitalism, even if Trump's other economic views aren't exactly Buckley's. 'It would not be far-fetched to say we are now seeing the fulfillment of what he had in mind,' Tanenhaus said.
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Man Who Turned Right-Wing Politics Into Entertainment
BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus In the age of Steve Bannon and Bronze Age Pervert — the pseudonymous author acclaimed by young Trumpists — a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. seems almost quaint. Since his death in 2008, the aristocratic founder of the flagship conservative magazine National Review has been wreathed in nostalgia. Especially as the Trump era dawned, there was a sense that somehow Buckley would have stopped it, even as National Review's iconic 2016 'Against Trump' issue proved no match for the MAGA insurgency. At a moment without gatekeepers or even gates, it was said, Buckley showed how much we had lost: It was he who had kept out the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the antisemites; it was he who had defined, even created, the respectable right. Sam Tanenhaus's immersive authorized biography partakes of this nostalgia, even as his portrait of Buckley dispels it. Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, concludes on an elegiac note, imagining Buckley trapped in a world different from ours, 'beyond our reach but hovering near.' But the Buckley that emerges from his exhaustive, 1,000-page portrait is not so much a stranger to our times as a precursor to them. After all, Buckley made his name with 'God and Man at Yale,' his slashing 1951 attack on his alma mater as a hotbed of leftism, complete with the suggestion that alumni withhold donations as a means of pressuring the university to remedy the issue. Tanenhaus's case for Buckley's significance is mostly tacit, as the book curiously lacks a formal introduction; his keenest insight is to understand him as the right's 'first intellectual entertainer.' In his precocious youth, not only did Buckley realize that politics was becoming entertainment, but he helped make it so, branching off from magazines into television, spy novels and a stunt run for New York City mayor, all while befriending and advising the most powerful politicians of his day. More than a political journalist, Buckley was an unabashed activist who intuitively grasped the centrality of the media and the power of attention, and wielded both on behalf of his cause. American politics has never been the same since. As Tanenhaus lavishly elaborates in the book's early chapters, Buckley was to the manner born. His oil speculator father had spent years in Mexico — where he was involved in various counterrevolutionary intrigues until he was expelled in 1920 — and he recreated the country's colonial aesthetic meticulously at Great Elm, his Connecticut estate. Late in life, Buckley once claimed he had been raised in Mexico. This was not the case, but Buckley and his nine siblings did grow up in a veritable hacienda, speaking Spanish, English, French as well as 'a polyglot of their own invention,' and attended by a fleet of tutors, nannies and maids. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
The Cerebral, Bach-Loving Patrician Who Wrote Trump's Playbook
In a memorable exchange during a Republican primary debate in January 2016, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas needled the upstart candidate Donald Trump, saying he was not a true conservative and adding, 'Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.' Mr. Trump was ready with a retort. 'Conservatives actually do come out of Manhattan,' he replied, 'including William F. Buckley.' It was obvious why Mr. Trump would invoke William F. Buckley Jr. — the author, columnist, magazine editor, TV debater and political candidate who died at 82 in 2008 (and who did work for decades in Manhattan). Mr. Buckley was the leading intellectual architect of the modern conservative movement — indeed, he personified it for more than 50 years. But by what reasoning could Mr. Trump rightfully claim a connection with him? Outwardly, Mr. Buckley, with his patrician manner, salon wit and gold-plated vocabulary, his passion for Bach and connoisseur's taste for fine writing, could not have been less like Mr. Trump. And in policy terms, Mr. Trump's love of tariffs, defense of entitlement programs and isolationist tendencies were at odds with Mr. Buckley's fondness for the free market, skepticism of big government and support for a muscular foreign policy. In fact, in the winter of 2016, the editors of National Review, the venerable political journal Mr. Buckley founded in 1955, devoted an entire issue to making the case against Mr. Trump. They invited conservatives 'across the spectrum' to argue that he was a 'philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the G.O.P. in favor of a free-floating populism with strongman overtones.' Since then, the ranks of anti- or 'never' Trump conservatives have thinned almost to extinction, in the pages of National Review and elsewhere. Mr. Trump controls the Republican Party top to bottom and commands the loyalty of its policy minds as well as the thriving right-wing media ecosphere. His vision, it seems, has prevailed. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Move aside, Trump – here's the man who made conservatism fun
