William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008)
William F. Buckley Jr. with his magazine, National Review (credit: The Intercept)
William Buckley’s rise to stardom in postwar conservatism demonstrates the continued relevance of the old adage “it’s not what you say but how you say it.”
In The Fire Is Upon Us, Claremont McKenna College (CMC) Professor Nicolas Buccola observes that Buckley achieved prominence as a “communicator and popularizer of conservative ideas. According to Buccola, Buckley wove together “a combination of devout religiosity, strident antiegalitarianism, and deep opposition to the welfare state” into a pithy argument that convinced many that the greatness of the United States required the recognition of “certain immutable truths.”
But as much as Buckley is lauded as a pioneer of contemporary American conservatism, his rise and fall as a conservative icon provides a cautionary tale for today’s political commentators. Although publicity made Buckley, it would ultimately burn him.
Buckley’s Rise: Challenge with Charm
In Buckley’s first issue of National Review magazine, he positions his conservative project against a liberal intellectual class that “runs just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’.”
The consequences of this social-intellectual monopoly were significant:
“Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas—not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word. A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is—dare we say it?—as necessary to better living as Chemistry.” National Review, November 19, 1955.
Core to William Buckley’s conservative ethos was an understanding that political ideology was driven by the press. In order to effectively challenge the dominant liberal order, Buckley’s National Review needed to distinguish itself: “Especially during NR’s early years,” observes historian David Farber, “Buckley crafted an ironic tone that made conservatives appear dashing and clever and calls for Christian virtue in the public square sound hip and rebellious.”
Equality: The Solution to Academic (Un)Freedom
In 1951, four years prior to the first issue of the National Review, William Buckley published God and Man at Yale as an undergraduate. The ideas in Buckley’s debut political salvo should sound familiar to the contemporary college student. Buckley alleged that the Yale faculty prompted students to abandon their religious and free market fidelities, rendering them nothing less than “atheistic socialists.”
Buckley couched his argument in appeals to “academic freedom.” If it is unacceptable to pontificate on the “anthropological superiority of the Aryan,” Buckley reasoned, then it should also be unacceptable to preach communism and atheism: “My task becomes, then, not so much as to argue that the limits should be imposed but that existing limits should be narrowed,” wrote Buckley. Ironically, since academic open-mindedness was hostile to traditionalism, Buckley charged the university with a sort of close-minded relativism. The problem was not that the collegiate mind needed to be freed, exactly, but rather that the limits imposed needed to be politically equal.
Even today, conservative efforts toward rebalancing political perspectives on college campuses are shaped by the arguments pioneered by Buckley in God and Man at Yale. This is especially true in Claremont.
In a piece published by the Duke University Press, Ellen Messer-Davidow explained that Buckley’s National Review “laid the foundations for everything that followed” by creating “a recognized forum for conservative ideas” and a model of conservative cultural production on college campuses.
In the 1980s, the Institute for Educational Affairs, a conservative tax-exempt group, began a program to fund conservative student newspapers across the country, dubbed the Collegiate Network, in an effort to bust the liberal trust on higher education that Buckley first described in 1951. In 1988, CMC’s own Claremont Independent was listed among the 53 original newspaper grant recipients. In 1995, the operation of the Collegiate Network was taken over by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI)—an organization where Buckley served as the inaugural president in 1953. Binder and Wood, in Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives, saw the ISI’s mission as relatively straight-forward: to promote conservative values on college campuses and create opportunities for “the best and the brightest” conservative minds to “redress the widespread image of conservatives.”
While it could seem ironic that the self-avowed Claremont Independent is dependent, at least in part, on a conservative-aligned influence network, this relationship is well within the bounds of Buckley’s conception of academic freedom first articulated 75 years ago: Academic freedom is not a matter of eliminating all ideological constraints, but rather a matter of making them equal.
Resolving the Tension: Capitalism and Conservatism
Whereas Buckley began his career confronting “atheistic socialism,” it soon became necessary to establish an ordering of conservative values. Buckley appealed to a new conservative tent under a banner of moral authority. Only with the right moral virtues would capitalist economic freedom be worthwhile.
Not all on the Right responded positively to Ayn Rand’s 1957 bestseller defense of capitalism, Atlas Shrugged—among the detractors was William Buckley. “For William Buckely,” writes Professor Farber, “conservatism without the traditional religious faith that placed individual acts, even those of the finest capitalists, in God’s mighty hands, was an empty and even vile thing.”
Rather than shrink from the tension between capitalism and conservatism—which would have been easy given that Rand’s primary target was the socialist Left and not the conservative Right—one of Buckley’s best National Review writers, Whittaker Chambers, sought to confront it head-on. Rand’s sin was the prioritization of materialism, “productive achievement”, over all other values, which Chambers readily admitted “scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left.” Materialism on the Right would lead to the domination of America by the technocratic “industrial-financial-engineering caste.”
The picture of a laissez-faire capitalist system painted by the National Review was surprisingly dystopian: A society built on “technological achievement, supervised by … a managerial political bureau,” argued Chambers, “can only head into a dictatorship.” While dictatorships fly different banners, Chambers observes “embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism”. By centering the “Randian man” in the same manner as Marx centered the “Marxist man”, the society endorsed by Rand’s rebuke of socialism would make the same moral mistake as the Communists: without the checks and balances of religion, man will build a self-centered dictatorship in a Godless world.
The ordering of religious morality before economic freedom would ultimately pay off. Farber explains, that while not all conservatives bought into Buckley’s “religiously transcendent, intellectually demanding ethos”, for “those who wanted a morally potent, spiritually engaging, intellectually rigorous conservatism, without any hint of backwater Bible-thumping, the National Review provided the goods.”
The Descent: Burned by the Spotlight
While Buckley kept appealing to populist sentiments at an arm’s length, Buccola explains that much of his success was “accelerated by the fact that he proved to be a compelling presence on television.” Often, these appearances would take the form of debates with liberal intellectuals and writers — “Conservatives loved seeing such an articulate defense of their views.” In this period, Buckley’s relentless advocacy paired with a restraint from personal attacks often led his ideological opponents to begrudgingly admire him. He was sharp but cool and collected. In 1962, Buckley began one of his most popular rivalries with the famous Left-leaning writer Gore Vidal by writing a column defending conservatism next to a column where Vidal was attacking it.
During the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, Buckley and Vidal were to spend ten nights debating each other on live television on the merits and demerits of liberal and conservative political tracks. This was a showdown of two, sharp-tongued political juggernauts which had been building in the public sphere of television and newspaper columns for years. But as Robert Gordon explained in Politico, “Within minutes of their first conversation, these high-minded individuals took the low road”— instead of a dialogue, they sought to make each other bleed.
William F. Buckley Jr. mid-debate with Gore Vidal (credit: Vox)
It wasn’t until the penultimate debate that this feud had finally boiled over. After Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”, Buckley — in a surprising moment of disinhibition — responded with venom: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face”. Since this moment, Gordon argues, “it’s been downhill.” This highly televised event served as a model for the intellectual bloodsport we see across today’s media landscape.
This was not lost on Buckley. In the 2015 documentary about the Buckley-Vidal debates, Best of Enemies, one person close to Buckley remarked that this moment changed him — his outburst undermined his sense of uprightness and he felt ashamed by his actions. When asked about the debates with Vidal in an interview, Buckley simply responded, “Does TV run America? There is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating….”
In an age characterized by a dizzying fusion of information and entertainment, we would be wise to keep Buckley’s admonition in mind.
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