28-05-2025
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'.