William F Buckley Jr was, above all else, a debater. He's perhaps best known today for jousting with the liberal writer Gore Vidal in 1968 during the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. This formed the centrepiece of the 2015 Netflix documentary, Best of Enemies, and an acclaimed 2021 play by James Graham of the same name. Three years earlier, in 1965, Buckley also debated the novelist and essayist James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union on the motion: 'The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.' But many people, including me, have discovered Buckley through Firing Line: the television show he hosted from 1966 to 1999, in which he argued with a variety of distinguished public intellectuals, from Norman Mailer and Noam Chomsky to Germaine Greer and Christopher Hitchens. In these video clips, readily available today on YouTube, he's both charming and ready to tear down his opponent's arguments. And yet he was also a builder, rather than simply a pugilist, and became the preeminent figure of the American intellectual Right from the moment he founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955 until his death in 2008. In the late 90s he appointed the critic and journalist Sam Tanenhaus as his official biographer, after Tanenhaus had published a biography of the writer and ex-communist Whittaker Chambers with the help of Buckley. After more than two decades, we have the result: Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. It's an enjoyable and fascinating romp through American political and cultural life in much of the 20th century. And it helps the book, too, that Buckley had such a colourful personality. He possessed a peculiar mid-Atlantic drawl, very expressive eyebrows, and an idiosyncratic vocabulary. He made conservatism seem fun. Buckley was mostly raised in Connecticut, but he spent parts of his childhood in France and some of his adolescence in England. His first language was Spanish because he had a Mexican nanny. From such a worldly background, one might conclude Buckley was an urbane and jet-setting bon vivant. He loved sailing. He spent his winters skiing in Gstaad in Switzerland. He owned a maisonette in Park Avenue, and socialised with Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov and Charlie Chaplin. But this was only a part of him. He also passionately stood up against any liberalism and progressivism in a way that put him at an awkward angle to much of elite Manhattan's social life. His hostility to the Soviet Union was another essential part of his political worldview: throughout his life, he defended Joseph McCarthy and his campaign to expose the communists who had allegedly infiltrated the federal government. Anti-communist on foreign policy, libertarian on the economy and conservative on matters of society and culture: this triumvirate of beliefs did not automatically go together until the 20th century. And the fact that they seem to do so now – and indeed for many, constitute a definition of conservatism – is testament to the enduring influence of Buckley's colleague, Frank Meyer, creator of this 'fusionism' and also a founding editor of National Review. That magazine, Tanenhaus writes, was at the 'sharp advancing edge of an avowedly radical movement and its politics of insurgent revolt'. One of the things the magazine revolted against was the power of the federal government to impose laws on southern states against racist discrimination. During the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s Buckley stood up for the segregationist South. His parents, who were from Texas and Louisiana, 'came from segregated regions whose social life was shaped by the rigid formations of caste'. Buckley wrote an essay entitled 'Why the South Must Prevail' in 1957 in which he argued that 'the White community' in the South 'is so entitled [to discriminate against black Americans] because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.' For Buckley, this was not an issue of biology. It was to do with culture. White Americans were better educated than black Americans: this meant they should be entitled to greater rights. Later on in life, however, he expressed regret for his opposition to the civil rights movement, and said the federal government was ultimately right to enforce anti-discrimination laws. What, in the end, was Buckley's legacy? It does not seem readily clear after putting the book down. (Presumably Tanenhaus intended for it to be published this year to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Buckley's birth.) Buckley never wrote a great book. In the two debates he's most famous for – with Vidal and Baldwin – he humiliated himself in one (threatening to 'sock [Vidal] in the face' after he called Buckley a 'crypto-Nazi'); and definitively lost the other (Baldwin won by 544 to 164 votes). Many of the causes for which he passionately stood – on race, sexuality and the role of religion in society – have ended in total defeat. Buckley was on the losing side of the 60s revolution in terms of culture. But not politically. The final section covers his last 24 years – from 1974 to 2008 – where Republican presidents, galvanised by Buckley's influence, occupied the White House. And yet, ironically, it's the most boring part of the book. It's far more exciting to read Buckley as an opposition figure than in the role of éminence grise. He seemed most alive in the 60s: this was when he became a syndicated columnist; when he got his own show, Firing Line; when he ran for office as Mayor of New York. His instincts, Tanenhaus writes, 'were those of a public talker and writer, an actor and performer.' And yet Buckley's greatest resonance for our times came from his earliest political conviction. At 15, he presented a paper in his New England boarding school in which he proclaimed that, 'far from being America's long-standing ally, England has been to date this country's worst enemy'. Fascinatingly, this was a view shared by Buckley's greatest nemesis, Gore Vidal. They also shared a hero, the handsome and charismatic aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had warned America against getting involved in the Second World War. America, the advocates of this isolationist movement argued, should focus on its own security interests rather than being entangled in Europe. Their motto was: 'America First'.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Perspective: The renaissance that American universities need
Years ago, as a young academic, I found myself seated in an antebellum inn in Oxford, Mississippi. A fire crackled quietly in the hearth, and across from me sat William F. Buckley Jr. — founder of National Review, author of 'God and Man at Yale,' and one of the great minds of our time. As we spoke at length about the decay of higher education, Buckley lamented that Yale had abandoned its soul. 'They've kept the Latin,' he said with a wry smile, 'but they've lost the light.' He was, of course, speaking of Yale's motto: Lux et Veritas — Light and Truth. I would add this: Yale's seal doesn't only include Latin. It also bears Hebrew script—Urim and Thummim— symbols drawn from biblical tradition, meaning 'lights and perfections.' When a university abandons Lux et Veritas, it doesn't just lose tradition. It forfeits transcendence. Buckley told me that universities were drifting not only from faith, but from intellectual seriousness, from moral purpose, from the courage to say some things are true and others are not. That night shaped me. It reminded me that ideas are not abstractions — they are anchors. And liberty requires more than license. It requires character. This is one reason that, earlier this year, I sponsored a bill that seeks to restore civic education to our universities. This was not a nostalgic gesture, but a necessary course correction. Why? Because I spent years in the classroom, and I've seen what's been lost. Students arrive equipped with slogans, not substance; credentials, but not conviction. They can quote grievance, but not Lincoln. They can deconstruct, but they cannot defend. One critic asked me, 'Why fix something when you can reinvent a whole other concept?' Here's why: Because what's broken is not just policy — it's purpose. And sometimes, reinvention is the most responsible form of repair. My bill, SB334, doesn't dictate doctrine. It doesn't ban ideas. It revives balance, it renews foundations, and it reminds us all that our republic cannot endure if it forgets its roots. And yet, for daring to suggest that students should engage with the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and the great thinkers of our tradition — from Augustine to Du Bois — I have been accused of censorship, of cowardice, of control. When I wrote earlier this year that Americans are sick of the 'neo-Marxist, nihilistic narcissism of the hard left,' it wasn't a rhetorical flourish. It was a cultural diagnosis — a warning drawn not from ideology, but from experience. Neo-Marxism has infiltrated too many corners of the academy — not as one voice among many, but as a dominating lens through which all of history, literature, and society must be interpreted. It teaches that everything is about power — race, gender, class —forever locked in a binary of oppressor and oppressed. Nihilism soon follows, replacing wonder with suspicion, and turning the quest for truth into a campaign of endless deconstruction. If nothing is true, then everything is permissible — and everything is politicized. Narcissism completes the triangle, elevating personal identity above shared reality, feelings above facts, grievance above gratitude. It replaces moral formation with moral performance —and turns education into a pageant of self-righteousness. This is not education. This is theater, not thought. True education derives from virtue, and from liberty rooted in reason. It prizes self-rule, not mob rule. It knows that happiness is found not in the hedonism of the moment, but in a life anchored to virtue, ordered liberty, and moral purpose. 'Pleasure,' said Epicurus, 'is rather sober reasoning… banishing those beliefs that lead to the tumult of the soul.' Justice Anthony Kennedy reminded us that to the Founders, 'Happiness meant that feeling of self-worth and dignity you acquire by contributing to your community and to its civic life.' And then there is Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw far ahead— into our very moment: 'Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul… You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity… Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.' That is the tyranny that awaits when liberty is divorced from moral clarity, when freedom is severed from formation, when truth is replaced by technocracy and virtue by virtual applause. Not long ago, I sat down with sculptor Sabin Howard, whose work on the National World War I Memorial has been called nothing short of a modern marvel. His bronzes don't just commemorate; they communicate. They teach. They remind us that art, at its best, does not flatter our vanities but elevates our virtues. Howard and I spoke about something bigger than a statue —something deeper than nostalgia. We spoke about the need for a renaissance— not just of art, but of ideas. A revival of beauty, meaning and moral imagination. A return to excellence. He told me about his next great vision: The Grand Liberty Arch, a monumental sculpture installation coming to Salt Lake City — a tribute to freedom, courage, sacrifice, and the enduring American spirit. Not just metal and stone, but a declaration in form: Liberty still lives here. It is up to all of us to ensure that this remains true. John D. Johnson is a Utah state senator and professor emeritus at Utah State University. This essay was adapted from a speech he delivered at the 2025 commencement ceremonies for Mount Liberty College.
